It may’t have been straightforward being Franz Kafka. However then, it could’t have been a lot easier being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evidenced by the correspondence learn aloud by Richard Ayoade in the brand new Letters Reside video above. “It’s now 10:30 on Monday morning,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on November 4, 1912. “I’ve been waiting for a letter since 10:30 on Saturday morning, however once more nothing has come. I’ve written daily however don’t I deserve even a phrase? One single phrase? Even when it have been solely to say ‘I never wish to hear from you once more.’ ” This anxious, hectoring tone was not a one-off indulgence. “Expensiveest, what have I accomplished that makes you torment me so?” he pleaded simply over two weeks later.
Kafka and Bauer had been introduced three months earlier than. She was a relative of Max Brod, Kafka’s good friend and eventual literary executor, and according to Kafka’s diaries, made a goodly unprepossessing first impression: “Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Naked throat. A shirt thrown on. Seemed very domestic in her costume though, because it turned out, she in no way was.”
But during their ensuing five-year correspondence, he was moved to write down her greater than 500 letters, a few of them despatched someday after the other — and various berating her for not writing again fastly sufficient.
This relationship twice led to have interactionment, however perhaps unsurprisingly, never culminated in marriage. Neverthemuch less, Bauer’s relationship with Kafka remained important sufficient to her that she saved eachfactor he wrote to her, which was collected and published in e book type as Briefe an Felice (and later, in translation, as Letters to Felice) in 1967. Perhaps, as burdensome as they might little question be, Kafka’s letters suggested to Bauer a certain literary talent. (This was, in spite of everything, the identical period by which he wrote The Metamorphosis and “Within the Penal Colony,” in addition to early versions of The Trial). In addition they trace at his since-celebrated humorousness, not least in a concluding line like “Rattling the mail!” — phrases that, in Ayoade’s delivery, draw a spherical 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
Belowfloor Automotivetoonist Robert Crumb Creates an Illustrated Introduction to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work
David Foster Wallace Reads Franz Kafka’s Brief Story “A Little Fable” (and Explains Why Comedy Is Key to Kafka)
Behold the Drawings of Franz Kafka (1907–1917)
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social webwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
