Kafka in Love

by Jacqueline Raoul-Duval

  28 Of the three residences, it is the only one that survives. A plaque between the two windows on the ground floor commemorates the fact that Kafka lived there for three months.

  29 Dr. Robert Klopstock emigrated to the United States, where he became a distinguished professor of medicine, a lung specialist. He died in New York City in 1972.

  30 The dedication reads: “To Franz Kafka, venerated poet and friend, with all my wishes for a prompt recovery, Werfel.”

  31 Thanks to Max Brod, Dora received Kafka’s German-language royalties as though she were his wife.

  32 Robert kept Kafka’s “conversation slips.” The ones addressed to him use the formal mode of address. Only a portion of them have been published.

  The Last Day: June 3, 1924

  A noise? A silence? Something must have awakened her. Leaning toward him, she listens to him breathe. Are his breaths too short? Irregular? She is afraid to turn on the light, he sleeps so shallowly. He went to sleep around midnight, relaxed, calm. Despite the pressure from Robert—“Go get some sleep, you need it, you’ll be exhausted”—she has once again spent the night in his room. Chained to the bedside of a skeleton. The hands resting on the red quilt are no more than talons, and the bones show through the skin of the mummy’s face.

  She is afraid of dozing off. She goes out on the veranda, whose door is always slightly ajar. The night is warm. Scents rise from the surrounding gardens. A breath of air occasionally comes to her from the fields. She has looked out at this swath of countryside so many times that she can almost see it in the darkness, the cluster of tamaracks here, the houses and the steeple there, the sandy track. Her senses sharpened, she goes back inside to sit at the head of the bed.

  Toward four a.m., a shrill whistle pierces her. She leaps to the telephone. Robert comes running. He immediately awakens the doctor on duty.

  Two years before, Kafka had written in his Diaries: “There is without question something agreeable in being able to write calmly: Suffocation is a thing of inconceivable horror.”

  The inconceivable horror, suffocation, is happening. Air is no longer entering his lungs, despite the pneumothorax. Stretched rigid on the bed, from which he has violently thrown back the covers, his mouth wide open, no cry emerging from it, no sound, his eyes wild, bulging, Kafka begs for a breath of air, his emaciated arms extended toward the doctor. Dora, her hands pressed to her mouth, moans as though from stomach cramps. She steps forward, falls at the foot of the bed, faints.

  A little before noon, Robert asks her to post an express letter to Franz’s parents. She limply refuses: “I don’t want to leave him.”

  Robert insists. Tired of arguing, tired of hoping for a miracle, she obeys. A relief. She can’t bear to be a helpless witness to this martyrdom, she can’t bear to see this horribly emaciated body. The only part of him still living is his eyes. Eyes that implore her to put an end to his suffering.

  Robert Klopstock is the only witness to this inconceivable horror. Suffocation. He sees his friend, with a brusque gesture, ask the nurse to leave the room. He sees him rip out his breathing tube and throw it against the wall with surprising force.

  He sees him suffocate, he sees the throat distend, offer itself to be sacrificed. He hears his friend pant, he hears him say: “You have always promised me that you would. You are torturing me, you have always tortured me, and you continue to! I will die all the same!”

  Robert feels his legs go weak. He tells himself, I am twenty-five years old, I am a doctor, how can I kill the man that I admire most in all the world? That I love like a father, a teacher who has given me, taught me so much? But can I just allow the excruciating pain of his death agony to go on indefinitely?”

  He prepares a syringe.

  “More, more, isn’t it obvious that your dosages have no effect?”

  Robert doesn’t answer, he is silently crying. Suddenly he hears Franz cry out: “Kill me, or else you’re a murderer!”

  Now he is hallucinating. He calls to his sister: “Elli, don’t come so close. There, yes, that’s better.”

  Robert doesn’t turn away. He sees the face relax, the body grow calm, slide into the silence of the shadows.

  Dora comes back from the post office with a bunch of flowers. She leans toward her fiancé’s face, kisses him on the cheek.

  “Do you want to smell the roses, my Franz, their delicious scent?”

