Franz Kafka's Completed Novel

FRANZ KAFKA'S COMPLETED NOVEL: HIS LETTERS TO FELICE BAUER
Author(s): Heinz Politzer

Source: The Centennial Review, Vol. 13, No. 3 (SUMMER 1969), pp. 268-290
Published by: Michigan State University Press
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FRANZ KAFKA'S COMPLETED NOVEL:
HIS LETTERS TO FELICE BAUER
Heinz Politzer
Love letters are written in cipher. Meant to verbalize
passion which by its very nature is beyond words, they pre

sent as miraculously unique an obviously commonplace
fact of life: the affection felt by any John for his Jane, and
vice versa. They are verbal nets spun from the human sighs
—inarticulate and ineffable—which anticipate the sexual
act, accompany it and echo its consummation. To be sure,
they are written to ensnare and hold fast the beloved person.
But if the writers are at all aware of their doings, they know
that their love is bound to escape through the written mesh
—for the greater the passion inspiring the lines, the more it
defies description. And yet, while utterly incapable of
catching love itself, these nets will convey the realities be
hind the love; they will speak of the obstacles which stood
in its way, of the loneliness which it was destined to over
come, and of the opportunities which were sought in order
that this love be fulfilled. It is these very realities which to
the outsider appear in the love letters as hieroglyphics, for
only the lovers themselves understand the true meaning of
these signs, and even this becomes possible only after they
have become conscious of their love. Yet more often than
not, this consciousness of love is reached when it can no
longer render help or offer comfort, and has become an
ominous sign of the end.
Love letters are essentially sublimations or, to use a less
psychological term, romantic transfigurations of basic life
experiences. What we mean by the words "romantic trans
figurations" was expressed almost one hundred seventy years
268
KAFKA AND FELICE BAUER
ago by the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known

as Novalis, when he said in one of his Fragments: "I
romanticize by bestowing a sublime meaning on the com
mon, a mysterious look on the customary, the dignity of the
unknown on the familiar, and the semblance of the infinite
on the finite."1 The suprapersonal validity of these sub
limations or transfigurations cannot be measured by the
mere extent to which reality is transformed in the process,
but rather by the dialectical tension engendered between
"the semblance of the infinite" and the "finite" world, be
tween the "sublime meaning" and the "common" object
to which this meaning is attached.
Novalis, who as a very young man fell in love with thir
teen-year old Sophie von Kühn, exclaimed after the pre
mature death of his betrothed, "What I feel for Söphchen
is religion—not love,"2 thus translating the tension between
the "familiar" and the "sublime" into the juxtaposition of
the pet name "Söphchen" and the exalted feelings—"reli
gion"—which he harbored for her. However, in the year
preceding the death of Söphchen, he described the virgin
saint of his religion as follows: "Her precociousness. . .
she does not care for poetry. . .she dreads the idea of
getting married. . .she smokes tobacco. . .she is afraid of
ghosts. . .she refuses to be bothered by my love. . .often
my love oppresses her. . . . She is cold throughout. . .she is
ever so much afraid of mice and spiders. . .her favorite
dishes are soupe julienne—beef and beans—and eel."3 This
portrait is completed by a letter Söphchen had written to
her fiancé approximately half a year earlier. Her grammar
and spelling were unusually poor even if one considers her
youth and the general instability of the German language
before 1800. She says: "Well, dear Hardenberg, how did you
get home? Fine and dandy, I hope. Now I am sorry to make
a request of you. Just think: after you gave me your hair
1 Ed. Ernst Kamnitzer (Dresden: Jess, 192g), p. 673.
2 Schriften, ed. Paul Kluckhohn (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, n. d.),
IV, p. 399.
s "Klarisse," ibid., pp. 375-376.
26g
THE CENTENNIAL REVIEW
I wrapped it neatly in a little piece of paper and put it

on Hans' table. The other day I wanted to pick it up but
the hair and the little piece of paper were gone. Now this is
to ask you to have yourself shorn again, namely your head.
—Sophie von Kühn." (Schriften, IV, pp. 132-133.)
This is to say that even the Romantic poet was not
blinded by his love. Novalis' songs about Söphchen were
written in code, not in Braille. The key to the mystic union
between him and his deceased fiancée can be found neither
in symbol nor in reality. Rather it lies hidden somewhere
in between. The Romantic friends close to Novalis and
most literary critics after him have shrouded Sophie von
Kühn in an aura of mystery. Yet her letters and pictures
convey little more than the image of a child, albeit a mor
tally sick one. The "lovely sun of the night," to which the
poet raised her image in his hymns, appears in broad day
light to have been quite an ordinary creature, a "chance
girl," as Hermann Kafka once described the women to whom
his son Franz used to propose marriage.4 This is far from
being astonishing, for the substance of the extraordinary
consists in the very transubstantiation of the ordinary.
II
Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in Max Brod's apartment on

