"I was raised in the city, in the middle of the city." "I was raised in the city." "It's the city where I was born and I wonder slowly, haltingly though its narrow lanes." "My life is hesitation before birth." "Perhaps my youth was too short." "Time passes and one passes uselessly with it." "Amazement sometimes with the colourless, sensless clouds almost incessantly drifting past." "Where is eternal Spring?" "Who was Kafka?" "With the voice of Jimmy Shuman" "Franz went only to German schools and was raised in the German tradition;" "it wasn't until later, on his own initiative, that he learned the Czech language properly." "Throughout his life," "Franz lived in the shadow of his domineering father, who was also extremely imposing physically." "Hermann Kafka ran a wholesale business in fancy goods, which he sold to retailers in villages and provincial towns." "Franz was the eldest child." "He had three sisters." "Since his mother worked in the business all day to his father in the evening," "Franz's upbringing was left largely to governesses." "We can imagine that Franz's childhood must have been unspeakably lonely." "I met Franz Kafka in my first year of university, in 1902-3." "Franz was a year older than I was." "At first sight, he seemed perfectly healthy, though strangely silent, observant, restrained." "I was on good terms with Kafka for a number of years without knowing that he wrote." "He had to be pushed, virtually begged to let anyone see anything he'd written... not because he was proud, but because he was hypercritical of himself." "Then one day, in 1909, he read me the beginning of a novel called" ""Preparations for a Country Wedding"." "I was unsettled but thrilled." "I immediately sensed that this was no ordinary talent:" "This was genius speaking." "From there on my relationship with Kafka deepened." "We saw each other every day, sometimes even twice a day." "He radiated a strength unlike anything I've encountered since." "In his presence the everyday world was transformed." "As if one were seeing things for the first time, often in a very sad, almost shattering way." "At 10 o'clock last night I was walking down Zeltnerstrasse in my sad gate." "I felt better at the cemetary than in town and the feeling lasted." "For hours I roamed the city as if it were a cemetary." "I was raised in the city, in the middle of the city." "I was raised in the city" "It's the city where I was born, and I wonder slowly, haltingly though it's narrow lanes." "And then the torment of walking back to walking back Altstädter Ring" "And at the end at Eisengasse he has to stumble upon a mob on the hunt for jews." "Kafka took a position with the Workers' Accident Insurance Institution... for the Kingdom of Bohemia, in Prague." "It roused his social conscience intensely to see workers who had been maimed... because of inadequate safety precautions." "His sense of duty was exemplary, his work highly valued." "Kafka clearly acquired much of his knowledge of the world and of life, and likewise his sceptical pessimism, from his administrative experiences, from his contact with the injustices inflicted on suffering workers... and from the slow grinding of the wheels of bureaucracy," "the stagnating life of the filing cabinet." "Whole chapters of the novels "The Trial"" "and "The Castle" get their realistic stamp... from the climate he experienced at the Workers' Accident Insurance." "How often I visited him there... and paced the grim, echoing corridors with him." "These terrible recent spells, numberless, almost endless." "Walks nights, days, incapable of anything except pain." "There will almost be greater pleasure in walking across the bridge to the Belvedere then through the river to Heaven." "I continually come to the same conclusion that I was more damaged by my upbringing than anyone else I know and more than I can understand." "One day my father showed Dr. Kafka some poems I had written as a pupil of 17, to ask his opinion." ""What Dr. Kafka is that?" I asked him." ""He's a good friend of Max Broïs."" ""Then he's the author of 'The Metamorphosis'?"" ""He works in our legal department."" ""What did he say about my work?" "He praised it."" "Father took me to the office on the second floor of the accident-insurance institution." "Behind the desk sat a tall, slim man." "Dr. Kafka extended his hand to me." ""Your poems are still filled with noise," he said." ""That goes with youth." "When do you write?"" ""In the evening, at night."" ""If it weren't for those horrible, agonizing, sleepless nights, I would never write."" "But this way I'm continually reminded of the darkness of my solitary confinement." "I can't write during the day." "The light distracts my attention." "Perhaps it also distracts from the darkness within."" "True hell is over there in the office." "I have no other hell to fear." "As long as I can't escape from my office I'm simply lost." "I know that only too well that's all a question of holding my head up high enough not to drown for as long as I can." "I surely write this out of despair over my body and over my future with that body." "The diaries contain such harrowing statements... about his office work keeping him from writing that there's nothing more to add." "He's shocked to realize... that everything in him is ready for literary work, that this work... would mean blessed release and truly coming alive." "The purity of Kafka's view... of art comes out in a phrase from his diary:" ""Writing as a form of prayer."" "In a letter to me, he says:" ""Having done some good writing at night," "I could have gone on writing through the night and the day and the night and the day... and finally flown away." "What a prodigious world I have in my head."" "I've been in the city for over twenty years now." "Twenty times now I've spent every season of the year here." "For twenty years here the tress have been growing taller." "How small shall one become beneath them?" "I can't live in Prague." "Whether I can live elsewhere" " I don't know but that I can't live here is the one thing I know beyond doubt." "I spend all my afternoon in the streets these days basking in the antisemitism." "Isn't it one of the most natural thing in