BiographyDora Diamant was Franz Kafka's mistress - an unenviable role, one might think, rather like being Naomi Campbell's maid or the Duke of Edinburgh's wife. It is hard to imagine that there was much chortling and frolicking around the dinner table, as Franz threw off yet another darkly paranoid masterpiece.
Yet, according to Kathi Diamant (no relation, or maybe she is), that is exactly how it was. Kafka, she informs us, was "always cheerful", as surprising a revelation as learning that Donald Rumsfeld is a post-structuralist. The couple were deeply in love, and Dora attended Kafka in his last illness, having married him a year before.
The book thus joins an increasingly popular genre: not Lives of the Poets, as Dr Johnson called his essays, but "Sex Lives of the Poets". No civilised bookshelf today is complete without its account of Stendhal's secret sodomy or Nabokov's necrophilia. The relentless "humanising", personalising and sexing-up of history goes on apace. We learn almost nothing from this book about Kafka's art, towards which Dora seems to have manifested a stunning indifference; indeed she burned quite a bit of it at his request. And Kathi Diamant shows scarcely more interest in it than her namesake, despite being director of a Kafka project in California.
Instead, what interests both Diamants is such weighty matters as the pleasure the great man took in eating a banana, a fact so utterly central to his existence that it is mentioned no less than twice. We are also informed that his hairbrush was manufactured by G. B. Kent and Sons of England, which ought to cast a radically new light on The Castle. Biography is in dire danger of becoming the philistine's literary art.
Dora Diamant, however, did many more fascinating things than climbing into bed with Kafka. Born into a Hasidic Jewish family in Poland, she led a life more gripping and dramatic than any of her lover's fictions. Having moved to Berlin as a young woman, she met Kafka and became the first woman with whom he could share his life; but there is a sense in which she started her own life for real only after his death. This highly intelligent, Yiddish-speaking woman was by no means a Kafka groupie - though Kathi Diamant, who first came across her (possible) relative in college and has been delving doggedly into her biography ever since, might be uncharitably described as something of a Diamant groupie. Certainly no breath of criticism is allowed to taint this bright-eyed, deeply empathetic account, which perpetrates such breathless sentences as "Dora was paralysed by eyes, which were large and brown - or were they gray? - and wide, wide open". Well, they would be wouldn't they, if she could see what colour they were.
In Dora's case, though, groupiedom is a forgivable addiction. After Kafka's death, she hung out in inter-war Berlin, was swept up in agitprop and the radical avant-garde, and became deeply involved in Yiddish culture and theatre. She was an actor of some distinction, and before long gravitated towards the German Communist party.
When Hitler rose to power, she and her second husband hung on in Berlin as long as they could, then fled, hounded by the Gestapo, to the Soviet Union. It was the darkest era of Stalinism, and before long Dora's husband was shipped off to a labour camp, never to be seen by her again.
She herself washed up in England, where she was deported as a German refugee to the Isle of Man and later set up home in London. There she worked devotedly in the Jewish East End, nurtured Yiddish culture once more, and, as a devout Zionist, travelled out to visit Israel, which in 1949 no doubt looked rather more like a promised land than it does today.
This Yiddish answer to Constance Markievicz died in London in 1952, thus demonstrating that this particular Diamant, despite her preternatural courage and energy, was not forever. Kafka's Last Love is an answerable work of devotion - a precious, remarkably well-researched document whose author has ransacked everything from the Gestapo files to the Comintern archives. There are touches of biographese, that fashionable biographical discourse which (with the airport bookstore well in its sights) has to bring everything compulsively, novelistically alive:
As the minutes of last day ticked away, Dora sat at his bedside . . . A lamp on the table elongated shadows on the high walls of the room . . . Dora watched the slow rise and fall of his chest and studied his profile, the sharp outline of his long, bony nose . . .
This is more Catherine Cookson than Michael Holroyd. How on earth does she know? Does she have details of the couple's domestic lighting scheme? For all its occasional tabloid language and sophomore naïvety, the book represents an extraordinary labour of love. Reading accounts of second World War survivors in central Europe, one is struck by just how much happened to them - how many frontiers they crossed, roles they played and dramas they witnessed - compared to our own thinly populated, sedately sheltered lives.
They had, in short, something for others to be biographical about, compared with what the German philosopher, Walter Benjamin (himself a Jewish victim of Nazism), saw as the death of the experience itself in a media-driven, commodity-ridden age. It is not, to be sure, an unmitigated gain to live in interesting times, as Dora Diamant knew to her cost. But hers was, even so, a life of a kind that an age too shallow and simulated even for true biography might come to look upon with nostalgia.
Terry Eagleton is a fellow of the British Academy
Kafka's Last love By Kathi Diamant Secker & Warburg, 402pp, £16.99