Michael Kumpfmüller - Much of this intriguing novel about Franz Kafka’s last year is mediated through letters, telegraphs, and the telephone; the author has genuinely captured the excitement of modernity, a world with cinema, mobility, and long-distance communication

Michael Kumpfmüller, The Glory of Life, Trans. by Anthea Bell. Haus Publishing, 2015.  excerpt

 The aftermath of Franz Kafka’s love affair with Dora Diamant is legend: refusing to honor his instructions to destroy his work when he died, Diamant saved Kafka’s writings and letters that were in her possession. These were later taken by the Nazis and are still being sought today. Her importance for Kafka’s literary legacy makes their all-too-brief relationship even more intriguing. Set over the course of his last year, The Glory of Life is compelling fictional re-imagining of this fragile, tender romance.


In July 1923, Kafka is convalescing by the Baltic Sea when he meets Diamant and they fall in love. He is forty years old and dying of tuberculosis; she is twenty-five and seems to him the essence of life. After a tentative first meeting, the indecisive Kafka moves with Diamant to Berlin, a city in the throes of political upheaval, rising anti-Semitism, and the turmoil of Weimar-era hyperinflation. As his tuberculosis advances, they are forced to leave the city for the Kierling Sanatorium near Vienna, a move that threatens the paradise they have created.


The first of Kumpfmüller’s novels to appear in English after his acclaimed The Adventures of a Bed Salesman, The Glory of Life is a meticulously researched and poignant portrait of one of the most enduring authors in world literature. Beautifully crafted, this book is an evocative rumination on the power of love and friendship.

Much of this intriguing novel about Franz Kafka’s last year is mediated through letters, telegraphs, and the telephone; the author has genuinely captured the excitement of modernity, a world with cinema, mobility, and long-distance communications. At the same time The Glory of Life achieves a meditative quality and offers beautiful insights into what really makes life worth living.

To say that Franz is indecisive would be an understatement, and it is precisely this aspect of his character that gives the book its structure. Twelve chapters describe his tentative ‘coming’ to Berlin, twelve more cover his difficulties ‘staying’ there, and the last dozen depict Franz slowly ‘leaving’ this life, nursed by his lover Dora and a friend called Robert. Friendship nourished by communication and loyalty is skillfully portrayed. There are touching descriptions of the physical intimacy shared by both Robert and Dora with the dying Franz, as they wash and feed him together. Beginning with a holiday-cum-convalescence on the Baltic Sea in July 1923, and ending with his death in a sanatorium near Vienna in July 1924, it is surprising that the last year of Kafka’s life can be told as a love story. The perspective shifts between Franz and Dora. Dora is in her mid-twenties, while Franz is already forty. Yet as the pair fall in love, Franz impulsively decides to move to Berlin in order to join Dora there.

The problem is that 1923 was not a good year for anyone to move to Berlin. Inflation was sky-rocketing, and for Franz and Dora there are occasional glimpses of the anti- Semitism that was deeply ingrained in early twentiethcentury European society. Franz himself has ambivalent feelings towards Judaism, the Hebrew language, and even to Jews. But the greatest obstacles he has to overcome are the influence of his domineering sisters, his fear of an authoritarian father, and his resulting inability to assert himself. There are several well-observed passages about Franz’s psychology, notably regarding the difficulty of telling lies over the phone, or analysing the facts that are not written about in his letters.

A very convincing combination of historical research and fictional reconstruction of events, The Glory of Life will appeal to a wide audience not only for its contribution to our appreciation of Kafka but also its depiction of Weimar Germany and central European society. - www.new-books-in-german.com/english/946/313/96/129002/design1.html

‘An unbelievably tender, beautifully poetic love story at the end of a life.’– Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung


Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in July 1924, leaving instructions to his friend and executor Max Brod that all his unpublished writings should be destroyed. Happily, Brod disobeyed the command. In the previous summer, already in wretched health, but holidaying with his sister and her children on the Baltic coast, Kafka met a young woman, Dora Diamant. She was Jewish like himself, and a practising and observant Jew, which he wasn’t. She was working that summer as a cook for a Jewish children’s home.
They fell into conversation. He found her sympathetic, full of a stimulating and comforting vitality, For her part, this 40-year-old man who looked younger than his years and whom she first knew as “the doctor” – not, of course, a doctor of medicine – was like nobody she had encountered before. She was drawn to him because he was gentle, intelligent and funny. One should remember that Kafka regarded himself as a writer of comedies. When he read his work aloud to friends, he often had to break off because he was giggling with delight.
Friendship soon turned to love, if of necessity a strained one, disapproved of by both families – though not by his sister and her husband. In the autumn, Kafka moved to Berlin to be with Dora, and Michael Kumpfmuller’s evocation of the Berlin of the early days of the Weimar Republic is vivid. These were the years of hyper-inflation, when any money you had in the morning had lost its value by the afternoon, of rising political tension and anti-Semitism, aggravated by the number of Jewish refugees from the East who had flocked into the city. It’s the turbulent city so vividly recorded by Joseph Roth in his journalism, a place where everything was provisional, nothing sure. Kumpfmuller catches the atmosphere very well and it seems that his picture of this Berlin, where uncertainty concerning the future was endemic, is the right, even the poetic, setting for this love affair which Franz knows, and Dora fears, cannot last long.
Yet it enriches them both. It even gives him hope. He reads to her and she understands things she hasn’t even thought of previously. But the giving is not one-sided. “Sometimes,” we are told, “they even pray together, and she is always surprised to find how little he knows. But that, perhaps, is what makes his recital of the prayers so delightful; he is awkwardly devout, like a schoolboy muttering the first letters of the alphabet to himself, while his thoughts are heaven knows where. He is at odds with himself, has the feeling he is doing everything wrong – but there is no right or wrong, you just have to say the prayers.” This is very good. Kafka was always at odds with himself, which was one of his charms, however infuriating at other times to his father and those who cared for him.
The Glory of Life is a love story, and an unfashionably gentle and tender one. We know there can be no happy ending. Franz and Dora may have created a little paradise for themselves, tasting a return to Eden. But it can’t last.
Berlin is too much for Franz. He is moved to a sanatorium near Vienna. The last weeks are beautifully, painfully, described. “He does not sense that these are his last days. There is a certain fluctuation that is a kind of incredulity, for sometimes he feels with every fibre of his body, that he consists only of weakness, and then, the next moment, he pulls himself together again.”
When at last he slips away, Dora wonders if she should go back to Berlin, even though his family have made her welcome, even his father who has so often despaired of his son, though he now misses him and looks at Dora “as if he wouldn’t have expected Franz to find a girl like Dora”. But she will return to Berlin; it is the place where everything reminds her of Franz.
Last year this novel won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature, and it has now been admirably translated by Anthea Bell. The reviewer in the Suddeutsche Zeitung said it would be worth reading even if the protagonist were not Kafka. This is fair comment, but for at least the first half of the book I wondered if it might not have worked just as well, or even better, if Franz wasn’t actually identified as Kafka.
Eventually I decided otherwise, that Michael Kumpfmuller had been right not to fictionalise it entirely. The novel gains from its closeness to the reality of Kafka’s last months. One should add that you don’t have to have read any of the several biographies, or indeed Kafka’s own work, to enjoy the novel, though it’s likely that it will lead anyone who hasn’t already read, say, The Trial and The Castle to do so now, and indeed, others to return to them. Dora, incidentally, came as a refugee to England and so escaped the Holocaust in which Kafka’s sisters were murdered. She survived Franz by 30 years, dying in 1954.
The letters they wrote each other and his last notebooks which he entrusted to her were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933 when they searched her apartment and have never been recovered. This makes Kumpfmuller’s imaginative recreation of their love and their year together all the more admirable and welcome. - Allan Massie



