Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
Related Articles
On August 2, 1914, Franz Kafka wrote in his diary, “Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon.” The war he referred to was World War 1, which went on to kill 15-16 million people over the next four years, precipitated the end of the Ottoman Empire after seven centuries of rule, and announced the arrival of America as a world power. Decades later, as biographers pored over Kafka’s enigmatic but tragically short life, this diary entry caught their eye. To some, that sentence distilled the essence of Kafka — an insouciance towards the outside world. That the unfolding butchery of World War 1 and the unremarkable rituals of a middle-class life could cohabit in the womb of his mind, like twins, led them to conclude that Kafka was one cold fish. Responding to this charge of being emotionally unresponsive, Kafka’s great biographer, Reiner Stach, explained that the truth of the matter was more subtle. What Kafka sought to record in his diaries were not events in the newspapers but their significance as the Austro-Hungarian empire — which spread over much of continental Europe, like algae over a pond — began to crumble. When some of Kafka’s private diaries were published, they belied both: the finely cut paranoias of his published works as well as accusations of being emotionally unavailable. What they revealed was the froth, the anxieties, and the contradictions out of which burbled up Kafka the man and Kafka the author.
Source : https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-opinion/the-purpose-of-keeping-a-diary/article25018361.ece