August 13, 1912. He recorded the meeting in his diary,
observing her resemblance to a servant-maid and adding:
"I was not at all curious about who she was, but rather
was resigned to her presence at once."5 The woman to whose
presence he had thus resigned himself was to receive from
him three hundred fifty-six letters and one hundred forty
six postcards,6 the first written in September 1912, and the
1 Franz Kafka, "Letter to his Father, Dearest Father: Stories ana Other
Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken, 1954),
p. 187. [Here, and in all other translations, I have taken the liberty of chang
ing the English text slightly whenever a closer approximation to the original
texts seemed indicated.]
5 The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1903-1913, trans. Joseph Kresh (New York:
Schocken, 1948), p. 268.
"Jürgen Born, "Franz Kafka und Felice Bauer. Ihre Beziehung im Spiegel
des Briefwechsels 1912-1917, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, LXXXVI
(1967), 178.
270
last in October 1917. Nor did he spare telephone or tele

graph during this time. Especially during the six-week
period of his first engagement, during the late spring of
1914, he buried Felice under a veritable torrent of all sorts
of messages.
A "chance girl," indeedl Even a photograph taken at the
relatively happy time after his second engagement in 1917
cannot conceal the strange nature of their relationship (after
592).7 The broad-lipped Felice resembles a resolute gover
ness rather than a servant-maid, and is distinguished by the
"almost broken nose" and the "strong chin" on which he had
commented at the time of their first encounter. (Diaries, p.
269.) Behind her stands an overgrown boy, staring away at a
far-removed object, and yet attached to her in a hardly
definable way. She is seated, he stands; the distance which
prevails between them is apparent with an almost painful
intensity; only the fingers of his left hand touch her skirt,
as if clinging. His face reveals the trace of an unbelieving
smile, while hers remains completely apathetic. Actually
this is a face to which no one could offer his sympathies;
the best he could do was to come to terms with it. "To tell
the truth," Kafka writes to Felice's friend, Grete Bloch, on
May 16, 1914, "at first I was forced to cast down my eyes
before F.'s teeth, so shocked was I by their glaring gold
(really an infernal glare at this improper place), and their
grayish-yellow porcelain" (576). To Felice he admitted a
year earlier that he had looked into her "real human face
with all its inevitable blemishes, and had lost [himself] in
it" (348).
"There are marriages," Thomas Mann has said in his
t Numbers in the text refer to Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz

aus der Verlobungszeit, ed. Erich Heller and Jürgen Born (Frankfurt: Fischer,
1967). Since even serious critics have ignored the share Erich Heller had in
editing the letters—thus Hartmut Binder states that he "had only written
an extensive introduction" (Germanistik IX [1968], p. 451)—it has become
necessary to point out that it was Heller to whom the owners of the letters,
the house of Schocken, entrusted this edition; that Bom's work was based on
a doctoral thesis he wrote under Heller's direction at Northwestern University,
and that Heller eventually invited Born to sign as coeditor, in appreciation
of the contribution he had made to this edition.
27 1
story, "Little Lizzy," "which the imagination, even the most

practiced literary one, cannot conceive." A marriage of just
this kind was the one Franz Kafka proposed to enter into
with Felice Bauer. The "unshakable judgment" at which
he arrived when he first saw her most probably hints at the
idea of marrying her. Marrying, however, he wrote his
father in 1919, "founding a family, putting up with all the
children that come. . .is, I am convinced, the utmost a
human being can succeed in doing at all." (Dearest Father,
p. 183). Language, the most beloved of all he loved, betrays
him here. There can be little doubt that at certain times,
in certain dreams, he wished to have children. He fre
quently indulged in these dreams and occasionally uttered
these wishes, a fact which may have caused Max Brod to
broadcast the legend of an illegitimate son born to Kafka
by Grete Bloch,8 whom he just mentioned. As "unshakable"
as his judgment was the minute he laid eyes on Felice, so
irresistible must have been his wish to marry her, at least in
the beginning of his courtship. He seemed deadly serious
about a marriage which, in arch-Romantic fashion, he
dreaded as much as he yearned for. Yet phrases like "re
signing himself to her presence" and "putting up with
children" give him away. They were the utmost concession
he could wrest from himself when it came to declaring his
intentions. At moments like these he felt that the most
intimate sphere of his anxieties and desires was about to be
invaded. It is well-nigh impossible to close one's eyes to this
panic fear when one reads the sentence Kafka wrote five
weeks before the first engagement was announced, on April
22, 1914: "Come soon, let's get married and get it over
'Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard

Winston, 2nd enl. ed., (New York: Schocken, i960), pp. 240 ff. Even the
otherwise pedantically pragmatic Klaus Wagenbach accepts this legend as
truth, although he is forced to admit that it is based "only on the evidence
of a single letter written by Grete Bloch to one of her friends in 1940 (!);
in spite of all possible efforts no other supporting document was discovered."
Franz Kafka in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1964), p. 100. Against this, see the cautious and convincing rectifi
cation of these conjectures undertaken by the editors of Briefe an Felice,
pp. 469 ff.
272
with" (562). With his back to the wall and prevented by

himself from fleeing, he speaks of marriage as if it were a
double suicide.
What lay behind all this confusion? Erich Heller is cer

tainly on the right track when, in his preface to these letters,
he points to a passage in the diary entry of August 12, 1912.
There Kafka says of Felice's "bony, empty face" that it
"wore its emptiness openly" (30). (Diaries, p. 268.) This
emptiness which, in a symbolic way, represents the "chance"
character of the meeting as such, offered him a welcome
opportunity to fill the vacuum with an abundance of visions,
which were equally nightmarish and fascinating. Thus,
Felice became the mirror of "the tremendous world [he had]
in his head. But," the diary of June 21, 1913, continues,
"how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces.
And I would a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than
retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here,
this is quite clear to me." Since he was afraid of being
torn to pieces and with an equally urgent fervor wished
to free the world he had in his head, he wrote, on September
20, 1912, five and a half weeks after the encounter in Max
Brod's house, his first letter to Felice, choosing the emptiness
of her empty face as a blank screen onto which he could
project a semblance of the "tremendous world" that
thronged in his mind. Lest he be disturbed by her, he kept
her at a distance, reshaping her image in the likeness of the
faraway beloved, to whom Novalis had addressed his Hymns
to the Night, Hölderlin his Diotima elegies, and as late a
Romanticist as Richard Wagner his Wesendonck songs. Fe
lice became a goal, invaluable because it was inacessible
and yet capable of giving some direction to his freewheeling
and profoundly aimless libido. We presume that this was
what Erich Heller had in mind when, with a certain poetic
and historical license, he called these letters "minnesongs"
and wished that he could designate them as "the work of an
unknown minnesinger of the first half of the twentieth
century" (9).
273
Kafka neglected no excuse and avoided no subterfuge to

