The Kafka Project is the third official search to recover the last writings of Franz Kafka, working on behalf of the Kafka Estate of London, England. Under the auspices of San Diego State University's College of Arts and Letters since 1998, the Kafka Project has worked with the German government for the discovery and return of Kafka's unpublished letters and notebooks. Building on the results of the last search conducted by Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach in the mid-1950s, the Kafka Project is a non-profit volunteer organization, funded by donations, pooling resources, skills and knowledge to resolve a literary mystery.
The Kafka Project at SDSU is actively working in cooperation with a new partner, the German Studies Institute in Rome, Italy, on a three-phase research project, starting with a determination of how much material has already been digitized in the German Federal Archives and which materials are indexed, partially indexed, or possibly even unprocessed.
Coffee with Kafka returns in Spring 2026 with Kafka’s Cookbook, featuring recipes from 1901. Recipes for pastries, cakes and delicacies used by Kafka will be prepared by bakers in our group, for guests to sample and learn how the original ingredients translate into modern health foods! Stay tuned for more details.
The biography of Dora Diamant, first published by Basic Books in NY and Secker & Warburg in London in 2003 has since been translated into German, French, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Albanian, Arabic, and now in Marathi, the language of 83 million inhabitants of the Maharashtra State in India. Translated by Avadhoot Dongare, the Marathi translation was published in 2025. Kafkachi Shevatchi Preyasi: Dora Diamantchya Jeevanacha Shodh was published by Prafullata Prakashan, Pune.
A new online exhibit on Dora Diamant with an accompanying 18-minute film was produced in 2024 by Porta Polonica, the internet portal of The Documentation Centre for the Culture and History of the Poles in Germany. The online exhibit is entitled “Dora Diamant. Activist, Actress, and Franz Kafka’s Last Companion” and presents an extensive and in depth examination of Dora’s life, with a comprehensive text by Axel Feuß, featuring photographs from the Lask Collection and other archival sources.
The accompanying 18-minute documentary film was produced by Jörg Haaßengier and Jürgen Brügger for Porta Polanica and features interviews with Dora researchers, archivists, and Axel Grube, publisher of the German edition of Dora’s biography (Kafkas letzte Liebe).
A previously unknown drawing of Dora Diamant by Franz Kafka was presented to the public for the first time at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, England in May 2024. Also included were Dora’s letters to Kafka’s family, and an exhibit dedicated to Dora’s story of Kafka and the Doll. While Snopes maintains that the story is unverifiable, the Bodleain at Oxford believes it to be true. The exhibition was immensely successful, the second most popular exhibit curated at the Bodleian, and it moved to the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City (January-April 13, 2025).
The pencil drawing is on loan from the Brod Collection, now available online at the National Library of Israel, which is featuring its own Kafka exhibition in 2025. The portrait of Dora was discovered on the reverse side of the final page of Kafka’s final story, Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk, written during the three weeks he was separated from her in Prague, in March 1924.
Chrisoph Geis, Kafka Project lead, Germany, with Kafka Project director Kathi Diamant on the closing day of The Making of an Icon at the Bodleian Library at Oxford
Last page of Josephine The Singer
Portrait of Dora
Two German actresses nailed their roles last year, radiating Dora’s spirit in their performances, earning accolades for their performances.
Henriette Confurius embodied Dora Diamant in Tempest Film’s The Glory of Life, which premiered in Berlin in March 2024 to rave reviews.
Tamara Romera Ginés captured Dora’s strength and resilience in Kafka, the TV Miniseries which aired on German Television, also in March 2024, based on Reiner Stach’s 3-volume biography. The final episode of the six-part series was entitled, Dora. Tamara is also featured in an interview in the documentary produced by Porta Polonica, talking about what it was like to play Dora.
Henriette Confurius in The Glory of Life.
Tamara Romera Ginés in Kafka.
Tamara Romera Ginés and Joel Basman.
The German/Austrian production of The Glory of Life from Tempest Films premiered at the Delphi Filmpalast in Berlin on March 6, 2024, opened in theaters on March 14. When it opened a few months later in Austria, it ranked #2 in the opening week. It has since screened at more than 20 film festivals in the US, including at NYC’s Lincoln Center, and has garnered awards: The Glory of Life won the Audience Choice Award at the Austin Jewish Film Festival in 2024. It was nominated for Best Costume Design for a national German film award, and Sabin Tambrea was also nominated for a German Film Award for Best Actor for his role as Kafka. Read the Lincoln Center review from the New York premiere.
Kafka Project Director Kathi Diamant with Henriette Confurius at the Berlin premiere.
Dora’s great nephew Idan Diamant and great niece Shani Diamant, from Israel, came to the premiere at the Delphi Filmpalast on March 6, 2024.
Kathi Diamant with Sabin Tambrea, Idan Diamant, and Shani Diamant.
Kathi Diamant with Sabin Tambrea
The Kafka Project is back in business after a three-year COVID hiatus. In February 2023, Dr. Christoph Geis took the lead for the Kafka Project research in Berlin, taking the reins from Dr. Hans-Gerd Koch, who, in 2015, with Dr. Peter Andre Alt, assumed the leadership and had worked with the Ministry of Culture to gain support and funding at the federal level to uncover and catalog an unopened archive in Berlin. In 2019, Dr. Koch wrote an article for Suddeutsche Zeitung, reporting that the still-secret archive, known as Section IX-ll, contains papers and other documents confiscated from German communists, and possibly could be the repository of the papers taken from the Pariser Strasse apartment of Dora Diamant (Dymant-Lask) in 1933. While Dr. Koch has stepped down to complete the final volume of the critical edition of Kafka’s letters, he remains an essential advisor to Dr. Geis and the Project. Read Dr. Koch’s article Mountain's of Files.
A retired psychologist and psychotherapist specializing in trauma, Dr. Geis’ scientific approach to Kafka led him to complete a Ph.D., Franz Kafka and the World Approaches in the 21st Century; Reading Kafka as an aid to regain language and reflexivity in times of destructive life-world experiences, from the University of Koblenz-Landau in 2022. Dr. Geis is uniquely qualified to continue the research in Germany, and is interfacing with the German federal and state archives in the search for the missing writings of Franz Kafka, confiscated from Dora Diamant (Dymant-Lask) by the Gestapo in 1933. We are enormously grateful for his skill, time, and efforts.
Copyright © 2025 - All Rights Reserved | Document Reader
