Locked away for decades following also a history of persecution, the drawings of the iconic 20th-century writer Franz Kafka remained one of the final unknowns of his work. In 2021, the literary scholar Andreas Kilcher brought them to light.

It was a sensational discovery: hundreds of drawings by Franz Kafka that had been kept under lock and key for decades were made accessible. Although Kafka is renowned for his written work, his drawings are evidence of what his literary executor, Max Brod, termed his ‘double talent’. Irresistible and full of fascinating figures, shifting from the realistic to the fantastic, the grotesque, the uncanny, and the carnivalesque, they illuminate a previously unknown side of the quintessential modernist author. Four new and fascinating stories can be told in relation to Kafka’s drawings: the story of their transmission, the story of Kafka’s engagement with the visual arts, the story of Kafka as a draftsman, and the story of his drawing practice in the context of his writing, which implies a complex aesthetic question: How are these drawings to be understood in their own right, yet at the same time as connected to his writing?

Andreas Kilcher is Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. He has been a visiting Professor at Princeton University, Stanford University, UC Davis, and Tel Aviv University. His main areas of research are the relationship between literature and knowledge; Jewish literature and culture; and Kabbalah and esotericism. He has published a wide range of monographs, edited volumes, articles, dictionary entries, and reviews in these areas. Kilcher’s book on Franz Kafka’s drawings has been translated into more than ten languages and appeared on several bestseller lists. His most recent book, Kafkas Werkstatt: Der Schriftsteller bei der Arbeit (Kafka’s Workshop: The Writer at Work), has also appeared on bestseller lists. He is currently working on a book about Doctor Faustus.

This event is part of the online series Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.

Kafka’s last Unknown: The Story and Character of his Drawings

A sensational discovery