  She thinks she hears him breathe. She thinks she sees the left eye open. She gently hugs the man she loved so much.

  She no longer hears his heart beat.

  Franz Kafka has escaped.

  Franz Kafka was buried at Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery on June 11, 1924, at four o’clock in the afternoon. The day was cold, the sky was growing dark as a procession of about a hundred people gathered around the grave, the women in black veils, the men in top hats. While the rabbis intoned the kaddish and the coffin was lowered, Dora cried out, slipping from Max’s supporting grip, and fainted.

  Hermann Kafka disliked displays of this sort. He turned away from Dora lying on the ground and walked to the edge of the grave. He was the first to throw a handful of powdery, pebble-filled soil onto his son’s casket. He avoided looking at his daughter Ottla, stiff, silent, her eyes as blank as a ghost’s.

  Max Brod claimed that on the way back, as he was passing the town hall, he had noticed that the clock had stopped: the hands pointed to four o’clock exactly.

  Eight days later at 11:00 in the morning on June 19, 1924, at a memorial service held in a small theater and attended by more than five hundred people, Max Brod and a number of other writers spoke and offered eulogies.

  An actor, Hans Hemuth Koch, read two of Kafka’s texts. The first, “A Dream,” begins: “Joseph K. was dreaming. It was a beautiful day, and he was going for a walk. But hardly had he set out when he found himself in the cemetery.”

  The second, “An Old Parchment,” ends with these words: “Workers and peasants! The safety of the nation lies in our hands. But the task is beyond our powers. We have in fact never claimed to be capable of such a task. It is a misunderstanding, and it is causing our death.”

  After 1924

  HERMANN AND JULIE KAFKA

  Hermann Kafka died in 1931, and his wife, Julie, in 1934. Both lie buried beside their son. The names of all three and some verses in Hebrew are carved on the modest obelisk marking their grave.

  ELLI, VALLI, AND OTTLA

  Elli, her husband, Karl Hermann, and their three children, Felix, Gerti, and Hanne; and Valli, her husband, Josef Pollak, and their daughter Lotte were all deported to Lodz in Poland, where they were killed in 1944 during the liquidation of the ghetto.

  Ottla convinced her husband, Joseph David, who was classified as an Aryan, to divorce her in order to save their two daughters, Vera and Helen Davidova. Shortly after, Ottla registered herself as a Jew. In August 1942 she was arrested and sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp near Prague. The following year, she volunteered to escort a convoy of 1,260 orphans that she understood was traveling to Denmark. On arriving at Auschwitz on October 7, they were all sent directly to the gas chambers. Ottla Kafka’s name is the sixth on the list of that day’s victims.

  A plaque resting against the headstone of the family grave commemorates Elli, Valli, and Ottla, all three of whom died at the hands of the Nazis.

  Of Kafka’s seven nieces and nephews, only three survived: Vera, Helen, and Marianne.

  Marianne, Valli’s eldest daughter, married a man named George Steiner and fled to London. By an extraordinary coincidence, Marianne encountered Dora in a London real estate office and recognized her. Learning that Dora was in terrible financial straits, Marianne offered her the English-language royalties of her uncle’s works.

  FELICE BAUER

  In 1931 the German parliament seated 107 members of the Nazi Party, and Felice fled Berlin for Switzerland with her husband and two children. In her suitcase she packed the hundreds of letters and telegrams Franz had sent her. F
ew are missing. The letters are so numerous that they might fill a suitcase all to themselves. Does she, in Geneva, reread a few of them on nostalgic evenings? Or does she tell herself that the past is past, leave it be?

  By 1936, the position of Jews in Europe seemed so precarious that Felice emigrated to the United States. Before embarking, she rented a safe-deposit box for her papers. As a businesswoman, she could not fail to know that they constituted a valuable property. She hadn’t forgotten that Max Brod saved the smallest scrap written by Franz as a relic. To her own letters she added those given to her by Grete Bloch on her way through Geneva.

