Franz Kafka's Diaries

Kafka’s diaries offer a detailed view of the writer's thoughts and feelings, as well as some of his most famous and quotable statements.

Kafka began keeping the diaries at the age of 25, as an attempt to provoke his stalled creativity, and kept writing in them until 1923, a year before his death.

The diaries offer an image of a profoundly depressed man, isolated from friends and family, involved in a series of failed relationships, and constantly sick.

While this is certainly part of Kafka's character, it is typical for a private journal, not meant for publication, to express more of the writer's anxieties and worries.

[3] In 2023, the first unexpurgated edition of Kafka’s diaries was published in English,[4] "more than three decades after this complete text appeared in German.