the world to leave a place where one is hated so?" "It was about three weeks after my first encounter with Franz Kafka, that we took our first walk together." "We had just gotten back to the Kinsky Palace... in a black overcoat and shiny hat... emerged from a commercial building bearing the sign HERMANN KAFKA." "When we'd come three steps closer, the man said very loudly:" ""Franz." "Go inside." "The air is damp."" "Franz spoke in a strangely soft voice:" ""My father." "He worries about me." "Love often takes the face of violence." "Good-bye."" "In November 1919 he wrote a very long letterto his father." "He wanted his mother to give it to him, but instead of passing it on, she returned it to Franz, probably with a few conciliatory words." "Dearest father," "You recently asked me why I claimed to be afraid of you." "As usual I could think of no answer." "Partly, I suppose, for the very reason that I am afraid of you." "I was a fearful child though surely obstinate as children are although mother undoubtely spoiled me" "I cannot believe I was particularly unmanageable." "I cannot belive that a kind word a quiet taking by the hand, a friendly look, wouldn't have been enough to do anything a person wanted." "What I would've need at the time and everywhere at the time was encouragement." "I was already overwelmed by your sheer physicality." "Having worked you own way so far up by your own efforts you had unlimited faith in your own views." "From your armchair you ruled the world." "Your opinion was right." "Everyone else was crazy, excentric, meshugga, abnormal." "It took on from me the enigmatic quality typical of all tyrants who's justification is based not on their thinking but on their person." "You silenced me at a very early age." "Your warning, "Not another word!", and the raised had that accompanied it had been with me ever since." "I developed a hesitance, stammering way of speaking in your presence and finally I fell silent because in your presence I could neither think nor speak." "To flea from you would have been to flea from the family, even from mother" "I could always go to her for protection but only in relation to you" "She loved you too much and was too devoted to you to be an enduring, independent spiritual force in the child's struggle." "I was continually in disgrace." "Either I obeyed you commands and that was a disgrace or I was defiant and that was a disgrace too." "I has lost my self confidece before you and exchanged it for a boundless sense of guilt." "Kafka laid out the rest of his life as a series of attempts... to break away from his father's influence." "Alongside his father appears his mother." "The son complains of her lack of independence from his father." "Kafka dedicated one of his books, "The Country Doctor", to his father." "Franz often quoted his father's response on receiving the book:" ""Put it on my bedside table."" "I often accompanied Kafka home from the office." "I was amazed, time and again, at his knowledge of the city." "He loved the city of his birth." "Not only did he know all of its palaces and churches;" "he was well acquainted with the secrets of the Old Town's obscurest courtyards." "He was familiar with the archaic descriptions of the houses... and could read the history of the city from their old walls." "He came to the subject of the ghetto." ""Do you still remember the old Jewish quarter?" "Its shadowy nooks, mysterious lanes, blind windows, dirty courtyards, noisy taverns, and locked inns they are all still alive in us." "We walk along the broad streets of the newly built city." "But our steps falter." "Deep down, we still tremble, as if surrounded by the misery of the past." "We are awake, yet we move through a dream:" "Ourselves only ghosts from the past."" "I found as little deliverance from you and Judaism." "There deliverance would have been conceivable" "We might even have found each other in Judaism." "But all the kind of Judaism I got from you." "As a child I reproached myself in agreement with you for not going to temple enough, for not fasting and so on." "You went to temple on four days of the year and were closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously." "Patiently you attended to your prayers as a formality and sometimes amazed me by being able to point the passage in tha prayerbook that was just being recited." "There was still enough Judaism in that but it was too little to pass on to a child." "I recevied a sort of restrospective conformation of this view of your Judaism from your behaviour over the last few years when you felt I was taking a greater interest in jewish matters." "As you developed an immediate aversion to anything I considered important you developed one there too." "Had your Judaism been stronger you would have also set a more convincing example." "More to the point was you aversion to my writing and everything you didn't even realise was connected with it." "Here I had in fact gained some distance from you on my own." "My writing was about you." "I was only venting the sorrows I couldn't vent to your face." "It was a delibarately prolongued farewell to you." "Sometimes" "I imagine a spreadout map of the world and you stretched out across it." "And then it's as if" "I could inhabit only the areas that you either don't cover nor can't reach." ".We often took walks in the ghetto, too." "I once heard him say:" ""If only I could run to these poor ghetto Jews, kiss the hems of their garments and say nothing, absolutely nothing." "I would be perfectly content if they merely accepted my being around them."" ""Are you that lonely?", I asked him. "As lonely as Kaspar Hauser?"" ""Much worse," he said, "I'm as lonely as Franz Kafka."" "This morning - pleasure, for the first time in a long time at the idea of a knife being twisted in my heart." "I surely write this out of dispair over my body and over my future with that body." "What is certain is that my physical state poses a prime obstacle to my progress." "It's impossible to achieve anything with a body like this." "I will have to get used to it's continuous failure." "I want my brow to tremble when I write." "I can't get away from the diary any more." "It's where I have