Well when I got an email from Haus books about two upcoming books from Germany in translation I jumped at the chance with the knowledge that German lit month was coming up , this book won the Jean monnet prize for European literature prize , his earlier book has won the Alfred Doblin prize one of the most prestigious prizes in literature in Germany   .Michael Kumpfmüller he studied history at university , after he finished his studies he became a freelance writer for several papers within Germany , his first book came out in 2000 a collection of short stories , he has since written three novels .He also in 2005 joined a red/green movement run by the German writer Gunter Grass . 
Dora sits at the kItchen table , getting fish for supper .She has been thinking of him for days , and suddenly here he is .Tile of all people , has brought him , and he’s alone , the woman she saw on the beach isn’t with him .He stands in the doorway , looking first at the fish , then at her hands , a little censoriously she thinks .But there is no doubt about it ,this is the man from the beach
Franz meets her alone for the first time .
The glory of life is a novel partly based on true fact , the story follows the last year in the life of the Czech writer Franz Kafka .The story is told through the eyes of Dora Diamant a twenty-five year old woman , who meet the dying Kafka whilst he was recovering on the Baltic coast , she sees the boy with in this forty-year old man and he see life in this much younger woman as the romance starts .We then follow them over course of his last year as we follow the pair to Berlin ,of course the is just the time when fascism is on the rise so apart from the romance between Franz and Dora , we also see Franz having to deal with the Anti Semitism .But he is also growing weaker all the time this means he eventually ends up at a sanatorium in Austria. We see a love that burns bright but is very doomed since the start . 
He has seemed to be better again for the last few days .She doesn’t really know why : is it his work on the proofs , is it the whispering at night when she tells him silly things ,what she was like as a little girl , her refusal to have her hair cut after her mothers death ? instead she wore two long braids .
Dora loves him til the end , I love the fact she isn’t sure if it the love or the writer in Franz driving him , I ‘d love to think it was the love !
This is an imagined year , yes Franz Kafka had a relationship with Dora Diamant ,but no real evidence of how this relationship went on so , Michael has done a real good job in imagining the world they lived in , I of course have read Kafka , but it was almost twenty years ago and I have since read bits about his life , I think most of us that read any amount of books in translation know the story of how we are able to read Kafka , he had ask his friend Max Brod to destroy all his work after he died , of course he didn’t thus we are able to read him ,Max is a character in this book .This book could have easily felt like historic document ,but it didn’t no what we get is a blossoming love affair that is doomed from the start ,we know this but Dora and Franz don’t .MIchael Kumpfmüller  has brought us a story of lovers that will I’m sure touch any reader that like me is a romantic at heart .As for Dora , her life after this book is really interesting  she also had some of Kafka’s work but lost it to the Gestapo , one can wonder what was lost to us the reader .
Have you read Kafka or anything about his life? - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/the-glory-of-life-by-michael-kumpfmuller/



