The Threshold of Happiness. Kafka’s Summer With Dora Diamant. Reading and Discussion With Reiner Stach

In July 1923, Franz Kafka travels to the Baltic seaside resort of Müritz to recuperate in the fresh air. He suffers from tuberculosis and has had a constant fever for months. The vacation colony of the Berlin Jewish People's Home is in the immediate vicinity of his accommodation. Kafka enjoys the contact with the East Jewish children who are looked after there: „When I am among them, I am not happy, but on the threshold of happiness,“ he writes to his friend Hugo Bergmann.

Dora Diamant (Yiddish: Dymant), who had come to Berlin from Silesia a few years earlier, worked at the vacation colony. When they meet, he is fascinated – also by her search for a Jewish identity beyond the ultra-orthodox Hasidism that shaped her youth and imposed so many prohibitions on women. „When I saw Kafka for the first time, I immediately realized that his image corresponded to my idea and conception of the human being,“ Dora Diamant would later recall.

Soon the two were inseparable. They walk along the seaside, sit in a beach chair, Franz helps Dora in the kitchen. This summer love would change his life: He finally manages to tear himself away from Prague. He follows Dora to inflation-ridden Berlin.

Renowned Kafka biographer Reiner Stach will read this touching love story from Kafka. Die Jahre der Erkenntnis, the third volume of his monumental, multi-award-winning biography of Kafka, which has been translated into numerous languages. The subsequent discussion with Vera Schneider from the German Cultural Forum for Eastern Europe will also focus on why Dora Diamant was much more than „Kafka's last love“.

An event organized by the German Culture Forum for Central and Eastern Europe Cultural in cooperation with the Leipzig Book Fair.