  The letters lay undisturbed in the safe-deposit box for nearly twenty years. In 1955, Felice sold the rights to Schocken Books of New York. They would be published only in 1967, seven years after her death and forty-three after Kafka’s. Like all German Jews, Felice knew the publisher Salman Schocken, a wealthy philanthropist who had created the publishing house Schocken Verlag in Berlin. When Hitler passed a decree in 1933 that Jewish writers could be published only by Jewish publishers, Max Brod immediately contacted Salman Schocken to persuade him to buy the rights to Kafka’s books from the non-Jewish publishers who were no longer allowed to sell them. As an inducement, Max offered him global rights to Kafka’s published works, as well as to any posthumous works. Felice therefore had no choice but to turn to Schocken.

  A brief word about this unusual man. Expelled by Hitler, Salman Schocken emigrated first to Palestine, where he founded a new publishing company and bought the newspaper Ha’aretz. In 1940 he moved to the United States, a country better suited to his ambitions, and left Schocken House in the hands of his son, Gustav. Strong in his faith, Salman created Schocken Books as soon as he arrived in New York. His first collaborator was Hannah Arendt, a German immigrant.33

  Bought in 1980 by Random House, Schocken Books is today a division of Bertelsmann, a German consortium!

  It was most likely to Erich Heller and Jürgen Born, who edited the book, that Felice offered her letters and those of Grete’s in her possession. The scene can be imagined: an elderly but still sprightly lady introduces herself to the two men and unpacks before their astonished, their dazzled, their incredulous eyes the confessions and most intimate secrets of the author of “The Metamorphosis.” We can guess the emotions that coursed through them, the feverish nights they spent deciphering the letters, putting them in order. Day after day, they witnessed his descent into hell, his torments, his devouring passion. Writing to have the right to live.

  By 1955, Kafka had been translated into almost every language and honored in almost every nation. They could guess the extreme interest this discovery would arouse. Did they consult Max Brod in Tel Aviv, who still had his friend’s manuscripts and letters?

  Where are the letters that Felice wrote to Franz a century ago? Were they burned? By Franz, as he suggests in a letter to Robert Klopstock? Might there be a few of them in Israel in the files of Max Brod?

  GRETE BLOCH

  She had neither Felice’s foresight nor her luck. Against the advice of her friends, she fled to Italy, where she was arrested and most likely deported. She had entrusted the second half of her letters from Kafka to an attorney in Florence. At the end of the war, this attorney gave them to Max Brod, who sent them to Schocken Books in New York. The entire batch, some seventy letters in all, was then published. None of those that Grete sent to Franz has survived—the letters he refused to give back.

  JULIE WOHRYZEK

  Of the letters that Franz Kafka sent to Julie, probably quite small in number, none are known to exist. And nothing is known of Julie in the years that followed her engagement to Franz, beyond her death in a psychiatric institution.

  MILENA JESENSKÁ

  In 1924, the year of Kafka’s death, Milena obtained a divorce from her husband and took up with an Austrian count, a Communist. In 1927 she married a talented architect, Jaromir Krejcar, with whom she had a daughter, Honza. After contracting septicemia during her pregnancy, Milena suffered such unbearable pain that she turned to morphine for relief and had difficulty weaning herself from it.

  In 1936, separated from her husband, she devoted herself to politics. A Communist, she was excluded from the party for having denounced the Stalinist purges. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Milena—though a non-Jew—wore the yellow star in the streets of Prague. Was it her relationship with Kafka that she was acknowledging publicly with this yellow star sewn to her collar?

  Active in the Resistance, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to Ravensbrück, where she died on May 17, 1944. At this concentration camp, she told the story of her life and loves to Margarete Buber-Neumann, who, once freed, wrote a biography of the liberated and radiant woman she so admired, Milena. The name is forever linked to Kafka’s.

  The Letters to Milena were the first to be published, well before the Letters to Felice. Milena had put them in the hands of the editor Willy Haas, the husband of her close friend, Jarmila. The incomplete 1951 edition was corrected in 1981. The definitive edition appeared in 1983.