to explain myself because it's the only place I can." "I would love to describe the feeling of hapiness that I have from time to time, at times like this." "I live with my family among the best and most loving people, more or a strager than a stranger." "Over the past twenty years I've spoken no more of an average of twenty words a day with my mother and I've rarely exhanged more that a greeting with my father." "I never speak to my married sisters and brothers in law." "Not that I'm angry at them in every way, it's just that I haven't the slightest thing to talk to them about" ".Anything that isn't literature bores me and I hate it because it's in my way." "In summer we used to take long Sunday walks..." "We spent countless pleasurable hours on the boards of Prague's public beaches... or in little boats on the Moldau." "Kafka's literary work was languishing, he had produced nothing for months." "He sometimes lived in a sort of lethargy for months on end, immensely sad, in utter despair." "I discover comment after comment about his sadness in my diaries." "But I already knew how intensely he suffered, because he had admitted to it many times." "He didn't ask little from life, rather too much, namely perfection, even in love... it had to be perfection or nothing." "His whole nature was a longing for purity." "I've been in the city for over twenty years now." "Twenty times now I've spent every season of the year here." "For twenty years the tress here have been growing taller." "How small shall one become beneath them?" "Amazement sometimes with the colourless, sensless clouds almost incessantly drifting past." "The wish for numb solitute..." "These terrible recent spells, numberless, almost endless..." "Walks nights, days, incapable of anything except pain" "My world is collapsing." "I don't lament the collapse," "I lament being born." "I lament the light of the sun." "Time passes, and one passes uselessly with it." "Where is eternal Spring?" "In 1912 he met a young woman at my father's home." "For five years Franz's relationship with her dominated his life." "In October he wrote her a 22-page letter." "That was the start of the tragedy of their relationship." "We met in June 1912, at Max Broïs father's home in Prague." "In September Franz wrote me a letter reintroducing himself... and reminding me of my promise to travel to Palestine with him." "He recounted how we had met, how we had talked about the trip to Palestine, how he had sat behind me during the piano-playing, and how I had extended my hand to him when we said good-bye." "Later, in his meanwhile published diary, I read:" ""As I was sitting down, I looked at her more closely for the first time, by the time I was seated, I had made an unalterable judgment."" "After "The Judgment" he continued on the first chapter of the novel "Amerika" or "The Man Who Disappeared"." "Here is a passage from my diary notes from this period:" ""Kafka is in ecstasy, works whole nights through... on a novel set in America."" "For November 3rd I find the entry:" ""To Baum's, where he reads us a wonderful second chapter."" "Reading aloud was a particular passion." "That novel of his, a magic work." "The language is crystal clear, yet shot through with dreams, visions of infinite profundity." "You look inside and are captivated by the beauty and individuality." "To read a few sentences of Kafka... is to discover on yourtongue, your breath, a sweetness never before experienced." "That is perfection, absolute perfection, the perfection of pure form that brought Flaubert to tears... at the sight of the Acropolis." "Kafka's work is marked by a new sort of smile, a smile that says the Last Things are near, so to speak a metaphysical smile." "It's the city where I was born and I wonder slowly, haltingly though it's narrow lanes." "I can't live in Prague." "Whether I can live elsewhere I don't know but that I can't live here is the one thing I know beyond doubt." "I can't talk to anyone, particulalry not to my parents." "It's as if the sight of those who gave me life filled me with revulsion" "I will resign from my job." "Resigning is my strongest hope." "We'll get married, move away from Prague, perhaps to Berlin." "I can't sleep." "Only dreams, no sleep." "For weeks I've been afraid to be alone in my room." "For weeks I've known sleep only as a raging fever." "He always wrote at night." "First literature, then letters to his friends." "Sometimes he would write to me from his office as well." "Again and again he complained about his work at the office and how it kept him from writing." "He said he needed to concentrate his pitiful powers in order to write, and if he didn't write, he hit rock bottom." "His life consisted in attempts to write, failed attempts in his eyes." "He was just working on his novel "The Man Who Disappeared", which was later also known under the title "Amerika"." "A story "extending into eternity," as he put it." "His mother considered his writing a mere pastime." "He often complained that she didn't understand him, that neither of his parents, the people with whom he still shared a home, understood him." "Sometimes he talked about his sisters, whom he was very fond of, and about his father, whom he hated and who, in his opinion, also hated him." "We soon became closer and he seemed to have fallen in love." "But we still hadn't seen each other again." "He was writing to me almost every day at the time... sometimes even two or three times a day." "By November, he was already swearing his eternal love." "Once he had a bouquet of roses sent to me by messenger." "I once showed him three stories he'd written and that I'd had bound in brown leather." "I showed him the book." "He had a coughing fit." "He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, held it in front of his mouth, stuffed it back into his pocket when the fit was over, and said:" ""You overestimate me." "Your faith crushes me." "My scribbling doesn't deserve a leather binding." "It shouldn't be printed at all." "It should be burned." "It has no meaning."" "I objected violently." ""According to whom?" "I must disagree with you." "By tomorrow your scribbling, may already represent an influential voice in