The spa town Müritz, located on the coast of Mecklenburg, is surrounded by forests, marshes and the Baltic Sea. The beach is ten minutes by foot from the vacation home "Glückauf" (Good luck). The doctor is supposed to spend a few weeks there with his sisters to recuperate. It is a Friday night in July 1923. For nearly six years he has been suffering from tuberculosis; the healthy climate is supposed to offer him a bit of relief. Eleven months later he will be dead.
The conclusion of Michael Kumpfmüller’s novel is hardly a secret. Although Kafka's name never appears in the text, the reader soon realizes he is the protagonist of this love story. The author delicately handles the final year of the Prague-based writer’s life, and manages to capture the magic of love between him and Dora Diamant without ever slipping into kitsch.
It is a completely successful balancing act: Kumpfmüller meticulously records the stations of Kafka’s final months. At the same time, he creates a universal story about the power of love and the difficulty we all face in saying good-bye, no matter how predictable the end might be. While the story focuses on the real relationship between Franz and Dora, it is not the thrust of the novel’s emotional impact. Presumably this is one of the reasons Kumpfmüller has omitted the famous surname.
Kafka is forty years old when he first meets the kindergarten teacher Dora in Müritz. It seems to be love at first sight. The Jewish woman from Eastern Europe is twenty-five; born in the Russian Empire, for the last few years she has been living in a courtyard apartment in Berlin not far from Alexanderplatz. The writer experiences a rebirth through his love for Dora, they take walks on the beach and go swimming in the unusually warm Baltic Sea. Franz and Dora relish their newfound closeness: "You are my salvation,” Kafka tells her.
The despondent man has been granted a new life. He breaks away from his parents in Prague and searches for a new home in Berlin. Hyperinflation makes life difficult for the residents of the city and Kafka’s health is a source of constant worry. But Kumpfmüller touchingly shows us how all worries and concerns begin to shrink in the face of love. Kafka certainly is aware that his relationship cannot last. He has always known he would not live to an old age. But that does not prevent him from throwing himself head over heels in love.
Since the correspondence between Dora Diamant and Franz Kafka has not been saved, Kumpfmüller must find a way to imagine and feel into their relationship. He more than succeeds. In September they move into an apartment in Berlin-Steglitz. Dora takes care of her lover, who in contemplative moments ponders his legacy and despairs at the sobering inventory: three "botched" novels, a few dozen short stories, and some letters, mostly to women living elsewhere.
Kumpfmüller brings to life Berlin in the Weimar Republic. The Roaring Twenties have not yet begun; famine and unemployment plague the third largest city in the world. The couple is aware of anti-Semitic remarks and of Hitler’s putsch in Munich. But they are living secluded from everything; Kafka rarely leaves his bed, and Dora takes care of him and everything they need. He tries to write and starts the short story “The Burrow” which he never completes. Kumpfmüller’s ability to cast this love story in fiction is truly impressive.
The couple is forced to move twice and they fantasize about alternatives to life in Germany: Maybe open a restaurant in Palestine? The harsh winter in Berlin is not good for Kafka’s health; hour-long coughing spells are hardly uncommon. The reader viscerally feels how difficult it is for them to leave their newly acquired nest. They both know it will probably be forever, even if neither of them dares to mention it. Kafka asks Dora to burn his notebooks, letters and papers – he considers them "worthless stuff". In March 1924 he completes his final story, "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk."
Kumpfmüller poignantly describes Kafka’s worsening health. The disease has spread to the larynx. He is forced to move into a sanatorium north of Vienna. He is unable to eat and suffers from severe pain and relentless thirst. He barely weighs a hundred pounds. He is not allowed to speak. The doctors have given up on him; Dora never gives up. She devotedly nurses him together with Kafka's friend Robert Klopstock.
Kumpfmüller depicts the writer’s final days with enormous respect and without melodrama. Although, or maybe because, we know from the start how this story ends, Kumpfmüller’s fictionalized account moves us all the more. Completely emaciated, Kafka proposes to Dora, he is concerned about her future. He tells her he would have liked to have children with her. He dies in her arms on June 3, 1924. Before he dies the couple assures each other they had spent a happy life together, even if it lasted only briefly. They reminisce about Berlin, about their summer at the Baltic Sea. They would not have changed anything. - Daniel Grinsted [Translated by Zaia Alexander]

Michael Kumpfmüller, The Adventures of a Bed Salesman, Picador, 2004.


This picaresque tale of a sexually voracious bed salesman whose life is dominated by his adventures with women opens in l962 as thirty-year-old Heinrich Hampel crosses the Berlin Wall leaving the West for East. This is not a political gesture but a desperate attempt to escape debt and the sexual mayhem caused by his bold selling techniques. Charming his way into the hearts, and beds of his female customers in Bavaria in the l950s Heinrich's turnover doubles. But when an expensive mistress appears, his long suffering wife Rosa has cause to worry. Despite the post-war economic miracle, Heinrich's debts build until he is forced to flee across the border and take up his old ways in the East. From this audacious and outlandish opening the novel builds up a mosaic of Hampel's life. As fresh as it is provocative, Michael Kumpfmüller's first novel was a bestselling literary sensation in Germany.


When we first encounter Heinrich Hampel, in 1962, he is thirty, an affable womanizer in West Germany whose job as a bed salesman affords him continual opportunity. After running up big debts, he flees to the East, where he zigzags from delivering bread and dealing black-market goods to being an informer for the Stasi. Heinrich is a likable scoundrel, and it is easy to see why the book was a best-seller in Germany. Still, the author's insistence that his protagonist symbolize every single aspect of postwar Germany—in the manner of Grass's Oskar Matzerath or Fassbinder's Maria Braun—leaves Heinrich even more of a cipher than the allegory requires. - The New Yorker


