Franz Kafka's Letters to Felice

Kafka's Tortuous Trial of Love

The most fraught emotional entanglement of Franz Kafka's entire life was the one he shared with Felice Bauer, the woman to whom he became engaged twice and with whom he pursued a period of intense letter writing lasting five years. Incredibly, Kafka only met Bauer in the flesh about a dozen times, and yet, for the better part of half a decade, he was devotedly attached to her and came to rely upon her as an emotional support more strongly than anyone else he knew.

The importance of this relationship in shaping Kafka's development, both as a man and as a writer, cannot be understated and is something that any student of Kafka can gauge since most of his letters to Bauer have been preserved intact. Sadly, Bauer's letter to Kafka have all been lost to posterity, so inevitably we have a one-sided view of the affair - one that, given the writer's propensity for exaggeration and self-pity, may not be entirely accurate.

Published as Letters to Felice (Briefe an Felice), this intimate exchange of words is available for general readership and provides not only a deeply moving account of a dramatically flawed love affair but also a fascinating insight into the mind and character of one of the literary giants of the 20th century. The letters (which include some correspondence from Kafka's most devoted friend Max Brod, his mother Julie, and a friend of Felice, Gerte Bloch) make compelling reading and are every bit as worthy of our attention as Kafka's great literary works.

As anyone familiar with the writer's work may anticipate, the picture of Kafka that emerges whilst reading his letters is one of extraordinary complexity and baffling contradiction. He engages our sympathies, even moves us to tears in his moments of despair, and yet he also repels us. Kafka had a remarkable capacity for self-awareness, and this rare quality endears us to him, but he also had a habit of turning this self-knowledge in on himself like a dagger, convinced that he is the most loathsome and worthless thing on earth. Extravagant self-pity came naturally to Franz Kafka and his health worries were a constant preoccupation, as if he knew what the future had in store for him. This is the abiding impression he creates in his Diaries

Who could like, let alone love, a man like this - a man who is incapable of showing real affection to those who care for him and whose sole desire is to live in a cellar and spend his entire life scribbling away at his desk? As riveting as Kafka's letters are - they hold the attention more fiercely than any thriller novel you care to name - it is not the most flattering self-portrait the writer could have left us with. In his unremitting efforts to convince Fraulein Bauer that she should keep up the correspondence Kafka resorts to the most shameless attempts at psychological blackmail. How could Felice abandon him now that he has become so dependent on her, to the extent that every day she fails to write to him he is immediately brought low by the most harrowing fit of depression?

Was Kafka really in love with Felice Bauer or was he subjecting himself to the wildest of self-fabricated delusions? As you follow the erratic twists and turns of the affair, you become increasingly inclined towards the later view. Kafka's obsessive need for approval - which his parents mercilessly withheld from him since childhood - was one of the most compulsive drives in his life. This might even be what lay behind his all-consuming need to write, the hope that one day, possibly, his genius would be recognised. Fraulein Bauer was the first woman in his life that Kafka felt sure could meet his emotional needs, but he was mistaken. No one could have managed this Herculean task - his needs were vast and totally insatiable. The affair was bound to fail, for the simple reason that Franz Kafka's expectations of it were ridiculously excessive.

At the time he was pursuing his wild correspondence with Felice Bauer, Kafka was gradually maturing as a writer. It was in this period (1912 to 1917) that he crafted some of his best known short stories: The Stoker, Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony. He also brought into being the novel for which he is now most widely known, The Trial - a book that resounds with bitter echoes of his complex relationship with the woman he came to idolise but could never possess. Kafka had intense relationships with several other women but it was his involvement with Felice Bauer that most left its mark on him and his work.

Getting to know you

Kafka first met Felice Bauer on 13th August 1912 at the house of his friend Max Brod. She lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company. Kafka recounts this first meeting in his diary and describes Bauer as having a "bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. " They were in each other's company for about an hour, barely communicated, and yet she made a big impression on him.

Kafka begins his long period of correspondence with Felice Bauer on 20th September 1912, with an introductory letter written on the company typewriter, on paper headed Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. Within a few weeks, Kafka and Bauer are regularly writing to one another and they gradually develop a warm and friendly rapport. From Kafka's letters we can reasonably gauge the tone and content of Bauer's letters, providing some allowance is made for Kafka's chronic hypersensitivity.