  When Kafka died, Milena wrote an obituary published in the Prague newspaper Narodni listy:

  The day before yesterday, June 3, 1924, Dr. Franz Kafka, a German writer from Prague, died at the Kierling sanatorium near Vienna. Few people here knew him because, fearful of the world, he kept to his own path. His illness gave him an almost miraculous sensitivity and an intellectual refinement that allowed no compromises, however terrifying the consequences. He was shy, anxious, gentle, and kind, but his books—the most important in all of young German literature—were cruel and painful. He saw the world as filled with invisible demons that destroy a defenseless man. He was too lucid and too wise to live, too weak to fight. He was of those who know that they are powerless, who submit, and in so doing cover the victor with shame. His books, filled with dry-eyed irony, describe the horror of being misunderstood, of innocent blame. He was an artist who kept his hearing, when the deaf thought they were safe.

  DORA DIAMANT OR DYMANT

  Her life reflects the historical upheavals of her time and, more specifically, the trials of Communists and Jewish Communists, who were victims of Hitler’s and Stalin’s persecutions.

  After a short stay in Poland, Dora returned to Berlin, where she studied theater. In 1929 she joined the Communist Party and met a Marxist economist, Lutz Lask, whom she married in 1932. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Marianne, Lask was arrested by the Gestapo. He escaped and fled to Moscow, where Dora and Marianne joined him. He was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag, returning twenty years later a broken man, almost blind, but still a Marxist! He owed his release to the extraordinary tenacity of his mother, who for over twenty years wrote petitions to every department of Soviet authority and to the president of East Germany.

  Separated from her husband, whom she was never to see again, Dora lived first in Sebastopol, then in Yalta. In 1938 she managed to cross into Switzerland with her daughter and then to reach The Hague and finally England. Classified as an enemy alien, she was detained on the Isle of Man. She was freed in 1942 and moved to London, where she worked as a seamstress, a cook, and a theater critic.

  At the invitation of the Tel Aviv city council, Dora traveled to Israel in 1950. She stayed there for four months, thanks to Kafka’s English royalties. She renewed her acquaintance with Max Brod, once again regretting that, despite his insistent entreaties, she had not given him the trove of Franz’s manuscripts and letters. She had obstinately refused, faithful to the promise she had made her fiancé to burn his writings.

  In Israel she discovered that the new immigrants, having escaped from hell, read Kafka differently from Europeans. They found comfort in his writings, took courage from his work, which they understood immediately and unreservedly. Dora spent several weeks at the Kibbutz En Sharod, where she inquired into the rules and ideals of the pioneers. She told them about Kafka and the dream that haunted him of an ideal community, whose laws he had set down
as a jurist and an ascetic in a very brief text, “The Community of Non-owning Workers.” It was written in 1919, though at whose request is unknown. Women are excluded from this community, its members are forbidden to possess or accept money, and each must earn his keep solely by his work. Lawyers are barred from membership.

  On the trip home, she stopped in Paris, where she met the French actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault. He was directing a production of The Trial in an adaptation by André Gide. At that time she also met Marthe Robert, who was engaged in translating Kafka’s Diaries into French. A lively friendship developed between the two women. Marthe Robert traveled to London several times to hear Dora talk about Kafka.

  Haunted by her memories, Dora transcribed them as they flooded back to her. These were gathered as Notes inédites de Dora Dymant sur Kafka and published in France in 1952 by Éditions Évidences.

  Dora died at the age of fifty-three in total poverty. She was buried in London on August 15, 1952, and Marthe Robert was one of the few people present. Today, her headstone carries these words of Robert Klopstock’s: “Who knows Dora, knows what love means.”

  The thirty-five letters from Franz, her “treasure,” along with twenty notebooks and a large stack of loose pages, were confiscated from her by the Gestapo during a search of her apartment. Dora never forgave herself for not saving these materials by entrusting them to Max.

  To this day, no portion of these texts has resurfaced, despite extensive research.

  What remains are Dora’s letters to Max Brod and to Marthe Robert. But none of those written to Franz.

  ERNST WEISS

  A surgeon and a talented writer, Weiss emigrated to France in early 1933. On the day Hitler entered Paris, he shot himself in the head.