preserve the distance of his beloved. To be sure, he acted
compulsively; but there was insight to his compulsion. Felice
was no Romantic fairy queen. In his letter to her father on
August 28, 19x3, he described her as "a gay, healthy, self
assured girl who, in order to exist, has to be surrounded by
gay, healthy, and lively people" (456). Willy Haas, who
knew her at the time of her engagements to Kafka, recalls
that "she could have become the manager of an important
branch of the internationally known record player and
dictaphone firm, whose chief clerk she had become already."9
She was no princesse lointaine but a surprisingly emanci
pated young woman raised by a Jewish bourgeois family in
Berlin before the First World War. Her independence and
the metropolitan air in which she had been brought up
must have given her a feeling of superiority over the pro
vincial manners of Kafka and his friends. Still, she was
prepared to make concessions and meet her friend halfway,
provided that the friendship would ultimately lead to mar
riage. It was Kafka who balked at this prospect. When, in
March 1916, they visited a Berlin store to buy furniture for
their future home in Prague, the shopping trip developed
into a nightmare. "The sideboard oppressed me," he writes
to her. "It was a perfect sepulchre or a monument erected
in memory of a Prague employee. It would not have been
out of place if a little death knell had sounded somewhere
in the background of the warehouse while we inspected it"
(650).
The grotesque tragedy of these love letters has its roots
in the character of their writer. They are a man's attempt,
probably unique in human as well as in literary terms, to
take possession of a woman by words and nothing but words;
by words, moreover, which were predominantly negative
in tone. Kafka did not woo—he warned. He begged for
photographs, and reciprocated bv sending her sketches of
S "Winseln und Zähneknirschen," (sic! Kafka has "Zähnefletschen" "baring
his teeth." See Briefe an Felice, p. 577.) Welt der Literatur, January 4, 1968,
P- 4
274
his shadowed life. In splendidly monotonous passages of

self-revelation and self-castigation he unfolded before her
eyes the awe-inspiring panorama of the existence into which
a lasting union with him would inevitably lead her. The
loneliness he could neither bear nor share allowed him only
to stretch out words as if they were hands—imploring, de
manding, and at the same time rejecting her. He tried to hold
himself upright by holding fast to the beloved; to enclose
her with bars wrought of language, thereby keeping her
at bay and yet in his power; to encircle her with complaints
and reproaches, questions and requests, and occasionally
even with practical suggestions; to blame her when her
letters arrived too late, and caress her when her answers
came on time, which would please his bureaucratic ego—
and all this on stationery which, as often as not, showed the
letterhead of his own prison, the "Workers' Accident In
surance Agency for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague."
He knew what he was doing. "It is not a matter of communi
cation," he wrote to her on April 14, 1916, "but rather
of making sure of the other" (652).
And Felice? After a long time, of which he said, "It was
either four or four thousand years" (681), she wrote to
him in October 1916: "You are a man so infinitely clear
about himself that by being alone you will certainly be
come still sadder than you are otherwise" (733). To the
very end she failed to realize that breaking through the icy
layers of isolation behind which he had barricaded himself
was tantamount to clouding the clarity he cherished above
all, and that it was impossible for him to tolerate such a
tarnish. She believed that she could allay his sadness, and
thus became the first of all the women, young and old, in
whom in succeeding years a reading of his books and an
understanding of his helplessness would stir up unfulfilled
redemptive instincts. Perhaps she also followed the "tragic
basic motif" formulated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his
sketches to a drama, Jupiter and Semele, which states: "The
feminine tends to turn to where the feminine meets with
275
destruction."10 Eventually, she changed into a figure from

Kafka's own books, more clearly defined and betraying
more of the writer's self than Frieda Brandenfeld in "The
Judgment" and Fräulein Bürstner in The Trial, both of
whom share her initials. As far as The Trial is concerned,
she also seems to have contributed some traits to the char
acter of Leni, the nurse of men sick beyond help, the most
uncharitable sister of charity, who withdraws into darkness
as soon as the hour of reckoning is tolled for the hero.
"It is a piece of art," says Kierkegaard's seducer, "to enter
the life of a girl by way of literature, a masterpiece to exit
from it in the same way."11 Kafka succeeded in performing
this masterpiece when, in November 1917, a hemorrhage
he suffered put an end to his love which had not been an
affair but a correspondence; a correspondence, moreover,
from which only his letters have been preserved, while hers
are merely echoed and mirrored in occasional quotes. Her
image emerges in his lines as if it were indeed coming from
some unfathomable distance. He had his will: Felice sur
vived solely in the role which he had assigned to her, that of
the faraway beloved.12
From Kafka's point of view Felice was as little a "chance"
girl as, in the eyes of Novalis and his friends, the meeting
of the poet and Sophie von Kühn had been a casual event.
Ill
The time has come to ask for the deeper meaning the
recipient of these letters held for their writer. The use
10 Dramen II (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1954), p. 505.
u"Das Tagebuch eines Verführers," Entweder/Oder, Part One, trans.
Emanual Hirsch (Düsseldorf: Diederichs, 1956), p. 396.
12 In his essay "Der andere Prozess" Elias Canetti first seems to agree with
this interpretation. He mentions that the correspondence offered Kafka "se
curity based on distance" and served him as "a source of strength which did
not disturb his sensitivity by all-too-close contacts." Soon, however, he reduces
this image of the distant beloved to the dimensions of a figure in a private
conflict: "The woman who served him [as such a source of strength] was not
allowed to be exposed to the influence of Kafka's family, nor was she to be
admitted to a proximity from which he suffered greatly: therefore he had to
keep her away." Neue Rundschau 79 (1968), p. 191. This is a blatant ra
tionalization. The dilemma had deeper roots, both in Kafka's unconscious
and in the tradition of the image of the distant beloved, which, whether he
knew it or not, he carried on while writing these letters.
276
Kafka made of her "empty face" to serve him as a mirror

