Letters to Felice by Franz Kafka

First published:Briefe an Felice, 1967 (English translation, 1974)

Type of work: Letters

Time of work: 1912-1917

Locale: Berlin and Prague

Principal Personages:

• Franz Kafka, one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century
• Felice Bauer, his lover between 1912 and 1917

Form and Content

Letters to Felice consists of a voluminous correspondence produced by Franz Kafka, one of the most prominent authors of the twentieth century. It consists of more than five hundred letters written by Kafka to a woman named Felice Bauer during the period from 1912 to 1917. He later destroyed her correspondence to him, but she saved his letters and sold them in 1955 to the New York publisher Zalman Schocken.

In order to understand the significance of these personal documents, some explanation is in order concerning the relationship between Kafka and Felice Bauer. Kafka met Felice for the first time on August 13, 1912, in Prague, at the home of his best friend, Max Brod. She was then twenty-four years old. She had been born in Silesia and reared in Berlin, the daughter of an insurance agent, Carl Bauer. His first letter to her was dated September 20, 1912. Thus began a strange and often-strained relationship that lasted until December, 1917, when Kafka terminated his marriage engagement to her for the second and last time.

Kafka’s initial impression of her at the Brod home was somewhat negative; he later wrote in his diary that she appeared to him rather average-looking and somewhat like a housemaid. This latter observation is revealing, since it was undoubtedly Felice’s air of bourgeois domesticity that prompted Kafka, despite his distinct misgivings about her, to initiate the correspondence. This apparent contradiction— and his ambivalence toward the idea of matrimony—is crucial to understanding the spirit of Kafka’s letters to Felice and to decoding his often-enigmatic stories.

At the time Kafka first met Felice, he was a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor from an upstanding family of Prague Jews. He lived at home with his parents. In this bourgeois environment, Kafka felt a definite pressure to wed and begin a family of his own. That was the duty of every good middle-class Jewish son. Even the God Jehovah in the Old Testament had advised the Hebrew tribes “to go forth, be fruitful, and multiply.” This conventional life plan posed problems for Kafka for two reasons. Since childhood, his relationship with his father, Hermann, had been a strained one. Hermann Kafka, a brusque and crude man, had greatly intimidated his sensitive son, and the latter suffered from a lifelong inferiority complex. It is clear from Kafka’s letters and diaries that he felt that he could not assume the role of father and husband, that he was ultimately incapable of displacing, in a figurative sense, the position of his father. Psychologically, Kafka felt himself to be condemned to the lifelong role of subservient son.

Marriage to Felice Bauer was problematic for a second reason. Kafka was also intensely dedicated to his art. He claimed that the narrative depiction of his dreamlike inner life was the sole justification for his being, that no other existence was possible for him. For Kafka, the price of such dedication to the spiritual domain of writing was a solitary, almost clerical life-style. The demands of a wife and family would have left him neither time nor energy for writing. Because of his apparent psychological handicap with respect to his father and his commitment to his art, Kafka was in an awkward position: Should he live the bourgeois life of a husband-father or the spiritual life of a writer? In truth, he could not have fulfilled the role of bourgeois family man. He was compelled to write. Thus, his relationship with Felice was doomed before it even began.

The result of such an inner contradiction was a debilitating state of chronic ambivalence. Kafka felt obligated to begin a correspondence with a woman for whom he had little romantic feeling. Letters to Felice reflects this ambivalence in several ways. He was clearly sending Felice rather mixed messages. The fact that he began corresponding with her and that he eventually proposed marriage indicated to her that he was genuinely interested in a serious relationship. The letters, however, are filled with references to his obsession with the solitary act of writing and to his unsuitability for marriage.

Kafka wanted his communication with Felice to be one of words, for the prospect of true physical intimacy was frightening to him. He became engaged to her in April of 1914 but ended the engagement in July of that same year. They were engaged for the second time in July of 1916, but Kafka again terminated the engagement in December of 1917. Felice Bauer was married to a Berlin banker in 1919 and fled to the United States in 1936. She died in 1960. Kafka was never married and died of a tubercular infection in 1924.

Critical Context

Kafka’s letters to Felice are important in several ways. First, they are interesting to the reader as a documentation of one of the more complex and tormented romantic relationships of this century. The vicissitudes of the relationship between Kafka and Felice present a painful and compelling story.

The correspondence is more important, however, as an adjunct to Kafka’s fiction, in that it documents the kinds of psychological pressures he was experiencing while he composed some of his greatest works. In certain respects, the letters themselves could be considered great literature. A brief critical discussion of The Judgment will reveal the ways in which the letters to Felice relate to the larger context of Kafka’s literary works. The Judgment is dedicated to Felice Bauer and reveals in fictional guise the conscious and unconscious emotions that that relationship unleashed in the author. The story represents a kind of fictional commentary on the letters themselves.

The Judgment is the story of Georg Bendemann, a young man who has recently become engaged to a woman named Frieda Brandenfeld. His mother is deceased, and he has taken over the family business from his infirm father, who lives in one of the apartment’s back rooms. His life seems to be going in a positive direction, and at the beginning of the text he is writing a letter to an old friend who lives, alone and without friends, in Russia. His friend’s life there has been rather dismal, and Georg has been reluctant to tell him of his good fortune. His fiancee, Frieda, does not approve of his friend and has told Georg that he should not have become engaged if he wishes to have such friends. He finishes the letter and goes to see his father.

When Georg attempts to put the sickly old man to bed, the father is suddenly healthy and strong and begins to denounce his now-cowering son for being a deceitful and devilish human being. The father claims that he has been in secret communication with Georg’s friend for years and that they are united in their rejection of Georg’s deceit and hypocrisy. The father then condemns Georg to death, and Georg rushes out and throws himself in the river.

Kafka wrote the story in one sitting, with, as he later noted in his diary, ecstatic feelings of release and creative abandon. This dreamlike story was clearly an emotional catharsis as well as an artistic breakthrough. Although as enigmatic as a dream, The Judgment reveals its symbolic meaning when interpreted psychoanalytically in the context of Kafka’s relationship with Felice.

The initials of Frieda Brandenfeld refer to Felice Bauer. The key to the text, however, is the intimate connection between Georg and his friend in Russia. They are both projections of Kafka’s divided self, a structural pattern that occurs in much of Kafka’s fiction and his letters. The friend represents the author’s true ascetic and artistic self, committed to a creative life of monklike solitude and introspection. Georg is that side of Kafka that the world—his family and Felice—expected of him, a successful bourgeois man about to be married and ready to rear his own family. That was the aspect of himself that Kafka believed was false, an elaborate facade presented to others. That he considered this part to be false is suggested by the fact that the father has been in secret communication with the true self and that they both condemn Georg for his deceit. Frieda even implies an insight into his hypocrisy when she says that Georg should not have such friends if he intends to wed. The two selves are clearly incompatible.

What is astonishing here is that Kafka clearly realized (on some level)—two days after his first letter to Felice—that his attempt to wed this woman would be doomed to failure, and it was. The judgment of the father in this story—that Georg is a deceitful individual—is in part an expression of the guilt that Kafka must have felt in initiating this correspondence with a woman he knew he could never marry.

The so-called biographical fallacy notwithstanding, it is clear that Kafka’s creative output was closely related to events in his personal life and that Letters to Felice is an indispensable resource for any serious student of Kafka. Any readings of the fiction from this period would lose a meaningful dimension of interpretation without consideration of these letters.

Bibliography

Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography, 1937.

Canetti, Elias. “Elias Canetti Talks to Idris Parry About the Work of Kafka,” in Listener. LXXXVI (1971), pp. 366-369.

Canetti, Elias. Kafka’s Other Trial: The Letters to Felice, 1974.

Dietz, Ludwig. “Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice and Other Correspondence from the Period of His Engagement,” in Literature, Music, Fine Arts. I (1968), pp. 27-28.

Emrich, Wilhelm. Franz Kafka: A Critical Study of His Writings, 1968.

Fischer, Wolfgang. “Kafka Without a World,” in The World of Franz Kafka, 1980. Edited by J. P. Stern.

Glatzer, Nahum N. The Loves of Franz Kafka, 1986.

Hayman, Ronald. “Felice,” in Kafka: A Biography, 1981.

Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, 1984.

Winckelmann, John. “Felice Bauer and The Trial,” in The Kafka Debate: New Perspectives of Our Time, 1977. Edited by Angel Flores.