As books cross borders and languages, titles come and go. Unfortunately for Americans, the title of Michael Kumpfmuller's debut novel went from clever and meaningful - Hampel's Flights - to clumsy and misleading - The Adventures of a Bed Salesman. From the title of the book, the reader expects something racy and action packed. Instead, it's a slightly over-long, but solid debut about the strange life of a split Germany.
As the book opens in West Germany, Heinrich Hampel has racked up an extreme amount of debt, has a wife he barely knows, a dozen mistresses, one of whom is becoming increasingly expensive, and a business about to go under. It's 1962, and Hampel decides his only escape is to flee to East Germany. His family is originally from East Germany, having snuck over the border a decade earlier. And now he's going back, expecting the government to welcome him with open arms. His clean break is not as clean as he may have hoped, nor is his welcome as enthusiastic as he envisioned. He is placed in a camp while they question him about his motives, and he finds he is not the only person fleeing from too much freedom in the West. As he waits, the authorities call his wife and let her know where he is. She packs a suitcase, gathers up her two children, and follows him without question. In the East, he quickly takes up his old ways with new mistresses, fencing stolen goods to make ends meet, and drinking heavily. What he doesn't seem to notice, however, is that East Germany is much less tolerant of his behavior, and he ends up in prison three times. In fact, he seems oblivious to where he is. His life was full of travel - Russia, East Germany, West Germany, South Africa - but in each new place, he continues his life as exactly before. He is recruited to write reports on others, and he willingly starts reporting on his multiple mistresses. Everyone around Hampel understood the danger of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, but he seemed to think they were all overreacting. One of his mistresses was especially jittery about the authorities. "[A]lthough it surprised him at first he soon got used to … the way she sometimes jumped out of bed for no obvious reason and ran to the door, looking and listening to see if there was anyone looking and listening outside." He accuses her of exaggerating, and sees nothing wrong with the country where his wife and children are starving, and the only meat they can ever procure is a sliver of sausage once a week. He blindly becomes a spokesperson for the East, bickering with his brother back in the West, threatening to turn in his wife for saying she wants to leave the country. The book is difficult to begin reading. The jumping back and forth in time is mostly painless to follow, but the sentence structure can be distracting. "When they sent in the last invoices for the big hotel order at the beginning of December Heinrich said: There, you see, Lehmann, we can't be in such a bad way if we're pulling in orders like this and sending our customers big fat bills, and Lehmann did in fact look quite surprised, or perhaps Heinrich only though Lehmann looked quite surprised, but at least he didn't contradict what Heinrich had said." All of the sentences are like this one, rambling, folding back on top of itself, dying for a period or two. But once you fall into the flow of the book, the sentences and the peculiar timeline make sense. Kumpfmuller is writing the way memory works, shooting off in one direction until a name sparks another memory causing a ricochet off in another direction. What feels awkward in the beginning eventually feels instinctual. The main problem of the book is that it feels about 100 pages too long. Hampel never grows up, never learns from his mistakes. And he keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over again, yet Kumpfmuller keeps detailing those mistakes each and every time. By the twelfth mistress and the third jailing and the fifth time he begs his wife to forgive him, the reader knows exactly what Hampel is going to do next, and it's boring. Passages at the end of his life are tedious to read because he is so oblivious and has been for the last 420 pages. Having an immature protagonist is not what is objectionable. It's that the third time he makes the same mistake, the reader does not need the full story. They can fill in the blanks themselves. Which is not to say that Hampel is all bad. He's certainly a delight to read about when he's not fucking up, and he does have his moments of clarity. His second daughter Susanna is born with spina bifida, and when Rosa rejects her he lovingly carries his daughter, whispering in her ear to please hang on, her mother would not be able to recover from her death. She dies a few days after birth, and Hampel drives her around in his car for hours before he can bear delivering her body to the hospital, telling her "something about himself, his travels to Russia and South Africa, his first years in Jena when he was a child himself, his first years with Rosa, and what was he going to say to her big sister Eva when he came back without Eva's new little sister, the little sister who had only come to visit for a few days and had a big dressing on her back." Unfortunately, it's one of the very few genuinely sweet moments Hampel has. The sympathy gained by this scene is squandered by the end of the book. The most interesting character in the book is Rosa, and we do not get enough of her. Her transformation from blindly following her husband to East Germany, to asking him to please put down a towel when he conducts his affairs in their bed, to initiating a divorce and making her way back to the West. Hampel and Rosa only got married because of a pregnancy, and neither one is happy about it. However, Rosa's unhappiness is mostly silent until she comes into her own as Hampel spends three years in his first prison sentence. I wanted a book about Rosa so that I could see how she was when he was not around. The book was translated by Anthea Bell, a highly respected translator, so the language is nearly flawless. The only awkwardness is during the sex scenes. There is a strange reliance on the word "penis" and the phrase "doing it," and the scenes themselves are not at all sexy. Despite the flaws and the book's length, it is a reasonably quick read, and other than a few passages, it's highly entertaining. At any rate, after a debut like this, it'll be interesting to see what Michael Kumpfmuller comes up with next.  - Jessa Crispin


