Franz Kafka’s Anxious Letters to His Fiancée, Read Aloud by Richard Ayoade

It can’t have been easy being Franz Kaf­ka. But then, it can’t have been much eas­i­er being Franz Kafka’s fiancée, as evi­denced by the cor­re­spon­dence read aloud by Richard Ayoade in the new Let­ters Live video above. “It is now 10:30 on Mon­day morn­ing,” he wrote to Felice Bauer on Novem­ber 4, 1912. “I have been wait­ing for a let­ter since 10:30 on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, but again noth­ing has come. I have writ­ten every day but don’t I deserve even a word? One sin­gle word? Even if it were only to say ‘I nev­er want to hear from you again.’ ” This anx­ious, hec­tor­ing tone was not a one-off indul­gence. “Dear­est, what have I done that makes you tor­ment me so?” he plead­ed just over two weeks lat­er.

Kaf­ka and Bauer had been intro­duced three months before. She was a rel­a­tive of Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and even­tu­al lit­er­ary execu­tor, and accord­ing to Kafka’s diaries, made a fair­ly unpre­pos­sess­ing first impres­sion: “Bony, emp­ty face that wore its empti­ness open­ly. Bare throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domes­tic in her dress although, as it turned out, she by no means was.”

Yet dur­ing their ensu­ing five-year cor­re­spon­dence, he was moved to write her more than 500 let­ters, some of them sent one day after the oth­er — and more than a few berat­ing her for not writ­ing back quick­ly enough.

This rela­tion­ship twice led to engage­ment, but per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, nev­er cul­mi­nat­ed in mar­riage. Nev­er­the­less, Bauer’s rela­tion­ship with Kaf­ka remained impor­tant enough to her that she saved every­thing he wrote to her, which was col­lect­ed and pub­lished in book form as Briefe an Felice (and lat­er, in trans­la­tion, as Let­ters to Felice) in 1967. Per­haps, as bur­den­some as they could no doubt be, Kafka’s let­ters sug­gest­ed to Bauer a cer­tain lit­er­ary skill. (This was, after all, the same peri­od in which he wrote The Meta­mor­pho­sis and “In the Penal Colony,” as well as ear­ly ver­sions of The Tri­al). They also hint at his since-cel­e­brat­ed sense of humor, not least in a con­clud­ing line like “Damn the mail!” — words that, in Ayoad­e’s deliv­ery, draw a round of applause.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Franz Kaf­ka: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to His Lit­er­ary Genius

What Is Kafkaesque?: The Phi­los­o­phy of Franz Kaf­ka

Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb Cre­ates an Illus­trat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Franz Kafka’s Life and Work

David Fos­ter Wal­lace Reads Franz Kafka’s Short Sto­ry “A Lit­tle Fable” (and Explains Why Com­e­dy Is Key to Kaf­ka)

Behold the Draw­ings of Franz Kaf­ka (1907–1917)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.