of his visions fails to explain completely the pathetic urgency
and the black irony evident in the bulk of this correspond
ence. To find an empty face he did not have to wait for a
visitor from Berlin; there were empty faces enough in his
Prague neighborhood. The spell in which this unattractive
girl held him did not emanate from emptiness alone.
He began his first letter to Felice by reminding her of the
promise "to undertake in his company a journey to Palestine
next year." Moreover, this promise seems to be the real cause
of his writing this letter. "Now," he continues, "if you still
intend to undertake this journey—you said at that oc
casion that you were not fickle and indeed I did not observe
any sign of fickleness in you—then it is not only right but
absolutely necessary for us to start right here and now to come
to an agreement about the trip" (43). Mentioning the Holy
Land, he gave a distinct clue to the understanding of the
letters which were to follow. He takes up this theme again
when, on October 27, he recalls in admirable detail the
circumstances of their first meeting. "The best d^ed I per
formed that evening," he writes, "was that I happened to
have with me a copy of Palästina [a Viennese monthly de
dicated to the rehabilitation of the Holy Land] and for
this reason I may be forgiven everything else. We discussed
the journey to Palestine, and during this discussion you
gave me your hand or, rather, I elicited it from you, on the
strength of my intuition" (58-59). The word "intuition"
associates and complements the diary phrase of the "un
shakable judgment." In both instances he had been struck
by a force beyond his control.
When, a year later, Kafka summoned his courage and for
the first time tried to extricate himself from a relationship
that had threatened to become unbearable, he travelled
from Prague to Vienna. This journey was explained to Felice
as a business trip he had to undertake in the company of
his director to attend an "International Convention for
Life-Saving Services and Hygiene." Yet as acute an ob
277
server as Elias Canetti has recognized that "the Convention

which really attracted him to Vienna was the Zionist Con
gress," held there at the same time. Kafka hid his real inten
tion from Felice less "because he tried to be tactful," as
Canetti suggests in "Der andere Prozess," than because he
wished to deceive her and thereby to liberate himself. Here
the motive of Palestine is set in reverse. Of course, the re
versal did not work either. After the last session Kafka
meekly confessed: "This morning I was at the Zionist Con
gress. I am lacking the right kind of rapport. I have it in
matters of detail as well as in those which lead beyond the
whole thing; what I am missing, however, is the rapport with
the essential" (461-462)—for the "essential" was Felice's
hand, which he had "elicited" at the time of their first meet
ing in order to gain the strength necessary for him to reach
the Promised Land.
The idea of Palestine connects the beginning of his letters
with their end. In the summer of 1916 they spent ten days
together at the Bohemian spa of Marienbad, and Felice most
probably^ became his mistress during this time, without,
however, relieving him of his loneliness. After her return
to Berlin she made her spare time available to Siegfried
Lehmann, the director of the Jewish National School there.
Palestine reappears in the correspondence, and the tone of
the letters changes. Kafka writes about the school's auxiliary
which Felice has joined:"They will achieve little, for they
are capable of doing little and represent little, but if they
understand the purpose [of the school], they will achieve
just everything, with all the power endowed to their souls;
this again is much, only this is much." And he continues:
"All this is connected with Zionism. . .only inasmuch as
this movement lends to the work in the School a young
and strong method, and generally the strength of youth,
as national aspirations are invigorating where other efforts
would perhaps be doomed to fail, and as the enormous old
times are being invoked, with the limitations, of course,
without which Zionism could not subsist" (697). Shortly
278
thereafter he writes again: "It is the School which draws

us so close together" (699); it is the School, we cannot help
noticing, and not, for instance, the recollections of Marien
bad.
Kafka, who suffered from his father's assimilation to
Central European standards and whose alienation from
Judaic lore had resulted in acute self-hatred, envisaged
in Palestine neither a reality nor a Utopia. He saw it as an
image. What promise this image held for him the Prussian
poet, Heinrich von Kleist, had expressed a century earlier.
He, too, pointed to the East, when he wrote to his ñancée
on October 10, 1801: "Among the Persian magi there exists
a religious law. Man, they say, cannot do anything more
welcome to the Godhead than tilling a field, planting a
tree, and begetting a child."13 Are we mistaken in our as
sumption that Felice Bauer outgrew the "chance" character
of their meeting the very moment she offered to accompany
him on his journey to the country which symbolized for him
the Good Life, life pure and simple? On a journey, we hasten
to add, which Kafka never embarked upon—a journey to a
life no longer possible, he was convinced, at least for him.
Less than six weeks after she had, hesitatingly enough,
answered his first letter, she suggested that "there is a limit
to everything, even his writing" (76). Two months later
he emplored her "with raised hands" not to be jealous of the
novel he was writing at that time, Amerika. He said: "If
the people in my novel notice your jealousy they will run
away. . . . And consider that I would have to run after them,
even if it had to be to the nether world, their real home,
to be sure. The novel is I; my stories are I; where, I ask of you,
could there be the barest room for jealousy?" (226) He
defended himself so passionately, as if she had actually
caught him in the act of deceiving her, and as if he were
deriving more pleasure from her jealousy than from any
infidelity he might have committed. He did not cease to fan
13 Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Hanser,

