Franz Kafka - Letters to Felice

Copyright 1973 by Schocken Books, Inc.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, Inc., New York. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Originally published in Germany as Briefe an Felice in 1967.
Copyright 1967 by Schocken Books, Inc. This translation first published in hardcover by Schocken Books, Inc., in 1973.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Kafka, Franz, 18831924.
Letters to Felice.

(Schocken classics)
Translation of: Briefe an Felice und andere
Korrespondenz aus der Verlobungszeit.
Bibliography: p.
1. Kafka, Franz, 18831924Correspondence. 2. Bauer, Felice, 18871960. 3. Authors, Austrian20th centuryCorrespondence. I. Bauer, Felice, 18871960. II. Heller, Erich, 1911 . III. Born, Jrgen. IV. Title. V. Series.
PT2621.A26Z48413 1988 833.912 [B] 87-32232
eISBN: 978-0-8041-5076-7

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1_r1

The following songs are the work of an unknown minnesinger from the first half of the twentieth centuryif only it were possible to begin with these words. For if they were true in every respectand not only in the one still to be shownthe editors of these letters would not be burdened with the problem of how to justify their participation in this edition. As it is, the problem exists, not only because Franz Kafka had asked the executor of his last will to destroy his unpublished writings, and despite the precedents of similar editions published in defiance of that testament. But precedents cannot dispel our scruples; for in matters of ethics no appeal to rules of custom is admissible, and certainly not to such as might merely make a norm of a bad habit. However, those who present the reader with the fait accompli of this edition should not trouble him, into the bargain, with their moral disquiet if they merely wished to soothe their own consciences. Yet a discussion of Kafkas will is likely to point beyond the immediate occasion and may perhaps help us better to comprehend the not-easily-comprehensible man who wrote these letters. And as their writer is Franz Kafkawhose works have presented to a whole epoch the mystery for which, apparently, it has long waited and in which, without being able to solve it, it has recognized its ownit is possible that the discussion may contribute a little to our self-understanding. Thus slightly to diminish the opaque confusion of our age is an undertaking that perhaps needs no justification.

The minnesongs are love letters written by Franz Kafka. He wrote them during the months and years between September 20, 1912, and October 16, 1917, to a woman whom, as was at times his conviction, he wished to marry, to whom he twice became engaged and from whom he twice parted. Should correspondences of this kind be published at all? To ponder this questionquite apart from any instructions that the writer himself may or may not have left behindmay indeed help a little to distinguish the sources that enrich the mind from those that merely add to todays plethora of printed words. Thus it is a useful question even if, as in this case, the lady who received the letters agreed that they should be published after her death, and although whole libraries could by now be founded with volumes unwittingly produced by authors who did not suspect that one day crowds of studious adolescents and curious adults would look over their shoulders, watching them in the act of unburdening their hearts in presumed privacy. But Kafka, suspicious latecomer that he was in the Romantic tradition of most secret, most private, most inward, and yet eventually published intimacies, was of course familiar with the probability of such indiscretions. Indeed, he himself, as these letters prove once more, was an avid reader of autobiographical writings, epistles, and confessions, and sometimes even preferred such reading to that of the writers actual works.

It was Kafkas last will that neither his letters nor his diaries should survive him; nor, for that matter, his unpublished stories and unfinished novels. When he made this request, he was very far from having attained that fame which, in accordance with the inescapable laws of literary scholarship and other branches of the literary trade, forces every word an author has ever written upon the attention of the reading public. And because he was at that time, despite several publications, still widely unknown, it may well be asked whether, if his last will had been fully carried out, his private utterances would have commanded any interest at all. For in that case the manuscripts of Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle would have been destroyed; and surely the constant bustle surrounding his name would be much less noisy if these books did not exist. Be this as it may, Kafka, inwardly incapable of undoing his work himself, or prevented from doing so by external circumstances, demanded of his disobediently faithful friend Max Brod that he should burn unread all Kafkas diaries, manuscripts, letters. The instruction, as Max Brod tells us in the Postscript to the First Edition of the (thus vainly condemned) fragmentary novel The Trial, was written in ink on an undated piece of paper, discovered, after Kafkas death in 1924, among many other papers in one of Kafkas drawers. Clearly the will had received little of the care usually given to such documents. Nor was the futile search for a more formal testament the only occasion that brought this piece of paper before Max Brods eyes. Kafka had shown it to him before, in 1921, and told him of the mandate it contained, whereupon Brod vehemently refused ever to carry it out.

However, yet another will came to light when Kafkas desk was searched. Jotted down in pencil, it was again undated, but internal evidence proves that, contrary to Brods assumption, it was produced later than the instruction written in ink (which Brod believes he saw as early as 1921), for it refers explicitly to stories that in 1921 did not yet exist. This testamentmost probably from 1922was not quite as destructive as the first. It gave permission, even if unenthusiastically, to withhold certain manuscripts from the auto-da-f: six stories that, in any case, nobody had the power to prevent from becoming known, for five were already published, and the sixth had only just been sent to the publisher by the author himself. This list of mercy consisted of The Judgment, The Stoker (the first chapter of the novel Amerika), The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, A Country Doctor, and A Hunger Artist. Again, no pardon was given to the fragmentary novels, letters, and diaries; and even with regard to the listed works, their author did not wish anybody to take much trouble for them to be handed down to posterity; on the contrary, should they disappear altogether, that would please me best. Only, since they do exist, I do not wish to hinder anyone who may want to, from keeping them. It is strange that, not long after he had written this, he himself felt so inclined: Kafkas last literary activity consisted in reading the proofs of the volume