Kafka biog slammed over porn claims

Claims that Franz Kafka had a penchant for hardcore porn have stirred up a hornet’s nest in literary circles. Oxford academic James Hawes reveals in a new book, Excavating Kafka, published this week, that the novelist subscribed to up-market pornographic material when he was in his twenties.

Hawes, who teaches creative writing at Oxford Brookes University, says that while researching in the British Library and the Bodleian he stumbled across images acquired by Kafka that include a hedgehog-style creature performing fellatio, golem-like male creatures grasping women's breasts and a baby emerging from a sliced-open leg. He also maintains that Kafka kept porn under lock and key in a safe, telling friends that it contained a savings book he did not want his family to know about.

Angry German scholars have hit back, accusing Hawes of sensationalism and even anti-Semitism. The renowned Kafka critic Klaus Wagenbach tells Frankfurter Allgemeine: "This is some idiot... who knows nothing about Kafka, but writes about him as if he did."

Rainer Stach, a Kafka biographer, said the controversy over the book was an "unbelievable marketing ploy". No one had ever said that the Prague-born Jewish author of The Trial and Metamorphosis was chaste, he said, but the images were "playful representations, some styled like caricatures".

Hawes has hit back claiming that his detractors were operating "a conspiracy of censorship" and that they had not read his book. He said that he made no claims to have uncovered Kafka's interest in porn and brothels - he had only added new material. He wanted to explore why scholars had ignored the topic. ·