Letters to Felice

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News of Bauer's marriage reached Kafka through his correspondence with a second lover, Milena, whose letters to Kafka have also been lost to history. An emaciated figure

Though his family cannot understand his voice, Gregor can hear all of their conversations. He learns that they have some money left in what they had saved after Mr. Samsa’s business went bankrupt. However, they do not want to dig into those funds yet, and they wouldn’t last very long. This revelation causes Gregor to feel guilty and ashamed, particularly at the idea that his mother and sister may have to find work. Sin darse cuenta al principio no nota que hay una dama sentada allí. Viene de Berlín y se llama Felice Bauer. Se produce así el primer encuentro entre Franz y una mujer que lo llevará hasta los rincones más recónditos del amor. Milena was an aspiring journalist at twenty-three when she reached out to Kafka, a thirty-seven-year-old writer who was primarily unknown, asking for permission to translate his short story, the Stoker. She would become the first translator of several of Kafka's short stories into Czech, including The Judgment, Metamorphosis, and Contemplation. Franz Kafka  met  Felice Bauer  in August 1912, at the home of his friend Max Brod. Energetic, down-to-earth, and life-affirming, the twenty-five-year-old secretary was everything Kafka was not, and he was instantly smitten. Because he was living in Prague and she in Berlin, his courtship was largely an epistolary one - passionate, self-deprecating, and anxious letters sent almost daily, sometimes even two or three times a day. But soon after their engagement was announced in 1914, Kafka began to worry that marriage would interfere with his writing and his need for solitude. In one of Kafka's letters to Milena, he vividly depicted himself as an emaciated man adrift on a boat, donning a swimsuit, and floating downstream. Observed from a bridge, his bony, motionless figure resembled that of the dead prior to the unveiling of coffins on Judgment Day.

On December 11, 1912, Kafka's debut book, Meditation, was published. He sent it to Bauer with a plea: "Please be kind to my poor book! Show the book to as few people as possible." The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice - through their breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final parting in the fall of that year, when Kafka began to feel the effects of tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life -  reveal the full measure of his inner turmoil as he tried, in vain, to balance his desire for human connection with what he felt were the solitary demands of his craft.

Tal vez, ambos fueron arrastrados bajo el influjo de esa famosa frase de Franz que dice "A partir de determinado punto no hay retorno. Ese es el punto que hay que alcanzar." He was possessed by his need to purge his creative ideas and thoughts. He dedicated ten uninterrupted hours to completing his short story The Judgment during that period. Within two weeks, he set aside four chapters from his novel Amerika to pen his novella The Metamorphosis, while marking remarkable progress on another work, Diaries. I was also fond of his relationship with his youngest and favorite sister (he had three), Ottilie (who, sadly, was later murdered in the Holocaust). He would be the sweetest brother. Es el 13 de agosto 1912 y Franz Kafka asiste a una velada íntima en la casa de su amigo y albacea Max Brod.

Unrequited infatuation

Kafka ορισμένες φορές έχανε τον έλεγχο των συναισθημάτων του, στην προκειμένη περίπτωση είναι η επιτηδευμένη σοβαροφάνεια του εργασιακού του περιβάλλοντος αυτή που πυροδοτεί την έκρηξή του: He's also somewhat less depressive than you'd guess from some of his writing. You could, on its face, easily interpret his writing as that of a highly depressed, maybe even suicidal man, but the reality, as revealed by these letters, is that he wrote such grim stories with a kind of excited zeal (he enthusiastically refers to his Metamorphosis as "this exceptionally repulsive story"). He's more Addams Family than Sylvia Plath. After Gregor sleeps for several hours, his sister, Grete, tries to bring him one of his favorite foods. He finds he no longer has an appetite for foods he once loved; he is more attracted to rotting food. Grete carefully handles any dishes she brings to or takes from Gregor’s room. Kafka and Bauer forged an unusual connection, between Prague and Berlin, bridging the gap between his physical frailty and Bauer's robust vitality.