the world." "Who can know that today?"" "He looked at me blankly." ""Stop it, please," he groaned and covered his eyes with both hands." "Once again about his writing:" ""Poor, poor darling, may you never feel forced... to read this wretched novel I'm scratching away at." "What I'd really like to do is abandon everything... and dig myself a grave on the spot." "After all, there can be no finer place to die, no place more deserving of total despair, than one's own novel."" "I can't sleep." "Only dreams, no sleep." "For weeks I've been afraid to be alone in my room." "For weeks I've known sleep only as a raging fever." "Dreamt of Felice... as if she were dead" "We haven't had a single moment good together yet" "A moment when I could have breathed freely" "I can live neither without her nor with her" "I believe it to be impossible that we shall ever be united" "But, at the decisive moment, I daren't tell her, or even myself." "He wanted me to hold him, to save him," "but at the same time declared that I would never experience pure joy with him... pure suffering, on the other hand, as much as anyone might wish." "And yet - do not send me away." "Darling, stay." "Love comes, love goes, love returns." "My fear of him grew, fear of a future with him, fear of his despair, his writing rage, the difficult life I would have with him." "I was so unhappy, so torn;" "he sensed I was despairing of him, he was afraid, and yet he was incapable of living a normal life among normal people." "But I wanted to live my life like everyone else." "I wanted children, a happy life." "He once wrote me:" ""I could never expose myself to the perils of fatherhood." "Please understand, dearest Felice, that I must lose you and everything else if ever I lose my ability to write."" "I had written him that I sometimes cried." "He wrote back that he couldn't cry, that when other people cried, it struck him as a weird, incomprehensible natural phenomenon." "That he himself had only cried twice, briefly, at night, because of a passage in a novel he was writing at the time." "He asked... if he could "kiss my lovely, wet eyes."" "He often spoke pensively about death." "He once commented:" ""Only those who truly understand life are unafraid of dying." "Fear of death is merely the result of an unfulfilled life." "Is an expression of unfaithfulness."" "One day we were standing on the quay." "Freight cars loaded high with coal were passing on the railroad bridge." "We walked on silently." "Dr. Kafka continued to gaze into the quickly darkening river." "Then he said:" ""The truth is always an abyss." "Man is condemned, not to die but to live." "I'm fighting the most hopeless battle there is."" ""Against whom?" I asked." ""Against myself."" "On another occasion he said:" ""I envy the young."" ""But you're not old," I said." ""I'm as old as Judaism, as old as the Wandering Jew."" ""It was the winter of 1917." "We were starving badly in Munich." "Thas where I saw Franz Kafka for the first time." "Up to then I'd known him as an eminent but distant name." "He was said to have written a great deal of important work, but had published only a few short tales." "Who was this man?" "Franz Kafka was a rumor." "The rumor of a suffering man who tortured himself, of a self-torturer who pushed his hatred of his father so far... that he was destroying himself." "Of a suicide out of punitive justice, so to speak." "His father, all fathers, the world of the fathers, the authorities... all of them were drawn into his trial." "That was the legend surrounding him." "To us Kafka seemed less a literary figure... than a judge of the inner human being." "And now this strange man had come to Munich from Prague, despite war and frontiers." "So now the judge was here, and I went to see him as if I were about to stand trial." "Kafka sat behind a raised lectern, pale, with shadowy dark hair, a figure incapable of overcoming his embarrassment over his own appearance." "Thas how, sitting angled towards the lectern, he read an unpublished piece of prose," ""In the Penal Colony."" "His voice may have sounded apologetic, but his imagery pierced me like a knife." "Needles of ice filled with boundless torment." "I had never observed the spoken word to have a comparable effect." "I stayed to the end, my heart stopping at certain moments." "I made a date to go for a walk with Kafka the very next day." "We crossed the slightly frozen stubble fields... in the foggy grey of a November day." "The world seemed without size or hope." "Again and again he gasped for breath." "He had turned a lung disease into a weapon against this world, above all against his father." "He was mesmerized by his father image." "Such hatred of one's father was alien to me." "But Kafka ignored my objections:" "He was possessed by his worldview, which had revealed the paternal principle as the cause of all evil." "Happy, in his bitterness, to have found the guilty party, in some strange way he agreed with him." "Outwardly a rebel, the son inwardly subjects himself to the father-patriarch." "The son takes the father's side against himself and executes the verdict against himself." "Behind this absurd hatred throbs a powerful love:" "The son can only hate his father so intensely because of the infinite love he once felt for him." "I was raised in the city, in the middle of the city" "It's the city where I was born and I wonder slowly, haltingly though its narrow lanes" "And when towards morning it was still hot and fine we crossed the Charles Bridge to go home I was actually happy" "over the Quai," "Stone Bridge, New Bridge, home." "Thrilling statues of saints on the Charles Bridge the peculiar evening light of the summer time and the nocturnal emptiness of the bridge" "There is a goal but no path." "What we call path is hesitation." "My life is hesitation before birth." ".Perhaps my youth was too short." "We walked silently through Melantrich Street, past the old town-hall clock, to get to Doctor Kafka's apartment at the corner of Altstädter and Paris Street." "As we neared the Hus Monument, Kafka said:" ""Everything sails underfalse colors, not a single word is true." "I, for example, am on my way home." "But thats only how it