Just over a month into the exchange of intimacies, (1st November 1912), Kafka is already stressing the importance of his literary endeavours. "My life consists... of attempts of writing, mostly unsuccessful. When I didn't write, I was... ready for the dustbin." He describes in some detail his mode of life, his daily habits, which include performing late-night exercises in his room, naked in front of an open window. At 10,30 pm he sits down to write until 2 or 3 am. Kafka cannot refrain from dwelling on the two bugbears of his life that would crop up repeatedly in later letters - his loathing for his day job as an insurance assessor and his poor state of health.

Not surprisingly, Bauer's enthusiasm for her new pen pal shows a marked decline after this far from agreeable insight into his personal life. Realising the upset that Bauer's reticence may have on his friend, Max Brod now intervenes with a letter to her imploring her to "make allowance for Franz's pathological sensitivity... he wants nothing but the absolute." The correspondence resumes, but by 21st November Kafka is still harping on about his personal ailments, writing at length about the sparse vegetarian diet he has arrived at after years of suffering from severe intestinal problems.

Bauer has barely had time to digest this delightful exposé before Brod gets back to her with another well-meaning intervention. This short letter sheds considerable insight on the depth of Brod's feelings for Kafka and shows him to be not just a close friend but something between a personal minder and a guardian angel. He confides in Bauer his concerns that Kafka's parents not only fail to understand their son's needs, they also seem intent on worsening his mental and physical state with their demands on him. From this brief communication, we are left with the impression that Brod was the only person who really understood Kafka, and possibly the only person who ever truly loved him.

After three months of assiduous letter-writing (with missives being sent off in both directions once or twice a day), Kafka suddenly realises that he is doing himself few favours by deluging his Berlin-based sweetheart with reams of morbid self-introspection. In a letter dated 8th January 1913, he shows his lighter side by recalling an occasion in which, two years previously, he collapsed in paroxysms of incontrollable laughter at the office when his president was making a serious speech.

One week later, Kafka follows up this hilarious revelation with a frank admission of the kind of life he was made for. He wants nothing more than to be locked up in a spacious underground hole to devote himself exclusively to his writing. Periodically, food would be brought down to him and put some distance from his room (just so that he was able to get some exercise). He ends his letter with a light-hearted appeal to his sweetheart: "Don't be reticent with your cellar dweller."

We cannot know for sure what impression Kafka's portrait of himself had on Felice, or how she this shaped her subsequent replies, but it's a fair guess that a certain doubt was creeping into Fraulein Bauer's mind about the sense in corresponding with a borderline neurotic with a serious hermit complex. In his letter of 19th January. Kafka is manifestly offended by the content of Bauer's last missive to him and, for the first time, he shows a streak of prickly petulance. At the same time, he is compelled to admit that he is entirely dependent on her - "I am utterly chained to your being."

Into the labyrinth of love

In the following February, Kafka reacts to Bauer's implied hesitancy with increasingly histrionic outbursts of inadequacy and self-loathing. "There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship", he admits in one letter. In another, he asks his beloved Felice "please tell my why you chose to love such an unhappy young man, whose unhappiness in the long run is bound to be contagious." Between his frantic protestations of devotion to Bauer, Kafka cannot help immersing himself in his pet subject - his lamentable health. How many trees died just so that he could go on and on about his never-ending headaches and recurring bouts of insomnia?

By March 1913, there is such an intensity of feeling in Kafka's letters to Bauer, so much shrieking pain and anxiety, that Bauer could have had no doubt he was wildly in love with her. Kafka's reaction to her letters suggest they were laden more with sisterly kindness than outright passion. In one letter, Kafka appears perplexed by Bauer's true feelings for him. After convincing himself that what she seeks to offer him is compassion based on a false understanding of his real nature, he does his best to undeceive her. "You may think at some time I might yet turn into a useful human being... If this is what you think, you are under a terrible misapprehension... Not for two days could you live beside me."

After this blithely delivered bombshell you might have thought Felice Bauer would have had the good sense to bring an abrupt end to the affair with a postcard assuring Kafka that they should start seeing other people. Instead, she tentatively agrees to meet him in Berlin at Easter - their first face-to-face encounter since they embarked on their mad tree-massacring correspondence. The meeting apparently went so well that they agreed to spend Whitsun together a few months later. Consumed with passion, Kafka sends Bauer his most ardent expression of love in May 1913: "What you give me in the way of love is the blood that flows through my heart. I have none of my own."

