Comenzaría así una relación que terminará el día de Navidad de 1917, dos meses después de que Kafka escupe sangre y comienza a entender que su destino está sellado: la tuberculosis lo acechará e implacablemente lo matará el 3 de junio de 1924. In her solo play with music Felice to Franz (1992), [8] [9] [10] performance artist Claudia Stevens portrays Felice as she responds to Kafka's letters. The play's text [11] recreates the letters Felice might have written to Franz.

I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it: These words of Canetti's had the same effect on me as Kafka's letters had on him. There is something incredibly valuable in seeing authors in their roles as readers as well, as die-hard fans of other people's thoughts, words, dramas. The - occasionally - difficult relationship between author, reader, work and criticism is turned into a beautiful love affair, a mutual, fruitful and necessary interdependence. Manifestly, writing was not an intellectual exercise for Kafka; it was a somatic shiver. Sometimes it was a spawning: “The Judgment” came out “like a veritable birth covered with filth and slime.” Sometimes it was a wounding: “I will jump into my novella even if it should cut up my face.” In one of the most often quoted passages of his letters, he compares great writing to a weapon smashing us open, insisting that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” These are gloriously mixed metaphors, always muscling their way from one image to the next. “I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else” can mean that life is subordinate to literature—but it can also mean that literature is coaxed to breathe and bleed. Kafka, que siempre luchó contra sí mismo y contra las barreras y obstáculos que creó para complicarlo todo, tal vez como le sucede a los personajes de sus novelas -especialmente K. y Joseph K. de "El castillo" y "El proceso", hizo lo mismo para su relación personal que siempre fue débil, dependiente y conflictiva también con otras, tal es el caso de Juli Wohryzek y muy marcadamente con Mílena Jesenská con quien también mantuvo un intercambio epistolar intenso y complejo teniendo en cuenta que Mílena estaba casada.in any case, what business have my hands to write letters if all they are made for and all they want is to hold you ! (Olivie Blake has a quote like this in "Alone w you in the ether", she thought I wouldn't notice, but I did girl!! Kafka fans, let me hear you) In the 2011 BBC radio play Kafka the Musical, written by Murray Gold, the character Felice was played by Jessica Raine. [12] Central heating, all things considered, may not be the bane of our existence, but it is essential, and it is not the comfort of a good life Kafka seems to be deriding, but his conflict is that of a genuine artist: he wants to pursue his writing with a dedication and perseverance that can be easily threatened by what you have to do to “maintain” the central heating. That is why he expects a calculated affection from Felice, an affection that has some distance in between, because in too much closeness with her he will lose his life-work. He tries to explain this to Felice in a letter that is so wonderful it can work as a pure statement on the writing life: In that respect, it is always fascinating to see what world class authors make of other authors, and Canetti trying to understand Kafka is one of the most interesting cases I can think of. To be the third party - the reader of Canetti, wandering around in the mind of Kafka - is a pure delight. It does not really matter if Canetti got the facts of Kafka's aborted love story right or not, the slim book is very much reminiscent both of Kafka's and of Canetti's fiction, an interesting case of merging different minds to form something new and enigmatic, and yet familiar, in the words of Canetti!

This particular piece never reappears, but many similar fragments are reworked and regurgitated with minor revisions, often in the course of several years. Six times Kafka fiddles with a sketch about the adverse effects of education, which he ultimately abandons. Occasionally, there are first drafts of full works, including “ The Judgment,” the story that Kafka completed in a surge of ecstasy in a single night. I actually think, counterintuitively, Kafka would make an excellent partner. He gives great credit to Felice's intelligence, wit, and education, and above all else sees her as an equal in every way (and bear in mind, these letters were written in the early 1910s, where that certainly wasn't a default). He's constantly concerned with her well-being and places her happiness above his at all times. Felice, μην αμφιβάλλεις γι' αυτό. Είμαι περιβόητος για το γέλιο μου αν και παλιότερα ήμουν πολύ πιο τρελός από όσο είμαι τώρα. Μάλιστα με έπιασε κάποτε, κατά τη διάρκεια μιας συνάντησης με τον πρόεδρο της εταιρίας μας - πάνε δυο χρόνια από τότε, αλλά αυτήν την υπόθεση θα την θυμούνται όλοι στο γραφείο ακόμα κι όταν εγώ θα έχω φύγει - μια κρίση γέλιου και πώς! Πού να σου εξηγώ τη σημασία αυτού του άνδρα. Πίστεψέ με, πρόκειται περί σημαντικότατης προσωπικότητας. Ένας απλός υπάλληλος τον θεωρεί όχι ως κάτι γήινο αλλά ουράνιο. Και καθώς δεν είχαμε όλοι την ευκαιρία να συνομιλήσουμε με τον ίδιο τον Αυτοκράτορα, η επαφή μας με το πρόεδρο ήταν για τον μέσο υπάλληλο - κι αυτό συμβαίνει σε όλους τους μεγάλους οργανισμούς - εξίσου σημαντική όπως θα ήταν και μια συνάντηση με τον αληθινό Αυτοκράτορα [...] Felice Bauer (18 November 1887– 15 October 1960) was a fiancée of Franz Kafka, whose letters to her were published as Letters to Felice.

Kafka’s correspondence with Felice has all the earmarks of his fiction - the same nervous attention to minute particulars, the same paranoid awareness of shifting balances of power, the same atmosphere of emotional suffocation - combined, surprisingly enough, with moments of boyish ardour and delight."  -   Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times Biography bursts into Kafka’s art at the level of content. “The Castle” and “The Trial” are full of the sorts of files and bureaucratic inanities that he would have encountered daily at the Accident Insurance Institute, and the workplace inspections that Vice-Secretary Kafka had to conduct probably inspired a bustling hotel scene in his first novel, “ The Man Who Disappeared.” Naturalmente, a ambos compromisos les corresponderá una ruptura, el 12 de julio de 1914 en el "juicio del hotel Askanischer Hof", como Kafka lo definiera oportunamente y el otro en esa Navidad indicada anteriormente.