looks." "In reality I'm about to descend into a dungeon installed especially for me, where conditions are all the harsher because it looks like a normal apartment that no one but I would recognize as a prison." "I live with my parents." "Although I have a little room of my own there, is not a home, merely a refuge where I can conceal my inner anxiety, only to become all the more its slave."" "On the subject of the insomnia he suffered from, he commented:" ""Perhaps the only thing my sleeplessness conceals is great mortal fear." "Perhaps I am afraid the soul... that slips away during sleep won't return to me."" "Then he came to Berlin." "He sat in the Askanischer Hof waiting for my call." "I ultimately phoned him and we met." "He was afraid, as he later wrote to me, that, sitting next to me, he would feel my breath and my body by his side... and at the same time be far, infinitely far away." "Back home in Prague again he wrote that his true fear... was that he would never be able to possess me, that he would, in the best case, have to remain limited... to kissing my hand like a blindly faithful dog," "which would be a sign, not of love but of despair." "Never will I or there would be my duty to be able to conceal the truth that I consider myself lost if I lose you." "Your last letter contains a sentence you've written before and so probably have I." "We are absolutely meant to be together." "Washing my hands outside in the dark corridor" "I was so consumed by the thought of you that I had to step over to the windows to find a little solace in the gray sky." "This is how I live." "Dearest, don't torment me so, don't torment me so!" "Today's Saturnday, you again leave me without a letter." "Today, when I thought that now it was bound to arrive with the certainty that day follows night." "Please understand, dearest Felice, that I must lose you and everything else" "I ever I lose my ability to write." "I feel myself being forced out of life by an unyeilding hand if I do not write." "It is as if..." "I were tumbling down on things and seeing them only in the confusion of the fall." "I lack all confidence." "I have it only in the happy spells when I'm writing." "But otherwise the world take its horrific course against me." "During a long walk we took on August 18, he told me he had proposed to Felice." "He is totally in love and happy." "Then he finally told his parents that he wanted to marry me." "It was the very first time he'd mentioned me to them." "Then he also wrote to my father." "Again with all his reservations... that I was a cheerful, healthy, lively girl... and he a taciturn, antisocial, querulous hypochondriac, his entire nature given to literature." "He wrote my father that, even in his own family, among the best, most loving people, he lived as more of a stranger than a stranger." "He asked himself how I would ever be able to bear him... and his, even in his own eyes, highly questionable literature." "That it was not facts... that hindered him, but fear, the insurmountable fear of being happy." "In September he read to me from the first chapter of the "The Trial"." "There one understands that, apart from reflecting on the general tragedy of mankind," "Kafka is describing the sufferings of his unfortunate people:" "Homeless, haunted Jewry." "And this without the word "Jew" ever appearing in any of his texts." "Dr. Kafka was a stalwart believer in Zionism." "He said: "The homeland of Palestine is a necessary goal for the Jews." "There's an immense distance... between the old Jewish quarter where I was born and the homeland." "I come from a different world." "My world is dying." "I'm burned out."" "When we were strolling through the ghetto on another occasion, he said:" ""You cannot escape yourself." "You have to go out into the unknown world to find the homeland you've left."" "Around the end of 1913 he announced another visit to Berlin." "I was writing to him less and less often." "He complained that I didn't write, that I wanted him to be different from the way he was, that I criticized him too much." "He asked me to finally recognize him, to recognize who he was and who he had become through his love for me." "For a while, I answered neither his letters nor his telegrams." "When I finally telephoned him again, at the sound of my voice he was overcome by a veritable obsession to see me, as he later wrote." "He wanted to come to Berlin." "He didn't hear the hesitancy in my voice, and the reluctance to meet him at the station." "During our last conversation in the Tiergarten, I had fallen silent." "He found this unspeakably humiliating." "He took it as a sign of distaste, of dull hatred." "He reproached me with not speaking as I wrote, that everything would be different, not better perhaps, but different, if I spoke as I wrote." "He assured me of his love." "We grew closer again." "We decided to renew our engagement, and he came to Berlin for two days." "He was over-tired, absent-minded, erratic, but also somehow indifferent." "We were never alone, and he later complained that he hadn't even been able to kiss me in peace and quiet." "After all, he so wished us to marry." "I visited him in Prague." "We began looking for an apartment together." "He thought I looked well and I actually felt quite well." "We didn't talk much, I was fairly reticent." "I began to write more regularly." "Ultimately we split up again." "We broke off our engagement at the Hotel Askanischer Hof." "Two friends and my father were present." "Franz wrote my parents a letter apologizing for everything." "He called me the greatest friend, and equally the greatest enemy, of his work." "I had given him quite a dressing down at the Askanischer Hof, almost shouted at him in fact." "He remained mute or stammered in dismay." "When he announced that he and Felicehad separated, he suddenly began to cry." "It was the only time I saw him cry." "I'll neverforget that scene, it was one of the most terrible things I've ever experienced." "He later wrote to me that he loved me, that I'd suffered unnecessarily for two years because of him, and that I couldn't grasp his situation." "One of his last sentences was:" ""I can't believe that there is any fairy-tale... in