By the end of May, Felice Bauer's apparent antipathy for the affair is driving Kafka to distraction. The torment of separation is compounded by his health concerns: "For about ten years I have had the ever-growing feeling of not being in perfect health." When Bauer doesn't immediately reply to his letters, no doubt put off by their increasingly despairing tone, Kafka rails against her with his customary childish petulance and self-pity. "For heaven's sake, why on earth don't you write to me? Not a word for a whole week. It really is dreadful."

In his next letter, dated 27th May, Kafka has reached the depths of despair: "So this is the end, Felice. You dismiss me with your silence and put an end to all hope for the only kind of happiness I am capable of in the world." Kafka continues in the same vein, pummelling his patient correspondent with a never-ending onslaught of words that swing manically between tenderness and bitterness. Why Bauer put up with this vicious psychological battering for so long we shall never know. Maybe she feared what would become of Kafka if she abandoned him? Whatever the reason, she dutifully kept up her side of the exchange, albeit with far less frequency and intensity than her lovelorn admirer.

Sickened to the core of his being by the fear of rejection and yet unable to free himself from the grip of a wild infatuation, Kafka's mood continues oscillating between exultation and despair, the ups and downs determined by how well Bauer's letters met or (as was more likely the case) failed to meet his emotional needs. It was in a letter dated 16th June 1913, nine months into the correspondence, that Kafka makes his first proposal of marriage to his beloved. He now sees marriage as a remedy to his "terrible loneliness".

But even with his offer of marriage Kafka cannot help blackening himself further in the eyes of his intended bride. What can she possibly gain from the arrangement? Nothing but "a sick, weak, unsociable, taciturn, gloomy, stiff, almost hopeless man who has but one virtue, which is that he loves you." The couple's future prospects indeed look grim. Kafka expects to earn nothing from the literary career he intends to slave at for the rest of his life; his future earnings from his work as an insurance official are likely to remain modest; and he can expect nothing from his family. Kafka goes out of his way to persuade Felice that she stands to lose far more than she could ever hope to gain by marrying such a wretch as him. His most ardent desire is not to flee to some idyllic island but "simply to race through the nights with my pen and to perish by it."

In August 1913, Kafka is still concerned that Bauer hasn't quite cottoned on to the nature of the sacrifice she will be making if she agrees to marry him. He feels compelled to put the record straight. "The life that awaits you is not that of the happy couples you see strolling along before you... but a monastic life at the side of a man who is peevish, miserable, silent, discontented and sickly... a man chained to invisible literature by invisible chains." After this cheering prospect, Kafka wonders why Felice takes so long getting back to him.

Bifurcation

By October, it is clear that something has gone slightly awry in the relationship, and this is when Grete Bloch enters the frame. A close friend of Felice, Fraulein Bloch agrees to act as an intermediary between her and Kafka, not suspecting that Prague's most compulsive letter writer will now make her the target of his epistolary addiction. Kafka's correspondence with Bloch is as compelling as the one he has hitherto unleashed on Bauer.

The cool formality of Kafka's first letters soon melts away and a friendlier, more intimate style of writing emerges, albeit with far less of the rampant emotionality that poor Felice has had to bear. Fraulein Bloch became a loyal and sympathetic confidante to Kafka; she not only preserved his relationship with her friend, she also helped to calm his rampaging inner demons. Some years later, Bloch gave strong intimations that she had given birth to Kafka's child - claims that were subsequently refuted.

In one of his most poignant letters to Bloch, written on 2nd March 1914, Kafka recounts an awkward meeting with Felice in Berlin. Whilst she had an obvious fondness for him, Kafka knew then that she was not yet ready to marry him. The sacrifices that the writer was asking of her - in particular, giving up her independent life in Berlin, were too much. Kafka's idiosyncrasies were something that Felice just couldn't put up with.

By April 1914, Kafka and Bauer had resumed their correspondence, but with far less enthusiasm and intensity. After the former's long period of communication with Grete, the tone he adopts in his letters to Felice seems to have changed markedly - far more genial, far less prone to self-pity and recrimination. There's no doubt however that Kafka is desperate to rekindle their love affair, but from the tenor of his writing we are convinced that he has all but given up hope. A few weeks later, Kafka is back in Berlin, and he and Felice promptly agree to become engaged.

