Martin Heidegger was recorded to have laughed only once, according to the historian Paul Johnson. It happened at a picnic in the Harz Mountains with Ernst Jünger, who “leaned over to pick up a sauerkraut and sausage roll, and his lederhosen split with a tremendous crack.”
Like Heidegger, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not known for his lightness of spirit. He was, in novels and stories like “The Trial,” “The Metamorphosis” and “A Hunger Artist,” the visionary 20th-century distiller of guilt and shame, ill defined and thus quintessentially modern.
In the spirit of Johnson’s anecdote about Heidegger, I’ve often recalled that, in his diaries, Kafka reports sitting in a bar in Prague with his friend Max Brod after they’d left an opera. Brod accidentally sprayed soda water all over Kafka, who laughed so hard that seltzer and grenadine shot out of his nose.
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