2nd ed., 1961), II, p. 694.
279
this "jealousy" of hers. This, too, was part of the game:

she was to be as jealous of him as he thought life was of art.
Thus, in November 1912, he copied for her a stanza com
posed by the Chinese poet, Jan-Tsen-Tsai, and kept dis
cussing the poem for weeks on end:
In the cold night, bent over my books,

I have forgotten the time of going to bed.
The perfumes of my gold-embroidered bed-cover
Have evaporated; the chimney fire has died.
My beautiful lady-friend, hardly having restrained
Her anger so far, snatches the lamp away,
Asking: Don't you know how late it is? (119)
In spite of all his protestations to the contrary, here he gave

her an example of how he expected her to behave, dreading,
of course, at the same time that she would live up to his
expectations. "In the struggle between you and the woman,
second the woman,"—one is tempted to vary one of his
aphorisms which speaks of the struggle between him and
the world. {Dearest Father, p. 38.) This variation is not
unjustified. Felice did represent reality to him. In this
"chance girl" he had found his ideal opposite, not as a
partner in marriage, to be sure, but as an antagonist who, in
his struggle, sided with the world.
IV
The conflict between life and art is presumably as old as

art itself. In German literature this dilemma had found
its classical resolution in Goethe's drama, Torquato Tasso.
But only the Romantics became fully conscious of the split
separating a natural existence from a creative one. As al
ways, consciousness bred doubts. We do not know whether
Kafka ever read Clemens Brentano's "Story of Good Young
Casper and Fair Young Ann." At the outset of this short novel
the narrator is asked for his trade by an old peasant woman.
Highly perplexed by this question, he ponders: "I couldn't
very well tell her that I was a scholar without lying. It is
strange that a German always feels a bit ashamed to call
280
KAFKA AND FELICE BAÜER- i : ' -3. ,
himself a writer; especially wary is he in using this term

when speaking with the lower classes, because it so readily
conjures up in their minds the scribes and Pharisees of the
Bible."14 Kafka would have shared these scruples, com
pounding them with the observation that his writings had
no part in German letters. Instead, they belonged to German
Jewish literature, "a Gipsy literature," as he wrote to Max
Brod in 1921, "which has stolen the German child from
its cradle and has somehow fixed it up in great haste be
cause, after all, somebody had to do the dancing on the
rope."16 Five years previously he had written to Felice in
the same vein: "A difficult case. Am I a circus rider on two
horses? Unfortunately, I am no rider at all but lie prostrate

on the ground" (720).
Thus he would have appreciated all the more the general
remarks Brentano's narrator adds to his meditations on the
fate of the German writer:
"Suspicion enshrouds the poet by vocation, he who is more

than a dilettante. It is an easy matter to say reproachfully to
the former: 'Sir, every mother's son has a bit of poetry in his
body, as he has brains, a heart, a stomach, a spleen, a liver, and
the like; but he who feeds one of these organs to excess, pam
pers or fattens it at the expense of the others, or even goes to
the length of making it a means of livelihood, he has cause to
be ashamed whenever he thinks of himself as a whole man.
One who lives by poetry has lost his balance; and an enlarged
goose liver, no matter how delicate to the palate, does presup
pose a sick goose."
The Romantic poet had diagnosed literature as a hyper

trophy of the poetic organ. More dangerously stricken by
this disease than he dared to admit, Brentano treated it
with a dose of soulful irony. In Kafka physical sickness has
turned into mental disturbance, and, accordingly, cool judg
ment into a tortured outcry. "There is in my life something
resembling bedlam," (195) he wrote to Felice during the
" "The Story of the Just Casper and Fair Annie," trans. Carl F. Schreiber,
Great German Short Novels and Stories, ed. Victor Lange (New York: Modern
Library, 1952), p. 131.
15 Briefe 1902-1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1958), p. 338.
2 ö 1
first year, and a little later, underlining every single word:

"The only thing I desire is spending my nights delirious
with writing. Perishing or growing mad in the process, this,
too, is what I want because it is the necessary and long
anticipated consequence of all that happened before" (427).
Because he looked upon his writing as madness, or feared
with a hypochondriac's apprehension that the former would
degenerate into the latter, and, to top it all, even wished
this degeneration to take place, he had chosen Felice to save
him from the inevitable as well as to hasten its approach.
Having been taken ill by literature, he expected to be nursed
by life; yet the strength he thus hoped to regain he meant
to spend on further cultivation of his sickness.
The Romantic motif of art as sickness, contrasted with the
hearty health of chubby philistines, acquired even more
demonic overtones the further the nineteenth century pro
gressed. "Look," Kafka wrote to Felice on November 2,
1913, "among the four men who are, I feel, my closest kin
(although I cannot come anywhere close to their strength
and their grasp), among Grillparzer, Dostoevsky, Kleist, and
Flaubert, only Dostoevsky was married, and perhaps only
Kleist found the right way out when he shot himself on the
shore of the Wannsee, haunted as he was by troubles from
without and within" (460). He forgot to mention that even
Dostoevsky's marriage failed to grant him the life dans le
vrai, from which Flaubert, another of his "kinsmen," had
resigned in order to embrace literature to the exclusion of
everything else. He admired Grillparzer, whose story, "The
Poor Fiddler," he had read aloud only four days before he
met Felice, describing the recital as "flowing from intuition,"
largely because the relationship the Viennese writer enter
tained with his "eternal bride," Katty Fröhlich, served him
as a classical example of the insoluble dilemma between
literature and life. And Kleist—of whom Kafka had earlier
written that his spirit blew into him as if "into an old pig's
bladder"—had escaped a crisis very similar to Kafka's own
when he shot himself and his companion, Henriette Vogel,
282
on November 21, 1811, thus putting an end to sorrows bred

