Dora Diamant (born March 4, 1898, in Pabianice, Congress Poland; died August 15, 1952, in London) came from a Hasidic family in Poland. She had several conflicts with her traditional parents and decided to move to Berlin, where she wanted to become an actress. In Berlin’s Scheunenviertel neighborhood, she worked at the Jüdisches Volksheim (Jewish People’s Home), a meeting place and educational center with a Zionist and socialist orientation for Eastern European Jewish children and Jewish adults.
There, she met the writer Franz Kafka in 1923. The Volksheim ran a holiday camp in Müritz on the Baltic Sea, where Kafka was vacationing at the same time. Soon they moved into an apartment in Berlin-Steglitz and Kafka deepened his knowledge of and connection to Judaism together with Dora. Both attended courses at the renowned College of Jewish Studies. Dora spent Kafka’s last year with him and was at his side when he died on June 3, 1924.
It was only after Kafka’s death that her acting career took off. At the same time, she became politically active, joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and married Lutz Lask, editor-in-chief of the newspaper Die Rote Fahne. In 1932, their daughter Franziska Marianne was born. At the beginning of the Nazi dictatorship, the Gestapo (secret police of the Nazi regime) raided Lask’s and Diamant’s apartment. It is believed that some of Kafka’s writings and letters, which Dora Diamant may have kept, were confiscated. They are still being searched for in the German Federal Archives today.
Lask and Diamant fled to the Soviet Union, where Lask disappeared into the Gulag for years as a victim of Stalinist purges. In the last stage of her life, Dora managed to flee to Great Britain with her daughter in 1938. There she was strongly committed to preserving Yiddish culture and language before she died at the age of 54.
Sources/Literature:
- Kathi Diamant: Kafkas letzte Liebe, Onomato Verlag, Düsseldorf 2013.