Beds are the frail vessels of our identity; they stage our birth and death and bear the imprints of our intimacy. This is age-old: Ulysses carved his bed out of a firmly rooted olive tree, making it both his home and homeland. Such an image would find little currency in Michael Kumpfmüller's novel; his hero, Heinrich Hampel, is more of a bed-hopper than an island-hopper. With a name as picaresque as Roderick Random - Hampelmann means both "fidget" and "puppet" in German - he seems a happy-go-lucky type who makes chance his destiny in the ruins of postwar Germany.
It starts in 1962 with Heinrich, pursued by his creditors, crossing the Iron Curtain from west to east - a rather unpopular direction in those years of the economic miracle. Hampel had been a diligent enough bed salesman, readily lending an extra hand to any lady customer willing to succumb to his charms. But even with business booming, he could not keep pace with his reckless spending on mistresses.

Hampel's wife and children soon join him in the east, and life starts again. While she sends wish-lists of comestibles to her family in the west, Hampel continues to list his lovers and their idiosyncracies. He has a short-lived career as a bookseller specialising in socialist literature before being reduced to making ends meet by dealing on the black market and writing useless reports on his lovers for the Stasi. Before long he is running up debts again, and is sent to prison. There he is turned into a good socialist and offered a second chance in a career as a civil engineer - but his taste for alcohol and women proves too strong, and his wife finally divorces him. Destitute and lonely, he dies in a nondescript hospital with no other company than the ghosts of his lovers, and letters sent by his faithful sister.
Hampel is a likeable rogue who appears more fatalistic than opportunistic, irresponsible rather than cynical; Buchenwald or the pungency of Hungarian perfumes, Molotov or the softness of an earlobe have equal value for him. There is something superficially seductive about his childlike innocence. In prison, when a fellow internee agonises over his responsibility as a criminal, Hampel evades his own guilt. In moments of criminality, he argues, normal people "are different, they don't know themselves".
Kumpfmüller's gentle irony makes it clear that he does not embrace such views. He delights in conflating world events with erotic detail - men walking on the moon with Heinrich's conquest of uncharted bodies - as if personal destinies were off-prints of history, and individuals merely pawns in a larger political scheme. The underlying question seems to be, why did East Germany survive as long as it did? There are no wagging fingers, although the novel portrays a regime that was tacitly, if not actively, supported by the masses. Hampel becomes a Stasi informer as easily as his father put on the Nazi uniform - and shed it as soon as Hitler died.

As the narrative reveals Hampel's fate, it also unravels his past, with alternating chapters on each: his childhood in Jena under the Nazi regime; an adolescence spent near Moscow, where his father worked to serve war reparations; the return to Jena in 1949 during the bleak early years of the German Democratic Republic; and then the flight westwards with a family constantly obliged to reinvent itself.
The juxtaposition of Hampel's exalted first love in Russia with his miserable death makes his end all the more gripping, for one realises that he could well have become someone else. The day he comes of age, his mother watches him move in with his Russian girlfriend. "So Heinrich had the bed removed from his mother's flat by two Soviet militiamen in broad daylight, and it was a little piece of her native land they were taking away from her, it was her last love, oh the shame, the lack of consideration for her these days." But now his native land has become a land of exile; he has his last dreams and nightmares on a rickety bed that is not his.
This first novel became a bestseller when it was published in Germany, and Kumpfmüller was hailed as a successor to Günter Grass and Milan Kundera. Hampel, like Oskar in Grass's The Tin Drum, is an anti-hero who refuses to grow up, and Kumpfmüller certainly writes in a tradition that probes the ever painful question of Germany's identity and the responsibility of individuals in politics. Yet his panoramic vision of history, however ironic, is more comforting than controversial; his humour, rather than densely philosophical like Kundera's, is generous. This is a very promising debut indeed.
- Henriette Korthals Altes