by the irreconcilable claims made on him by a disrupted,
confused existence and his literary ambitions.
Yet the trauma at the roots of this crisis had deeper
origins. It was articulated, ninety years after Kleist's suicide,
by Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger. This young writer, too,
speaks, full of envy, of the "bliss of the commonplace,"
denounces "the whole sickly aristocracy of letters," and
curses "the laurel tree of art," from whose branches one may
not "pluck a single leaf. . .without paying for it with his
life." But Tonio's most profound self-doubt is revealed
when, under his breath, he asks his friend, the painter Lisa
beta Ivanovna: "Is an artist a male, anyhow?" And, without
giving pause, he answers: "Ask the females! It seems to me
that we artists are all of us something like those unsexed
papal singers. . .we sing like angels; but—" (Stories of
Three Decades, pp. 108-109, 103-104). Literature is no longer
seen as a jealous mistress competing with the demands of
an equally jealous life; it has grown to the dimensions of a
pitiless fury, avenging life by depriving the writer of his
identity as a male, that is, of his identity in general. Kafka
was afflicted by such a permanent identity crisis no less than
Kleist had been more than a century earlier.16
The Prague writer, too, asked the females. He directed
his questions not only to Felice Bauer, but also to her friend,
Grete Bloch, who visited Kafka in Prague in 1913 in order
to mediate between him and his faraway beloved. Almost
at once he barraged the messenger with letters hardly less
urgent and torturing than those he had addressed to her
friend. It seems that for a while he subsisted on Grete
Bloch's letters as he had previously been kept alive by those
of Felice. Again he asked for assurances and planned en
counters which never materialized. Again he gravely inter
fered with another human's life, ultimately for the sake of
in See also Heinz Politzer, "Auf der Suche nach Identität. Zu Heinrich von
Kleists Würzburger Reise," Euphorion, LXI (1967), 383 ff, and generally,
F. G. Peters, "Kafka and Kleist: a Literary Relationship," Oxford German
Studies I (1966), pp. 114 ff.
2»3
being able to continue his writing without disturbance.

And again he disappointed his correspondent as well as
himself.
Once more Kafka was to ask a woman his question, years

after the second engagement to Felice had been terminated
and she had married a well-to-do businessman from Berlin.
Milena Jesenská was so superior to him owing to her free
outlook on life and her ability to cope with its realities
that he did not seem to be unduly threatened by her highly
developed critical mind. When even this relationship was
coming close to its end he wrote her, probably in 1921:
"I, an animal of the forest, was at that time barely in the for
est, lay somewhere in a dirty ditch (dirty only as a result of my
being there, of course). Then I saw you outside in the open—
the most wonderful thing I'd ever seen. I forgot everything
entirely, forgot myself, got up, came closer—though fearful of
this new yet familiar freedom—came closer nevertheless,
reached you, you were so good; I cowered down beside you as
though I was permitted to do so, I laid my face into your hand,
I was so happy, so proud, so free, so powerful, so at home—
over and over again this: so at home—but fundamentally I
was still only the animal, still belonged only in the forest, lived
here in the open only by your grace, read without realizing it
(for after all I had forgotten everything) my fate in your face."
For the first time we hear him using words like "home,"
"happiness," "pride," "freedom," and "power,"—yet he did
not speak of what he possessed, only of what had been lent
him by her grace. He still depended on the mercy of the
woman. He still asked her for his density, his destination.
What was his condition, what was to be his fate? The Czech
woman answered: "Nemáte sily milovat"—"you don't have
the power to love."17 He heard the answer, and agreed to
it. Pronouncing her verdict, Milena had proven that she
understood his plight; and Kafka, willingly, almost joy
fully, acknowledged this understanding.
Nemáte sily milovat. This was a judgment so general that
17 Letters to Milena, trans. Tania and James Stern (New York: Schocken.
1953). PP- 199. a°°
2 »4
it was valid not only for Kafka and his German-Jewish

friends in Prague but for contemporary Western literature
in general. The word "love," as it appears in Milena's
lapidary sentence, sounds grave enough to acquire a mean
ing far beyond anything physical. Milena was not speaking
here of the writer's ability to consummate the sexual act
(though she may have had that in mind, too), but pointed
to the profound weakness Western literature displayed when
it came to dealing with reality and the human beings in
habiting it. Erich Heller, who ironically predicts that the
readers of Kafka's letter to Felice would "stretch out their
index fingers and exclaim 'impotence!'" (33)18 slightly
misses the mark. Rather, perusing this correspondence, the
reader will be reminded of the scene in Thomas Mann's Doc
tor Faustus in which the devil tempts the German composer