which a woman was fought for harder and more desperately... than I fought for you within myself, from the beginning, and again and again, and perhaps forever."" "Marrying, starting a family, accepting all the children that come along maintaining them in this insecure world and even guiding them a bit." "That is in my conviction the ultimate a human being can ever attain." "So why didn't I marry?" "I would have a family, the finest thing that in my eye can be achieved" "Which means the finest thing you have achieved," "I, would be your equal." "All the old and ever new shame and tirrany would be mere history." "That would be magical." "But this very fact suggests how questionable it is." "It's too much to ever be achieved." "I'm preoccupied solely by concern for myself but I was certain of nothing at all, the thing closest to me, my own body, became uncertain as well." "I hardly dare to move," "I remain weak until, under the superhuman excersion of wanting to marry, blood came out of my lungs." "On September 9, 1917 he wrote... that he had tuberculosis of both lung tips." "That he was going out to the country for at least three months." "I went to visit him that same September, at the clinic in Zürau." "He took his illness, not as an illness but as total defeat." "He assumed he wasn't going to survive." "The last word I read of his was "ashes."" "Seven years before he died." "He interpreted coughing blood which started in August - psychologically, as a rescue from marriage so to speak." "He calls it:" "His final doom." "He termed his illness a punishment." "Franz endured his affliction heroically, usually even with stoic serenity." "Apart from a few brief interruptions," "Franz remained in Zürau until the summer of 1918." "Then he returned to Prague." "Three years later he wrote in his diary:" ""There is no one here who understands everything about me." "Having someone with that understanding, for instance a wife, would mean having something to hold on to on all sides;" "it would mean having God."" "In 1920 Franz fell in love with a Czech Christian, Milena Jesenska, an excellent writer; a truly great woman with a passionate personality." "In the course of almost three years he wrote her countless letters, sometimes as many as three on the same day." "This passion-filled relationship initially brought Kafka the greatest happiness, but soon took a tragic turn." "Max Brod asked me why Franz Kafka... should fear love... but not life." "But thas not the way I see it." "For him life is something totally different... from what it is for everyone else." "He doesn't understand even the simplest thing in the world." "His relationship to money... is almost as cramped as his relationship to women." "Everything is equally alien to him." "Franz couldn't live." "Franz didn't have the ability to live." "Franz could never recover his health." "Franz had to die young." "He had no refuge, no shelter." "Thas why he was exposed to everything... we're protected from." "It was as if he were naked among the clothed." "His books are amazing." "He himself was far more amazing." "I can't sleep, only dreams, no sleep." "I've done nothing for the last eighteen days but write letters, read letters and, above all, gaze out the window." "If it weren't for the fear that has gripped me for the last few days" "I would be almost completly healthy." "Think also, Milena, of how I come to you about the 38 year jouney I have behind me." "And as a jew a far longer one." "I am on such a perilous path, Milena." "You stand firm beside a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes reflect the suffering of the world." "My world is collapsing." "I don't lament the collapse," "I lament being born," "I lament the light of the sun." "Sometimes I think" "I understand the fall of the man better than any other person on Earth." "The damp autumn weather and the surprisingly early, hard winter, had worsened Dr. Kafka's illness." "His desk stood empty and deserted in the office." ""He has a high temperature,"" "explained Dr. Treml, who sat at the other desk." ""We may never see him again."" "I walked home very sad." "The desk remained unoccupied for weeks." "But one day Dr. Kafka returned to the office." "Pale, stooped, smiling." "He told me that he had come only to hand on some files and collect a few personal papers from his desk." "That he was not at all well." "He would be traveling to the High Tatras in a few days." "To a sanatorium." "His voice subsided into a dry, spasmodic fit of coughing, from which he quickly recovered." "Saying good-bye to him before he left, I told him:" ""You'll recuperate and come back healthy." "The future will make up for everything." "Everything will change."" "Dr. Kafka smilingly placed the index finger of his right hand to his chest." ""The future is already here." "Change merely means revealing the wounds that have been hidden up to now."" "These terrible recent spells, numberless, almost endless" "Walks, nights, days, incapable of anything except pain." "Where is eternal Spring?" "Time passes and one passes uselessly with it." "The systematic destruction of myself over the years is astonishing." "It's like a slow growing breach in the dam, a completely deliberated action." "I continually come to the same conclusion that I was more damaged by my upbringing than anyone else I know and more than I can understand." "I'm holding Franz's letter from the Tatras in my hand, a fatal wish and yet a command:" ""Don't write, and keep us from meeting again." "Quietly fulfill only this one wish of mine:" "It alone can grant me some sort of survival, everything else only destroys further."" "I asked Max Brod," "I trusted him... in what was perhaps the most difficult hour of my life." "Please understand what I want." "I know who Franz is, I know whas happened, and I don't know whas happened." "You've been with him recently, you can judge:" "Am I guilty or am I not guilty?" "I also asked Mr. Brod... for news of how Kafka was." "I had heard nothing of him for months." "What his fear was, that I know down to the last nerve." "It had already existed before me, before he met me." "I knew his fear before I knew him." "During the four days