Dora Diamant

Dora Diamant ( Dworja Diament, Yiddish Dora Dymant ) ( born March 4, 1898 in Pabianice, Congress Poland, † August 15 1952 in London) was the last companion of Franz Kafka. Against his will, she kept some of his last writings in her possession until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933.

Life

Dora Dymant was the daughter of Herschel Dymant, a successful small business owners and Hasidic followers of Gerrer Rebbe. When she was eight years old, her family moved to bendin in Silesia near the German border. At age 21, she separated from her family and moved to Berlin, where she worked for the Berlin Jewish People's Home.

She learned Franz Kafka in July 1923 in the Baltic Sea Müritz know. Only a short time later, on September 24, 1923, they moved into an apartment together in Berlin- Steglitz, Grunewaldstraße had 13 At this time, inflation reached its peak in Germany, they had to move twice because of financial problems. Kafka had now been resolved definitively from Prague and his family; He considered this to be the greatest accomplishment of his life.

Marriage plans were frustrated by the resistance of diamond father. Kafka's health became progressively worse. In April 1924, he went to a sanatorium in Kierling in Klosterneuburg (Lower Austria ). Until his death on June 3, 1924 Kafka was maintained there by diamond. She kept secretly an unknown number of Kafka's notebooks in their possession until they were stolen along with the rest of her papers in a raid by the Gestapo in 1933 from her home. It is still not known which notebooks passed into possession of the diamond, and which, during the last months of life Kafka had been handed over to Max Brod before. In the 1950s, Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach tried to search for these missing papers, and since the 1990s there exists a Kafka Project at San Diego State University in California.

In the late 1920s, was Dora Diamant actress in Dusseldorf, later she joined the KPD. She married Lutz Lask (1903-1973), an economist and editor of the Red Flag, with which she was the daughter Franziska Marianne ( born March 1, 1934) had. In 1936, she fled with her ​​in-laws Louis Jacobsohn and Berta Lask from the Nazis in the Soviet Union. There, her husband was imprisoned during the Stalinist purges, while the daughter was able to flee to the West in 1938. When she reached the UK in 1940, she was interned there as Enemy Alien. A year after she died in London in 1952 as the result of renal failure, Lutz Lask was released from Soviet prison camp.

Novel

Novel about Kafka and Diamond:

• Michael Kumpfmüller The glory of life, Kiepenheuer & Petrovich, Cologne, 2011 ISBN 978-3-462-04326-6