Adrian Leverkühn by promising him the conquest of un
heard-of musical spheres under the condition: "Thou
maist not love." Correspondingly, when Kafka wrote his
most intricate novel, The Castle, he described his endeavors
in a letter to Max Brod as "a sweet and wonderful reward
. . . for serving the devil." (Briefe 1902-1924, p. 384.)
Man's pact with the devil is a Romantic motif that sprang
to life centuries before Romanticism was established as a
literary mode. The same holds true of the motif of for
bidden love. What Kafka achieved in his love letters, and
Thomas Mann in his novel, was the merger of the two
themes, their counterpoint, and their extension into an image
reflecting modern existence proper.
Literature as a curse, creativity as the mark of madness,

the writer as a stranger errant along the silent highways of
the earth—together these form the symbolic sign imprinted
18 Canetti, on his part, misses Heller's irony. He pronounces: "This cor
respondence . . . could hardly be read by a primitive mind: it would appear
to him as the shameless spectacle of psychological impotence" (op. cit., p.
201). Apart from the fact that it is difficult to imagine a primitive reader of
Kafka, such a creature would scarcely be able to conceive of a subtlety as
complex as the notion of "psychological impotence."
285
upon the letters Kafka wrote to Felice, a profoundly Ro

mantic sign. And yet what a difference is noticeable be
tween the untiring self-mystifications of this "unknown
minnesinger from the first half of the twentieth century"
and the way his Romantic forerunners had understood the
meaning of their lives, and had expressed themselves about
it!
When Friedrich Hölderlin's mind began to be clouded by

madness and at the same time his genius was preparing it
self to reach the supreme height of his late verse, the poet
wrote to his friend, Casimir Ulrich Böhlendorff: "Contin
uously I was deeply moved by the immense element, the
fire of heaven, and the peace among men, their straitened
circumstances and contentment, and as they say in honor of
heroes I may well say about myself, that I was struck by
Apollo."19 Here reference is made to the final scenes of
Sophocles' King Oedipus, a play Hölderlin was to translate
and, while translating it, adapt to his own visions. "King
Oedipus," he is said to have exclaimed during the time of
his madness, "has perhaps one eye too many. The suffering
of this man seems indescribable, unspeakable, inexpressible
. . . Son of Laios, poor stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also life." (Sämtliche Werke, II, pp. 373-374.)
After his fatal disease was diagnosed, Kafka sent a fare
well letter to Felice, which was to be followed by still
another, the very last. The farewell ends with the words:
"For the rest I shall tell you a secret in which I myself
do not believe at this time. . .1 shall not recover anymore,
precisely because my sickness is no T.B. which can be
taken care of and healed in a deck chair. Rather, it is a
weapon which will remain extremely necessary as long as
I remain alive. Both however, cannot remain alive" (757).
Hölderlin's remark relates to Kafka's as Ananke, the Greek
demon of fate and compulsion, relates to neurosis, its
modern counterpart. Hölderlin and Kafka shared a kind of
i» Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959),

VI, p. 462.
286
proud humility when each prepared himself to sacrifice his

life to his art. Both withdrew from the world; with the
distinction, however, that Hölderlin raised reality to mythi
cal grandeur when he spoke of the "immense element, the
fire of heaven, and the peace among men," whereas Kafka
was altogether forgetful of reality. The "deep emotion" felt
by the earlier writer stands out in contrast to the anxiety
besetting the modern. In him the curse of literature is
completely introverted. He failed to acknowledge the
"straitened circumstances" even of those who were closest
and dearest to him, or to care for their "contentment." He,
and he alone, formed the scene of the bitter struggle be
tween literature and existence which his letters reflect in
incessant repetition. Only now when his correspondence
was coming to an end was he prepared to admit this, and
to pay his respects to her, who had listened to his mono
logues. "You know," he writes to Felice in the same letter,
"that two forces are interlocked in combat within me. That
the better of the two belongs to you, this I have come to doubt
the least during the last few days" (755). The absolute
loneliness in which this battle was fought, its aloofness
from all extraneous factors, and the lack of any participa
tion from the outside determined the neurotic character
of his conflict, deprived him of any strength to love, and
sealed the end of his relationship with Felice.
Finally, both Hölderlin and Kafka assigned a metaphysical
meaning to the sickness which threatened to overcome them.
Hölderlin, however, was completely unequivocal in the ac
ceptance of his fate. He took his madness to be an affliction
visited upon him by a god. Deeply steeped in Orphic mys
ticism, he firmly believed that he had been witness to an
epiphany when Apollo emerged before his eyes and struck
him with madness. This madness was the sacred enthusiasm
of the poet, a token of the divine origins and the integrity
of his song.
Kafka, on the contrary, vacillated, as was his wont. He
raised his sickness to the stature of a symbol only to mini
287
mize its importance in the same breath. "I think," he con

