December 4, 2024, 1:27pm

The earliest known writing by Franz Kafka is about to be available for bidding at the auction house Bonhams. Kafka, who would go on to write surreal and absurd books later in his life, signed a short note in the friendship book of his friend Hugo Bergmann as a teen.

The note reads:

Es gibt ein Kommen und ein Gehn
Ein Scheiden und oft kein – Wiedersehn
Prag den 20. November.
Franz Kafka.”

Which Bonhams translates as:

There is a coming and a going
A parting and often no – reunion
Prague, November 20th [1897]
Franz Kafka

Pretty intense! The dash and pause before “reunion” is particularly forceful and emo. It’s hard to read a lot into this, but since this is a discovery from A Great Writer, overinterpretation is inevitable. Decades later, a 90-year-old Bergmann interpreted his friend’s note:

When Kafka wrote these words at Barmitzvah age, did Kafka have in mind the deep meaning that we attach to his words today? – I don’t know… we can probably interpret these lines as a warning to his generation.”

Kafka may have written these words with deep meaning — he wouldn’t be the first intellectual teen with literary aspirations to think they were really onto something big — but a “warning to a generation” feels a little much to hang on such a brief phrase.

From the perspective of literary history, finding the oldest bit of Kafka’s writing is interesting and, to a lesser extent for the layperson, exciting. Still, I think Bergmann and the auctioneers are overstating things.

The auction’s copy interprets this note by a young Franz to be already expressing “a ‘Kafkaesque’ sentiment.” Maybe, but to my eye this aphorism seems more typically teenaged than anything else, the 19th-century equivalent of an emo “have a great summer” yearbook note. Plus, “Kafkaesque” refers to writing that is absurd and uneasy, full of anti-authoritarianism, alienation, and existential anxiety. Which is typical of Kafka’s later work, but also exactly the kind of thing 14-year-olds have been writing forever.

If Kafka had grown up more recently, he might have written this little aphorism not in a libro amicorum, but on bathroom tiles in a mall that is barely staving off bankruptcy. Put some power chords under this phrase and you’ve got the chorus to a punk song, composed in a suburban bedroom for a band called Ellen Degenerate or something. Put this phrase under a black and white picture and you’ve got a Tumblr post.

Kafka went on to write great things, but at 14, seems like he was just another angsty teen.