The End of Drawing: Kafka, Jugendstil, and Losing Weight in All Directions

We did not know the extent of Kafka's youthful drawing till the 2021 publication of Kafka's Die Zeichnungen (The Drawings). Despite the value of this volume, the editors overstate their case—arguing that Kafka's drawings remain an "enduring presence in his writing" throughout his life; that they appear whenever his writing hits a snag; and that they force us to understand his oeuvre as a mixture of literature and art. None of these assertions are true, and they distract from what Kafka's drawings really do show us: how ensconced he was in the culture of fin-de-siècle art and how he struggled to develop himself as a writer by leaving this behind. What is remarkable about Kafka's drawing is not its enduring presence but its stunning and abrupt disappearance. In this article, I uncover the meaning of this disappearance, arguing that it paradoxically confirms the importance of visual art for Kafka, albeit in ways not imagined by the editors of Die Zeichnungen. Visual art becomes for Kafka a "negative" force, which lurks powerfully behind his mature prose.