he is as far away as no one before him "To the discovery of lust in Franz Kafka

Not earlier than from the decade of 1910 to 1920, the expressionistic period in German literature, lust/sexuality itself becomes a subject of high literature. Franz Kafka, the German writer from Prague, was between the first great authors who discovered the ambiguous character of this essential dimension of life. This contribution presents and analyses some of the most important passages about lust in Kafka's works, and it discusses some critical remarks on the subject made by Rainer Stach und Milan Kundera. Finally the focus is laid on the for Kafka typical connection between the experience of lust and strangeness. It is shown that this experience of strangeness is on one hand an abstract, we can say, existential experience, and that it is on the other hand, because of the used metaphorical pictures, deeply rooted in the actual life experience of the protagonist. So with Kafka the experience of lust appears to be an experience of strangeness, and the experience of inner strangeness becomes the discovery of the real self.