Großer Lärm

In his diary entry of 5 November 1911, Franz Kafka writes about the noise in his parents‘ home. Around a year later, in October 1912, the text was published in the Prague based German language paper Herder-Blätter, entitled «Großer Lärm» («Great Noise»).

Great Noise

I sit in my room, the headquarter of noise of the entire apartment. All the doors I hear slamming, and by such noise I am spared only the continuous footsteps between them – still I hear the stove’s door shutting in the kitchen. Our father barges through the doors of my room and crosses through and his nightgown trails behind him; the ashes are being scraped from the oven in the next room; Valli, bellowing word by word through the hall, asks if father’s hat has been cleaned already. A hiss, that wants to befriend me, still carries the scream of a responding voice. The house door is unlatched and blows open, like a catarrhal throat that opens wider with the singing of a female voice and finally closes itself with a dull, manly and most ruthless jolt. Father has gone; now begins the delicate, scattered, helpless noise led by the voices of two canaries. I had thought of that earlier, and now with the canaries it occurs to me again, whether I should open the door a crack and, like a snake, slither into the next room and beg my sisters and their governess on the ground floor for some quiet.