Falling back to earth

Barely three months have past before Kafka is writing to Fraulein Bloch to express his concerns that the impending union is unlikely to be a happy one. On 13th July 1914, Kafka writes to Bauer's parents to inform them that he has broken off the engagement. No reason is given. A week later, Felice's mother receives a letter from Kafka's mother, Julie, offering consolation and hope that the marriage will one day take place, once the couple have come to their senses. In the same letter, Frau Kafka offers her own revealing character portrait of her son: "He loves me most tenderly and yet he has never shown me, his father or his sisters any affection. Nevertheless, he is the kindest person imaginable."

In late October 1914, after a lull of several months, Kafka sends a telegram to Felice with the cryptic message "Slowly feeling better." This he follows shortly afterwards with a long letter. By this time, Kafka is living alone in his sister's apartment but still has his meals at the family home. He has been leading the life of a solitary bachelor, writing late at night whilst sticking to his former daily routine.

In his letter, Kafka cites as one reason for the broken engagement a falling out over the choice of marital apartment. He was at once seized with the fear that he may not be able to continue his writing and would instead become trapped in an empty life of bourgeois conformity. The tone of the letter is gentle and placatory, and two months letter Kafka and Bauer appear to have reached a form of reconciliation, after a brief meeting in Bodenbach.

The correspondence between Felice and Franz resumes in late January 1915, but with none of the impetuosity and earnestness of previous years. By now, Kafka's literary career is beginning to take off better than he might have hoped, and he is living by himself (albeit in lodgings that never seemed to suit him), having finally escaped from the family home at the age of 31.

By May, Franz has grown sick of Prague and his life as an official, and he nurtures a desire to enlist in the army to fight in the war. His mood worsens with every passing month. After a long break in the correspondence, Kafka addresses Bauer with a heartfelt appeal for her to continue writing to him. His loneliness, coupled with recurring bouts of insomnia and headaches, is more than he can bear.

Starting in January 1916, Kafka begins bombarding Felice with requests for her to take an extended holiday with him in Marienbad. The excursion finally takes place, in June 1916, and this proves to have a massively restorative effect on the writer's mood. Within a month, Felice's mother is greeted with a telegram and the news that Franz and Felice have agreed to make a fresh start. Wedding bells are once again in the offing.

For the rest of the year, the exchange of letters is more amicable and prosaic, although Kafka is evermore concerned by his worsening headaches. In September 1916, Kafka assures his beloved: "These letters of yours create a stronger and deeper bond between us than did the best letters from the best of the old days." He then blames his troublesome typewriter for "leading him astray".

But within a month, the old recriminations, misunderstandings and doubts have begun to resurface. The relationship is already starting to deteriorate, but rather than hasten its demise Kafka does his best to shore things up with a more placatory and forgiving edge to his letter writing. By now, he has reached maturity, both as a man and as a writer. The childish petulance that made him so insufferable to others has left him for good.

Unfortunately, none of the letters written between December 1916 and September 1917 are still in existence. But from the next extant letter from Kafka to Bauer it is glaringly apparent that passions have waned further. On 9th September 1917, after an interval of four weeks, Kafka writes to Felice with the news that he has been diagnosed with tuberculosis in both lungs. He express hope that his young age (34) may help to retard the disease. Felice visits him a short time afterwards.

On 1st Oct 1917, Kafka writes a long letter to Bauer in which he solemnly regrets the suffering he has caused her over their long period of correspondence. This he attributes to there being two combatants at work within him, guiding inner forces he is powerless to control. He sums up his life thus: he has not been striving to be good, but instead to "know the entire human and animal community.... to reduce them to simple rules".

Kafka then confides just why his illness is so necessary to him. "It is not the kind of tuberculosis that can be nursed back to health, but a weapon that continues to be of supreme necessity as long as I remain alive." With a prophetic flash he confesses his darkest secret: "I will never be well again." After this, he sends a further short letter to Bauer and Bloch. All that remains of Kafka's final letter to Felice is a tiny fragment which ends: "There were moments when... something more than what you are... seems to break through... but I am too feeble to hold on to it..."

And so it was that the first real love of Franz Kafka's life slipped through his fingers - like a dream.