Über die Schönheit häßlicher Bilder (On the Beauty of Ugly Images: A Vademecum for Romantics of Our Time) is a German-language aesthetic essay by Max Brod, the Prague author and critic best known as Franz Kafka’s closest friend and the editor who, against Kafka’s expressed wishes, preserved and published his posthumous work. Brod was himself a prolific novelist, essayist, and cultural critic associated with the Prague literary circle.
This essay engages with the aesthetics of ugliness and its relationship to Romantic sensibility — a characteristically provocative contribution to early twentieth-century German aesthetic debate. Download this free public-domain EPUB to encounter Brod as a thinker in his own right, independent of his role as Kafka’s literary guardian.