Franz Kafka to Milená Jesenská

The Lovers
Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. His works powerfully express the anxieties of individuals trapped in a modern society. A Czech-born German, he was brought up in a middle-class Jewish family, the son of a domineering father, Hermann Kafka, and the older brother to three sisters. He studied law at the University of Prague and afterward worked in an insurance company. The frustrated hero-victims of his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) wee modeled on his own life, shaped by his profound fear of his father and deep sense of isolation from the world. Delicate, introspective, and prone to depression, he had many unsatisfactory affairs with women. Tuberculosis made Kafka an invalid and forced him to retire in 1922. He died two years later. Other major works include The Judgement (1912) and Metamorphosis (1915).	Milená Jesenská (1896-1944) was the daughter of a Czech nationalist professor who had her interned in a mental clinic for eight months for stealing money from him to give to her lovers. Soon after her release, she married ernst Polak, a German-speaking Jew, and they settled in Vienna. Neglected by her unfaithful husband, Milená resorted to taking cocaine. To provide herself with independent means, she took up journalism, and in 1919 wrote to Kafka asking permission to translate his works. This triggered an intense correspondence that filled a mutual need for intimacy. They had hour days together in Vienna, but Kafka could not sustain the relationship, and Milená did not want to leave her husband. She died in Ravensbruk concentration camp in 1944, a victim of the Holocaust.

The Lovers

Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)
was one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. His works powerfully express the anxieties of individuals trapped in a modern society. A Czech-born German, he was brought up in a middle-class Jewish family, the son of a domineering father, Hermann Kafka, and the older brother to three sisters. He studied law at the University of Prague and afterward worked in an insurance company. The frustrated hero-victims of his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) wee modeled on his own life, shaped by his profound fear of his father and deep sense of isolation from the world. Delicate, introspective, and prone to depression, he had many unsatisfactory affairs with women. Tuberculosis made Kafka an invalid and forced him to retire in 1922. He died two years later. Other major works include The Judgement (1912) and Metamorphosis (1915).

Milená Jesenská
(1896-1944)
was the daughter of a Czech nationalist professor who had her interned in a mental clinic for eight months for stealing money from him to give to her lovers. Soon after her release, she married ernst Polak, a German-speaking Jew, and they settled in Vienna. Neglected by her unfaithful husband, Milená resorted to taking cocaine. To provide herself with independent means, she took up journalism, and in 1919 wrote to Kafka asking permission to translate his works. This triggered an intense correspondence that filled a mutual need for intimacy. They had hour days together in Vienna, but Kafka could not sustain the relationship, and Milená did not want to leave her husband. She died in Ravensbruk concentration camp in 1944, a victim of the Holocaust.

c. 19221

No, Milená, I beg you once again to invent another possibility for my writing to you. You mustn't go to the post office in vain, even your little postman--who is he?--mustn't do it, nor should even the postmistress be asked unnecessarily. If you can find no other possibility, then one must put up with it, but at least make a little effort to find one.
Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire. Remembering that one extinguished fire with clothing, I took an old coat and beat you with it. But again the transmutations began and it went so far that you were no longer even there, instead it was I who was on fire and it was also I who beat the fire with the coat. But the beating didn't help and it only confirmed my old fear that such things can't extinguish a fire. In the meantime, however, the fire brigade arrived and somehow you were saved. But you were different from before, spectral, as though drawn with chalk against the dark, and you fell, lifeless or perhaps having fainted from joy at having been saved, into my arms. But here too the uncertainty of transmutability entered, perhaps it was I who fell into someone's arms.

Their Story

Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin