“Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday -- for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don't want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that's why I don't want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you? ”
—Franz Kafka, letter to Felice Bauer.
Damn.
“Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday—for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”
—Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer
“I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”
—Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer
Listen
A Letter From Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, read by RM.
Franz Kafka sent many love letters to Felice Bauer (1887-1960), with whom he was engaged to be married several times (he met her in 1912, and he sometimes sent her several letters a day—all to her place of employment, Carl Lindstrom Parlograph Company). The relationship finally ended when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917.
Here is one of those letters.
“I could reckon some explanations to defend my lifestyle (excluding that I, ever since I have lived this way, have been by far healthier than before), but You wouldn't approve of any of them, particularly since I with insufficient sleeping have voided all that may be healthy in it a long time ago (I certainly do not smoke at all, I do not drink alcohol, not coffee, not tea, I on the whole don’t even eat chocolate). Dearest miss Felice, still do not abandon me for that, do not try to cure me of these matters either, but suffer me kindly behind this long distance.”
—Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, June 6th 1912“Dearest, I am getting very depressed about myself. Had I strung together the hours spent in writing to you and used them for a trip to Berlin, I should have been with you long ago, and could be looking into your eyes. And here I am, writing pages of absurdities as though life went on forever and ever and not a moment less.”
—Franz Kafka in a letter to Felice Bauer“Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday -- for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you....”
—Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, 1912
A Letter From Franz Kafka, to Felice Bauer, read by RM
A Letter From Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, read by RM.
Franz Kafka sent many love letters to Felice Bauer (1887-1960), with whom he was engaged to be married several times (he met her in 1912, and he sometimes sent her several letters a day—all to her place of employment, Carl Lindstrom Parlograph Company). The relationship finally ended when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917.
Here is one of those letters.
Franz Kafka's love letter to Felice Bauer (1912)
11 November, 1912
Fräulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you? Oh, there is a sad, sad reason for not doing so. To make it short: My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked.
If only I had your answer now! And how horribly I torment you, and how I compel you, in the stillness of your room, to read this letter, as nasty a letter as has ever lain on your desk! Honestly, it strikes me sometimes that I prey like a spectre on your felicitous name! If only I had mailed Saturday’s letter, in which I implored you never to write to me again, and in which I gave a similar promise. Oh God, what prevented me from sending that letter? All would be well. But is a peaceful solution possible now? Would it help if we wrote to each other only once a week? No, if my suffering could be cured by such means it would not be serious. And already I foresee that I shan’t be able to endure even the Sunday letters. And so, to compensate for Saturday’s lost opportunity, I ask you with what energy remains to me at the end of this letter: If we value our lives, let us abandon it all.
Did I think of signing myself Dein? No, nothing could be more false. No, I am forever fettered to myself, that’s what I am, and that’s what I must try to live with.
Franz
(Kafka and Bauer first met in 1912. For the next five years they pursued a “tempestuous and ultimately unfulfilled love affair.”)
Fräulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday—for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?…
A Letter From Franz Kafka, to Felice Bauer, read by RM
A Letter From Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, read by RM.
“In June of 1914 Kafka and Felice were engaged to be married. The Bauer family held a reception in Berlin to mark the happy event. On his return to Prague Kafka wrote in his diary: "Was tied hand and foot like a criminal. Had they sat me down in a corner bound in real chains, placed policemen in front of me, and let me look on simply like that, it could not have been worse." But he was wrong – worse was to come. In July, Felice's friend Grete Bloch, with whom Kafka was at least infatuated, warned Felice that her fiancé was getting cold feet. Kafka was summoned to the Askanische Hof hotel in Berlin, where he was confronted by Felice and her sister Erna, Bloch, and, as unconvinced defence lawyer, Kafka's friend Ernst Weiss, who had been against the engagement from the start. Throughout this "tribunal" (Gerichtshof), as he described it, Kafka spoke not a single word. The engagement was off. In his diary Kafka is studiedly cool, even nonchalant. "The next day didn't visit her parents again. Merely sent a messenger with a letter of farewell.”
—Rereading: John Banville on Kafka’s other trial | Books | The Guardian
I need to get my hands on a good Kafka biography.
Love Letter From Kafka.
In the likelihood that you no longer have even the remotest recollection of me, I am introducing myself once more: my name is Franz Kafka, and I am the person who greeted you for the first time that evening at Director Brod’s in Prague, the one who subsequently handed you across the table, one by one, photographs of a Thalia trip, and who finally, with the very hand now striking the keys, held your hand, the one which confirmed a promise to accompany him next year to Palestine.
An excerpt from Franz Kafka’s love letter to Felice Bauer, the woman he unsuccessfully courted all his life. The beauty of the letter, I feel, lies in the humility, the near-absence of a proprietorial ego.
