Home » Czech Republic » Magdalena Platzova » >Život po Kafkovi ((Life After Kafka)
Magdalena Platzova >:Život po Kafkovi (Life After Kafka))
Felice Bauer met Kafka in 1912. He wrote to her almost every day and they soon got engaged but the engagement did not last long. However, after while they got engaged again. But by this time Kafka. Had contracted the tuberculosis which would kill him.He died in 1924.
Bauer kept all the letters that he had written to her. The letters that she wrote to him are now lost.Bauer would later marry Moritz Marasse,. a banker, and they would have two children.
Like many Jews they fled Germany when Hitler came to power , going first to Switzerland and then to the United States. They struggled to make a living and when he died of an illness in 1950 she sold off the letters she had received from Kafka to the publisherSchocken. Not only were the letters published, but Nobel prize winner Elias Canetti wrote a book about them called Letters to Felice.
This book focuses on her story. It takes an unusual approach in that it not only fictionalises aspects of her life that we do not know about ,it also makes other changes to aspects of her life that we do know about. We see this fairly early on when we learn about her children, called Ursula and Heinz in real life but are called Lily and Joachim in this book. It is Joachim who tells us that the letters she received from Kafka were in fact sold a huge sum at Sotheby’s, of which she only received $8000, something we know is just not true.
Joachim is keen to protect his mother’s reputation and writes toCanetti about his book. He damns Kafka – hat I know beyond a doubt is that he was a neurotic, a masochist, and, in regard to his relationships with women, a sadist as well.. Canetti is also criticised.
However, the story also deals with not just Bauer and her family but also the many other Jews who managed to escape from Nazi Germany, sometimes leaving it a bit late, and then struggling when they get to Europe and the United States.
We meet Bauer’s friend Grete Bloch who also knew Kafka. She had also fled Germany but ended up in Italy where she was captured and sadly sent to Auschwitz where she died.
We also follow the author’s own story and how she and her husband went to Sarajevo, and then to United States where she taught, a course, on Kafka. She becomes interested in Bauer and tracks down the family and meets the elderly Joachim who had an interesting career as a psychiatrist, hhelping soldiers in the war, suffering from PTSD.
It seems that Joachim and the family knew very little about their mother’s relationship with Kafka and neither did they know about the letters till much later.
While we are following the story of both Felice and her family, particularly Joachim, we are also following various other sidetracks. Felice was friends with Grete Bloch who was sadly killed in Auschwitz. She also had a relationship with Kafka and allegedly this relationship was one of the reasons that one of Felice’s engagements to Kafka was broken off. However, she also allegedly had a son. In the post war period a man turns up, claiming not only that he is the son o fGrete but also that Kafka was his father. There is of course no evidence for this though he claims there is evidence but it has been hidden away. He appears more than once in the book.
We learn a lot about Joachim including his personal life, his children and grandchildren, and his profession, which involved also the dispute between those supporting Freud and those supporting Reich. Platzova meets him as an old man and get some information from him.
We also meet some of the other players, including MaxBrod, friend of Kafka and author of the best known biography of Kafka. He has retired to Tel Aviv, which is where we meet him.
Felice agonises over the letters she received from Kafka. She seriously considers destroying them but is persuaded from doing so. However, she is very reluctant to sell them to Schocken, though she could clearly use the money as she is ill and has little money. We follow the whole story of how she is persuaded to sell them.
Joachim had not known about the letters. Joachim was barely aware of his mother’s relationship with Kafka and he himself had not read Kafka.
Joachim may not have known about the letters, but many people did as they had been mentioned inBrod’s biography. Platzova when reading Kafka and reading about him had discovered Felice. Who really was Felice Bauer? Who was the woman a generation of Kafka fans knew only as a lover of meaty dishes, heavy furniture, and precisely set watches? Who was hiding behind the poised exterior and hearty laughter to which many had testified?As we know from this book, she got more interested in Felice, her life, the family and her concerns.
As for Felice she was the last of her generation to survive. Her whole life was spent taking care of others: siblings, parents, husband, children
And what happened to her letters to Kafka? Did he destroy them? We do not know the answer but Platzova thinks he returned them to her and she destroyed them.
This something of a strange book as it mixes fact, fiction, and supposition and the boundaries between the three are certainly not always clear. We do get a portrait of Felice Bauer (and relatively little about Kafka himself) but we also get a story about the various people associated,with one or the other, with Kafka, particularly after his death.
Publishing history
First published in 2022 vy Argo
First published in English in 2024 Bellevue Literary Press,
Translated by Alex Zucker