Letters to Milena

by Franz Kafka

“The easy possibility of writing letters,” wrote Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská, “…must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters, where one letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness.” Kafka’s own ghost, or ghosts, still haunt his Letters to Milena.

Franz and Milena’s relationship reflected the contradictions of Kafka’s Prague—Jew/Gentile, German/Czech—although between them these differences accounted for more concord than conflict, perhaps because both enjoyed “foreignness for its own sake.” As the letters prove, however, their bond ran much deeper than mere affinity—so deep, in fact, that Kafka gave Milena all his diaries but the one he was still writing. And in that last notebook he wrote: “Always M. or not M.—but a principle, a light in the darkness!”

Milena Jesenská’s profession amplifies her uniqueness: among the women in Kafka’s life she was the only writer. And although her letters were destroyed, we can still hear her voice, or at least its echoes, in passages quoted by Kafka, in letters she wrote to Max Brod, and in her own articles and essays, some of which appear here for the first time in English.

In his preface to the first edition of these letters, Willy Haas described Milena in her youth: She herself sometimes struck one as like a noblewoman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a character such as Stendhal lifted out of the old Italian chronicles and transplanted into his own novels, the Duchesse de Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole: passionate, intrepid, cool and intelligent in their decisions, but reckless in her choice of means when her passion was involved—and during her youth it seems to have been involved almost all the time. As a friend she was inexhaustible, inexhaustible in kindness, inexhaustible in resources whose origin often remained enigmatic, but also inexhaustible in the claims she made on her friends—claims which, to her as well as to her friends, seemed only natural.

She joined the staff of the liberal-democratic journal Přitomnost (Presence), where in articles such as “There Will Be No Anschluss,” she addressed the growing menace from Nazi Germany. She worked on refugee relief committees, and when Prague was occupied, she helped many Jews, including Klinger, escape to Poland. After the Nazis shut down Přitomnost, she continued writing for the underground press until her arrest in November 1939. She was sent to a camp for people who had consorted with Jews and ultimately transported to Ravensbrück. Her biographer (and fellow inmate in Ravensbrück), Margarete Buber-Neumann, describes in detail Milena’s resilience in the concentration camp, her inner strength, which was an inspiration to fellow prisoners, her constant concern for her daughter (then in Jan Jesenský’s care), and her active resistance despite failing health. On May 17, 1944, after an unsuccessful kidney operation, Milena Jesenská died in Ravensbrück.

Following a diagnosis of tuberculosis in 1917, he had curtailed his duties at the insurance company. He often went away on cure, and in the spring of 1920 he traveled to Meran, where he wrote the first letters to Milena that have survived. What began as a business correspondence soon started to consume his sleep, as he noted in a letter to Max Brod from May 1920: My health would be good, if I could sleep. It’s true I’ve gained some weight, but recently my insomnia has been almost unbearable. This probably has several reasons, one of which may be my correspondence with Vienna. She is a living fire, such as I have never seen; incidentally, a fire that, despite everything, burns only for him. At the same time she is extremely tender, brave, intelligent, and sacrifices everything, or if you prefer, acquires everything by sacrifice. “Him,” of course, refers to Ernst Pollak. Kafka admired Milena’s husband—not least for his success with women—but his admiration was mingled with an awareness of Milena’s suffering, as well as with his own feelings of guilt.

As happiness receded into dreams, the passion ended where it began: in sleeplessness. The lovers never really recovered the four days spent in Vienna; these letters were their only progeny. And the ghosts consumed any consolation.

I wrote you a note from Prague and then from Meran. I have not received any answer. It so happens the notes did not require a particularly prompt reply and if your silence is nothing more than a sign of relative well-being, which often expresses itself in an aversion to writing, then I am completely satisfied.

So I’m expecting one of two things. Either continued silence, which means: “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” Or else a few lines.

It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.

I did not write any novella entitled “Murderers” (although this was apparently advertised in a catalog)—there is some misunderstanding, but since it’s supposed to be the best one of the lot maybe it’s mine after all.

Of course I understand Czech. I’ve meant to ask you several times already why you never write in Czech. Not to imply that your command of German leaves anything to be desired. Most of the time it is amazing and on those occasions when it does falter, the German language becomes pliant just for you, of its own accord, and then it is particularly beautiful, something a German doesn’t even dare hope for; a German wouldn’t dare write so personally. But I wanted to read you in Czech because, after all, you do belong to that language, because only there can Milena be found in her entirety

On the other hand I am happy to be able to make a small offering with the few notes you requested on “The Stoker”; this will serve as a foretaste to that torment of hell which consists in having to review one’s entire life with the knowledge that comes of hindsight, where the worst thing is not the confrontation with obvious misdeeds but with deeds one once considered worthy.

You don’t want to send me your feuilletons, so you obviously don’t trust me to place them properly in the picture I am forming of you. All right then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there’s a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart.

Dear Frau Milena, the day is so short, between you and a few other things which are of no significance it is over and done with. There’s hardly any time left to write to the real Milena, since the even more real one was here the whole day, in the room, on the balcony, in the clouds.

What do you think? Can I still get a letter by Sunday? It should be possible. But this passion for letters is senseless. Isn’t one letter enough, isn’t one knowing enough? Of course it is, but nevertheless I am tilting my head way back, drinking the letters, aware only that I don’t want to stop drinking. Explain that, teacher Milena!

Don’t you know that fat people alone are to be trusted? Only in strong-walled vessels like these does everything get thoroughly cooked, only these capitalists of airspace are immune from worry and insanity, to the extent it is humanly possible, and only they can go calmly about their business and, as someone once said, they are the only useful citizens of this planet, for they provide warmth in the north and shade in the south.

Your two letters arrived together, at noon; they aren’t there to be read, but to be unfolded, to rest one’s face on while losing one’s mind. But now it turns out to be a good thing that it is partly lost, for then the rest will hold out as long as possible.

I am on such a dangerous road, Milena. You are standing fast by a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes are subduing the sorrows of the world with their brightness. We’re playing škatule škatule hejbejte se,*3 I’m creeping in the shade from one tree to the next, I’m halfway there, you call to me, pointing out the dangers, wanting to encourage me, you’re scared by my faltering step, you remind me (me!) how serious the game is—I can’t make it, I fall down, already prostrate. I can’t listen both to the terrible inner voices and to you simultaneously, but I can listen to what the voices are saying and confide this in you, trusting you like no other person in the world.