It can’t have been easy being Franz Kafka. But then, it can’t have been much easier being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evidenced by the correspondence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Letters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Monday morning,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on November 4, 1912. “I have been waiting for a letter since 10:30 on Saturday morning, but again nothing has come. I have written every day but don’t I deserve even a word? One single word? Even if it were only to say ‘I never want to hear from you again.’ ” This anxious, hectoring tone was not a one-off indulgence. “Dearest, what have I done that makes you torment me so?” he pleaded just over two weeks later.
Kafka and Bauer had been introduced three months before. She was a relative of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and eventual literary executor, and according to Kafka’s diaries, made a fairly unprepossessing first impression: “Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it turned out, she by no means was.”
Yet during their ensuing five-year correspondence, he was moved to write her more than 500 letters, some of them sent one day after the other — and more than a few berating her for not writing back quickly enough.
This relationship twice led to engagement, but perhaps unsurprisingly, never culminated in marriage. Nevertheless, Bauer’s relationship with Kafka remained important enough to her that she saved everything he wrote to her, which was collected and published in book form as Briefe an Felice (and later, in translation, as Letters to Felice) in 1967. Perhaps, as burdensome as they could no doubt be, Kafka’s letters suggested to Bauer a certain literary skill. (This was, after all, the same period in which he wrote The Metamorphosis and “In the Penal Colony,” as well as early versions of The Trial). They also hint at his since-celebrated sense of humor, not least in a concluding line like “Damn the mail!” — words that, in Ayoade’s delivery, draw a round of applause.
Related content:
Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Letters
Franz Kafka: An Animated Introduction to His Literary Genius
What Is Kafkaesque?: The Philosophy of Franz Kafka
Behold the Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907–1917)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
