During the last ten months of his tragically abbreviated life, the Czech-Jewish novelist Franz Kafka formed a romantic relationship with Dora Diamant, a Jewish actress originally from Poland. He was 40 and she was 25 when they met at a Baltic Sea beach in Germany in 1923.
It was a doomed love affair in light of Kafka’s struggle with tuberculosis, from which he would succumb on June 3, 1924. Diamant was under no illusions about his devastating illness, but having fallen under his spell, she was driven by an insatiable desire to be with him.
Their short-lived liaison unfolds in The Glory of Life, a lovely and incandescent German film directed by Georg Maas and Judith Kaufmann and based on a novel by Michael Kampfmuller. Currently making the rounds of film festivals in the United States, it will be released in theaters the near future and then placed on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform.
As portrayed here, Kafka and Diamant met by chance when she was working at a beach-side Jewish children’s camp and he was vacationing nearby. In superb performances, Sabin Tombrea, a German actor of Romanian descent, plays Kafka, and Henriette Confurius, a Dutch-German actress, portrays Diamant.
Their attraction was instantaneous and mutual. In a letter to his best friend, Max Brod (Manuel Rubey), Kafka exulted that he had reached the threshold of happiness. To be sure, Diamant was a woman to behold, tender, loving and intelligent. Born in Pabianice, a town near Lodz, she moved to Germany after the end of World War I.
Recognizing her qualities, Kafka avidly courted her, and she reciprocated his affections. He was searingly candid with Diamant, admitting he was not cut out for marriage and was stricken with tuberculosis. She could have walked away, but decided to stay with him.
By this point, Kafka was an up-and-coming novelist whose budding career was tirelessly promoted by Brod, who admired his literary talent.
Having become inseparable, Kafka and Diamant shared a flat in Berlin, where his illness flared up again. Since its cold winter and spring weather was not conducive to his health, Diamant tried to work around this problem by taking Kafka to a tropical botanical garden in the city.
Realizing his days were numbered, Kafka feared he would never finish the stories he was working on. Diamant, his caregiver, was an encouraging voice during this uncertain period. Brod was instrumental in matching him up with a book publisher.
The Weimar Republic in Germany was experiencing turbulence during Kafka’s Berlin interregnum. Still reeling from its ignominious defeat in the war, Germany was gripped by monstrous inflation and chronic political instability.
The film references the horrendous economic situation with respect to Kafka, but omits the looming threat posed by Adolf Hitler’s emerging Nazi Party.
With Kafka’s condition fast deteriorating, his sister convinced him he needed better medical care than he was receiving in Berlin. She arranged a place for him in a sanatorium near Vienna. Eventually, Diamant visited him there. By then, on doctor’s orders, he was confined to a regimen of silence to preserve his health.
Although he had lost his voice, he had not lost his iron will to write.
Contrary to Kafka’s instructions, Brod refrained from burning his manuscripts after his death, thereby establishing Kafka as one of the finest novelists in the German language.
Diamant escaped to Britain after the formation of the Third Reich, her memorable fling with Kafka etched in her memory. As she had discovered, to use Kafka’s illuminating words, “the glory of life is always waiting.”