he spent with me, he lost it." ""Don't write, and keep us from meeting again." "Quietly fulfill only this one wish of mine:" "It alone... can grant me some sort of survival," "everything else only destroys further."" "Milena left after four visits." "For calmer days among tormented ones." "I'm tired, know nothing and wish only that I could lay my face in your lap, feel your hand upon my head and stay that way for all eternity." "In the summer of 1923 he met 19-year-old Dora Diamant... at the Baltic seaside resort of Müritz." "She came from a respected family of Eastern European Chassidic Jews... and was an outstanding Hebraist." "Kafka was studying Hebrew with particular enthusiasm at the time." "Franz returned from his summer vacation in high spirits." "He was now determined to sever all ties, move to Berlin and live there with Dora." "In his first letter to me from Berlin, he wrote that he felt happy and was even sleeping well." "He lived with Dora in the suburb of Steglitz." "I visited him there whenever I went to Berlin, probably three times in all." "I discovered an idyll there:" "Finally I saw my friend in good spirits." "He was working with enthusiasm, though his physical condition had deteriorated." "I first met Kafka at a Baltic resort... in the summer of 1923." "I was very young at the time, nineteen, and was working at a Berlin organization's holiday camp... in Müritz near Stettin." "One day I saw a family, parents... and two children, playing on the beach." "I was particularly struck by the man," "I couldn't get him out of my mind." "I even followed these people into town and later met them again." "One day an announcement was made at the holiday camp... that Dr. Franz Kafka would be coming to dinner." "I was busy in the kitchen at the time." "When I looked up from my work, the room had darkened... and someone was standing outside in front of the window," "I recognized the man from the beach." "Then he came in" " I didn't know it was Kafka... and that the woman I'd seen him with at the beach was his sister." "That evening we were all sitting on benches at long tables." "A little boy got up and became so embarrassed leaving the room that he fell." "Kafka, his eyes gleaming with admiration, addressed him:" ""How skilfully you fell and how nimbly you got to your feet again!"" "When I thought back on these words later on, they seemed to be trying to say that everything could be saved " "except Kafka himself." "Why did Kafka make such a strong impression on me?" "I came from the East, a dark creature full of dreams and premonitions, as if sprung from a novel by Dostoevsky." "The first time I saw Kafka, he immediately fulfilled my idea of what a human being must be." "Kafka turned his attention towards me, too, as if he expected something from me." "His eyes were the most striking thing about him." "He had bashful brown eyes... that lit up when he spoke." "When a flash of humor occasionally appeared in them, it was less ironic than impish, as if he knew things other people didn't." "Kafka had to write... because writing was the air he breathed." "He inhaled it in the rhythm of the days he spent writing." "If he's described as having spent two weeks writing, it means he wrote non-stop for fourteen consecutive evenings and nights." "He usually wandered around, sluggish and listless, before beginning to write." "He would speak little, eat without an appetite, appear apathetic and very depressed." "He often read me what he'd written, but never analyzed or explained anything." "Now and then he said:" ""I would really like to know whether I've eluded the ghosts!"" "He wanted to burn everything he'd written... in order to rid his soul of these "ghosts."" "I heeded his wishes, and as he lay ill in bed," "I burned some of his work before his eyes." "What he really wanted to write would only come later, when he had gained his "freedom."" "Franz Kafka was the first person to take me and my intellectual life seriously, to speak to me as to an adult and strengthen my self-confidence." "His interest in me was a great gift, a fact of which I was always aware." "It was as if I were being swept by an inner wave of happiness." "I was no longer the insignificant little civil servans son, but a human being wrestling to take the measure of the world and himself." "I owed this to Dr. Kafka, and revered and admired him because of it." "I felt myself growing from day to day and becoming inwardly freer and better." "Through Dr. Kafka I learned to see better and hear better." "For me, he was an educator and a sort of father confessor." "And there was nothing I enjoyed more than to sit in Dr. Kafka's office... orto wander through the streets, gardens and courtyards of Prague with him, listening to him in admiration." "I'm more inclined to believe that all of us, the whole world and all the people in it, are sick... and that he's the only healthy one," "the only right-thinking, right-feeling, pure human being." "I know that his battle was not against life itself, that it was only a battle against this kind of life." "If I had managed to go with him, he would have been able to live a happy life with me." "One day the cleaning woman said: "Dr. Kafka has disappeared, without a sound, without any commotion, as quiet as a mouse, just the way he lived." "I don't know who cleared out his closet."" "She spoke of a pretty china cup, decorated in gold and blue, that Kafka had often drunk tea and milk from." ""Take the cup, young man," she said. "You revered him."" "This china cup has accompanied me throughout my life." "I've never dared to touch with my lips... what HE must so often have touched with his." "He had to be taken to a sanatorium because his health was deteriorating." "A Viennese clinic had diagnosed tuberculosis of the larynx." "Aterrible, fatal day." "On March 17, 1924 I took Franz to Prague." "Now he was living with his parents again, and despite all the solicitude surrounding him, he experienced it as a failure of his plans for independence, as a defeat." "Now he wanted me to visit him daily." "He spoke as if he knew we wouldn't be seeing each other for much longer." "Tearing himself away from Prague, although it only happened very