fides to Felice, "that this sickness is no T.B. at all, or at least
no T.B. in the first place, but an indication of my total
bankruptcy." Unlike Hölderlin, he did not experience his
suffering as a promise of victory and transfiguration, but
rather as a loss which he chose to declare in the language
of capitalistic commerce. By reducing his fatal sickness to
a psychosomatic symptom he deflated its symbolic value.
Because the origins of his T.B. were psychological, the dis
ease was bound to remain incurable, at least as long as his
spiritual torment had not been resolved. On the other hand
(and Kafka seldom wrote a sentence without adding such
an "on the other hand" as the unmistakable hallmark of
his style), the blood he had coughed up did not stem
"from his lungs but from the more or less decisive stab"
inflicted upon him by one of the fighters in his interior
struggle (756).
What this struggle was about we learn in greater detail
from a letter he wrote to Max Brod in the middle of Sep
tember 1917, approximately two weeks before his farewell
to Felice. There he says: "My relation to T.B. is the relation
of a child to his mother's apron strings when it clings to
them. . . . Constantly I am looking for an explanation for
this disease since I am sure that I have not hunted it down
all by myself. Sometimes it seems to me as if my brains and
my lungs had come to an agreement without informing me.
My brains had said: 'It cannot go on this way,' and after
five years my lungs have declared their willingness to help"
(Briefe 1902-1924, p. 161.)
The letter to Felice not only repeats the image depicting
T.B. as a mother's apron strings to which he clings, but hints
at the meaning he attributed to the five-year span of his
struggle. "For five years," he writes, "the course of this
battle has been communicated to you by words and silence
and their combination" (755). After all, he did grant her a
certain degree of participation in his fight, if only as a spec
tator. But we learn suddenly that the torture of these years
288
did not really arise from a conflict between mind and body,
brains and lungs, but "these two who are fighting within
me, or to put it more precisely, of whose fight I am con
stituted apart from a small tortured remnant, are a good
one and an evil one," and the conflict she had been called
upon to witness was no struggle but a trial. "You are my hu
man court of justice," he now exclaimed; and since he did
so in the context of a farewell letter, he condemned him
self before an authority he had chosen to adjudicate the claims
of life and literature and, as he now realized, to decide be
tween right and wrong. "To sum it up," he confessed, "all
depends on the human court of justice, a court, moreover, I
want to deceive, without deception, to be sure" (756).
These words, like the message they convey, are "deceivers,
without deception, to be sure." Was it true that Kafka's
whole existence depended only on this human court of justice,
on Felice? He could hardly conceal from himself that his
farewell letter, this verdict of self-condemnation, this dec
laration of total bankruptcy, was a literary masterpiece
of the first order and, since he himself had invoked the
principles of "right or wrong," an act of applied ethics as
well. He acquitted himself before the only court of appeal
—literature and the morality of artistic creation—by con
demning himself before Felice's court of justice in life. Con
sidered in the twilight of this paradox, the whole corre
spondence that led up to it turns out to be literature, great
literature, even moral literature, incomparable in spite of
Kafka's "weeping and baring his teeth" (557) and in spite
of the cruelties he had inflicted upon his fellow beings
and himself. The Letters to Felice is the only novel com
pleted by Franz Kafka, who was no doubt assisted in its
creation by Felice, her strength, her stubbornness and her
inability to understand.
Hölderlin pointed to the heroes of the past whose ranks
he expected to join after having been struck, and thus
singled out, by the god. As much as it is at all possible to
speak of heroism today, we cannot deny a heroic dimension
289
to Kafka's struggle. The processes of social and cultural dis

integration which had announced themselves vaguely in the
era of German Romanticism reached a critical stage during
the time that Kafka wrote these letters. The First World
War broke out shortly after his first engagement to Felice
had come to an end. This historical catastrophe seems to
have passed him by without leaving more than occasional
traces of minor consequence in the lines of his letters. Yet
he imprinted upon his correspondence, as well as on his
other books, the cryptography of universal anxiety. He
never overcame his fear but neither did he give in to it. He
tried to exorcise it on the strength of the visions into
which he translated it. Thus he contributed to the creation
of a new image of man: a stranger among men and yet famil
iar to them all, a tortured torturer, who appears faithless be
cause he is obsessed with the compulsion to obey the ordi
nance of his conscience. Kafka stood where there was no
ground and, to his very end, did not yield an inch of where
he stood.
290

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FRANZ KAFKA'S COMPLETED NOVEL: HIS LETTERS TO FELICE BAUER

Author(s): Heinz Politzer

HIS LETTERS TO FELICE BAUER

Love letters are written in cipher. Meant to verbalize

passion which by its very nature is beyond words, they pre

ago by the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known

I wrapped it neatly in a little piece of paper and put it

Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in Max Brod's apartment on

last in October 1917. Nor did he spare telephone or tele

t Numbers in the text refer to Briefe an Felice und andere Korrespondenz

story, "Little Lizzy," "which the imagination, even the most

'Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. G. Humphreys Roberts and Richard

with" (562). With his back to the wall and prevented by

What lay behind all this confusion? Erich Heller is cer

Kafka neglected no excuse and avoided no subterfuge to

his shadowed life. In splendidly monotonous passages of

destruction."10 Eventually, she changed into a figure from

Kafka made of her "empty face" to serve him as a mirror

server as Elias Canetti has recognized that "the Convention

thereafter he writes again: "It is the School which draws

13 Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Hanser,

this "jealousy" of hers. This, too, was part of the game:

In the cold night, bent over my books,

In spite of all his protestations to the contrary, here he gave

The conflict between life and art is presumably as old as

himself a writer; especially wary is he in using this term

horses? Unfortunately, I am no rider at all but lie prostrate

"Suspicion enshrouds the poet by vocation, he who is more

The Romantic poet had diagnosed literature as a hyper

first year, and a little later, underlining every single word:

on November 21, 1811, thus putting an end to sorrows bred

being able to continue his writing without disturbance.

Once more Kafka was to ask a woman his question, years

it was valid not only for Kafka and his German-Jewish

tor Faustus in which the devil tempts the German composer

Literature as a curse, creativity as the mark of madness,

upon the letters Kafka wrote to Felice, a profoundly Ro

When Friedrich Hölderlin's mind began to be clouded by

i» Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1959),

proud humility when each prepared himself to sacrifice his

mize its importance in the same breath. "I think," he con

to Kafka's struggle. The processes of social and cultural dis

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Franz Kafka's Completed Novel

Franz Kafka's Completed Novel