Kafka's sexual terrors were 'absolutely normal', says biographer

Reiner Stach, author of a three-volume life of The Trial’s author, says his ‘anti-sensual’ fears were shared with millions of middle-class peers who dreaded STDs

It is a tantalising mystery that has fascinated historians and fans alike for decades, but a biographer who gained access to one of the author’s closest friends’ diaries has revealed a new theory about Franz Kafka’s sexuality.

Kafka’s intense attraction to women but clear aversion to physical contact and sex has been a subject for discussion for years. Theories on his possible asexuality or repressed homosexuality contributed to the mythology around the author. Max Brod, writer and eventual inheritor of Kafka’s estate, once described his close friend as being “tortured by his sexual desires”. Kafka himself described his fear of intimacy in a letter to Brod in January 1921:

“Like a person who cannot resist the temptation to swim out into the sea, and is blissful to be carried away – ‘now you are a man, you are a great swimmer’ – and suddenly, with little reason, he raises himself up and sees only the sky and the sea, and on the waves is only his own little head and he is seized by a horrible fear and nothing else matters, he must get back to the shore, even if his lungs burst. That is how it is.”

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