late, was the great achievement of his life." "He didn't actually hate Prague." "What distressed him most was the fear of becoming dependent on his parents again." "I remained in Berlin." "Kafka didn't want me to come to Prague... and into the home that had been the source of all his unhappiness." "Kafka essentially welcomed his illness, even if, in the final moments of his life, he would have liked to live on." "He left Prague as a sick man, though mentally as fresh as ever." "On Sunday, May 11, I traveled to Vienna to see Franz once more." "In some special way, death hung over the whole trip." "The first thing Dora told me, and Franz confirmed, was that he wanted to marry her before he died." "He had sent her pious father a letter." "Her father showed it to the rabbi." "He read Kafka's letter and simply said: "No."" "At one point Dora took me aside and whispered:" ""Every night an owl appears at Franz's window." "The bird of death."" "But Franz wanted to live, he followed his doctor's instructions more meticulously than I had ever seen him do before." "If he'd met Dora earlier, his will to live would have been strengthened earlier, in time." "Dora's care and concern forthe patient were touching, touching, too, the belated awakening of all his vital energies." "Now, at the point of death, he would have known how to live and have wanted to live." "I saw him again at a sanatorium... in the Vienna Woods, where his sister had taken him." "This is where tuberculosis of the larynx was first diagnosed." "He was no longer allowed to speak and wrote everything down for me, above all the devastating effect Prague had had on him." "He had a beautiful room... with a balcony, and the sun streamed in at all times of day." "I stayed with him there, and later his friend Dr. Klopstock came, too." "At the sanatorium Franz wrote a number of letters to his parents, his sisters and Max Brod, who also came to visit him there." "I'm away from home and constantly have to write home even if everything that was home might long ago been swept off into enernity." "Dearest Max, how good you are to me and how much you've done for me in these past weeks!" "I'm very weak but in reasonably good hands here" "Fair well dear, kind, Max!" "Where is eternal Spring?" "Lay your hand on my brow for a moment" "To give me courage." "He read proofs on the eve of his death." "Around four in the morning I summoned Dr. Klopstock... because Kafka's breathing was so labored." "Dr. Klopstock immediately recognized the crisis... and woke the doctor, who put an icepack on Kafka's throat." "Kafka died around noon of the following day." "It was June 3, 1924." "I gave one more full-throated cry out into the world then they forced a gag into my mouth, bound my hands and feet and tied a blindfold round my eyes." "Were there objections that have been forgotten?" "Certainly there were." "Unshakable though the logic may be it cannot withstand a man who wants to live" "Where was the judge he had never seen?" "Where was the High Court he had never reached?" "I wish to speak," "I raise both hands" "Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, it was a Tuesday." "The body was taken to Prague... in a sealed coffin and buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague-Staschnitz... at four o'clock on June 11." "I was truly stunned," "I hadn't known that Franz's illness... was so grave." "I wrote an obituary... forthe Nardony listy newspaper." ""Dr. Franz Kafka, a German writer who lived in Prague, died the day before yesterday." "Very few people here knew him, because he was a solitary man," "an initiate, a man terrified of the world." "He knew ten thousand times more about the world... than all the people in the world." "He wrote the most important books of recent German literature, the agonizing struggle... of today's generation all over the world is in them." "They are filled with the dry sarcasm... and sensitive perspective of a man... who had seen the world so clearly... that he could not endure it... and had no choice but to die."" "I had managed, with guile and persuasion, to relieve Kafka of almost all he had published." "No will was found among his things." "But in his desk, under a pile of other papers, lay a folded note written in ink and addressed to me, asking me to burn all his unpublished texts, the novels, diaries, and letters." "We had talked about it once." "He said: "My will is going to be very simple, just the request that you burn everything."" "I also remember the exact reply I gave at the time:" ""If you should, in all seriousness, demand anything like that from me," "I can tell you now that I will never fulfill your request."" "Convinced of the sincerity of my refusal," "Franz would have had to appoint someone else as his executor... if his own last instructions had been his unconditional and final wish." "He knew how fanatically I venerated his every word." "His literary remains contained the most wonderful treasures." "The most precious part of this legacy is the three novels." "Few writers have met with the fate that befell Kafka:" "To remain virtually unknown in life... and then to gain world renown so shortly after death." "I can't read his books for fear that the spell... cast by his personality, which still resonates in me, might be weakened or even lost." "I fear for the image of "my' Dr. Franz Kafka, which lives on in me and, as an unshakeable example of thinking and living, continues to give me renewed strength and discipline." "I was on the train... from Vienna to Linz in the year 1924 when I read the news of his death." "The rumors surrounding this strange man... had already passed into myth during his own lifetime." "Kafka lives on in the horrors of our day, a strangely pallid light that does not go out," "yet gives no comfort." "I miss Franz so unspeakably." "The accumulated longing of all these years is so intense... that I become totally helpless when I dwell on it." "Franz's dream was to have a child and go to Palestine." "Now I have a child, without Franz, and am going to Palestine, without Franz, but I'm buying my ticket there with his money, at least that." "With the voice of Jimmy Shuman Translation:" "Eileen Walliser"