Kafka’s Love Letters
Franz Kafka was an early twentieth-century Czech writer whose novels and short stories married up elements of the fantastical with reality. His most famous works include The Trial and The Metamorphosis. He never married but did enjoy love affairs with various ladies. Some of the letters from these relationships survive. These letters show Kafka’s profound sense of sexual failure and guilt- both of which may well explain why he was never able to settle down.
In 1920, Kafka had a brief relationship with Milena Jesenska, a Czech Journalist. Kafka felt insecure about the relationship based on a dream he described to Milena in one of his letters. “Last night I dreamed about you, ” he began, before continuing: “ we were merging into one another. I was you; you were me. ” This probably sounded promising if Melina was hoping for a romantic revelation. If so, she was to be disappointed.
Kafka continued by describing how Milena then caught fire and in the processes of trying to put out the flames, Kafka caught fire too. Thankfully, a dream fire brigade then turned up to save the couple. “But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark,” Kafka concluded. Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Milena eventually petered out. However, Kafka’s most significant love affair had already come and gone. The lady in question was called Felice Bauer, a marketing rep for a dictation machine company who Kafka met in 1912.
Although Kafka’s initial impression of Felice, recorded in his diary was unflattering: (“Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong Chin. ” ), over the next five years, the couple was engaged to each other twice. It was a relationship of letters where Kafka veered between tender declarations of love-before swiftly backing away due to his feelings of inadequacy. “I belong to you,” Kafka stated intensely in one early letter before continuing somewhat bizarrely: “But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life.”
Where do we get our Stuff? Here are our sources:
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