An Immortal Love: Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska - 150 Letters and Two Meetings
Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer.
"If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.”
Kafka wrote to Milena on 13 June 1920.
A warning, an ironic invitation? An attempt to seduce by repelling?
For some months, between the Ottoburg boarding house in Merano, where the writer was trying to fight the course of tuberculosis, and Milena Jesenská's Viennese home, there had been a flood of letters, postcards, telegrams. They had met fleetingly in a Prague café the previous spring, when Milena had begun translating some of Kafka's short stories into Czech. For him, a German speaker, it was the language of a 'people', scarcely frequented and understood. And without a doubt, Milena's published translations of his writings reveal to him surprising, unexpressed possibilities. Like proof that someone, in the world, sees the same things. A fact that for him, who feels he is the loneliest man in the world, has the nature of the supernatural. Above all, Kafka has the feeling, of excruciating intensity, that he has found, he who is 'guilty of everything', a woman who understands him, and does not accuse him of anything.
Milena, from a Christian family, the daughter of a famous Prague surgeon, educated and intolerant of the bigoted conventions of her class, was what one calls a free person, and at the age of twenty-four already carried the weight of many mistakes and illusions on her shoulders. She had moved to Vienna, where she starved (or almost starved), banished by her family, who had not forgiven her for marrying a Jew, the writer Ernst Pollak, also from Prague, whom Kafka knew well.
Is she a sort of Dante's Beatrice?
Milena is certainly a kind of Beatrice. But the latter guides Dante on an upward path, up to the light of supreme metaphysical certainties; on the contrary, Kafka has no need of an upward guide, he knows how to leave the world behind all too well, he does it every night, if anything, Milena points to the earth, she wishes to share her joy of life with that man so difficult, so ready to take refuge in one of his innumerable 'dens'. She has nothing else so precious to offer him. But just organizing a visit from Merano - or from Prague - to Vienna soon proves to be a labyrinthine undertaking, in which every slightest, most normal impediment generates a thousand others. It is a way of proceeding that soon throws Milena into doubt that she is doing something wrong. Kafka approaches as he recedes, and vice versa; he offers himself in one piece and warns his beloved within the same letter, the same sentence. The only thing that comes easily and naturally to him is the erection of obstacles. One must always consider that Kafka, unlike Milena, feels like a monster. He does not dare to offer the 'maiden', like the Beast in the fairytale, his 'dirty, convulsive, restless, uncertain, burning and cold' hand.
He did not consider himself equal to her
Two things torment him: the sense of his 'heaviness', which risks causing the 'angel', instead of saving him, to plunge with him into darkness; and the obsession with 'dirtiness', which precludes him from any carnal pleasure "I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, that's why I make such a fuss with cleaning". And so it is that, month after month of this unforgettable 1920, epistolary intimacy becomes the register of a kind of psychic catastrophe foretold. The fact that she does not feel like abandoning Pollak to his fate is decidedly secondary. For Kafka, it has all the air of an advantage. One wonders what Kafka would have done otherwise, what kind of impossibility he would have resorted to.
"Real life is not what happens, but its meaning, or rather the endless search for its meaning."
Franz and Milena had plenty of reasons to split up, more than they had to stay together. Geographically distant, involved with other people, one a Czech Christian and the other a German Jew. And then they had opposite characters.
At the same time he could not help himself and suffered when she told him she would not leave her husband. "Either you are mine and everything is fine, or instead I lose you and then it's not that it's bad, but then there is nothing left, no jealousy, no suffering, no anxiety, nothing at all."
The meeting in Vienna was postponed a thousand times, then finally from 30 June to 3 July 1920 they lived four idyllic days. He no longer even seemed ill. On 4 July, still stunned by so much happiness, he wrote to her 'today Milena, Milena, Milena... I can't write any more.' It was the beginning of the end. They met again in mid-August in Gmünd, along the Prague-Vienna line. For months they had ignored the impossibility of their love, now they were beginning to understand.
Milena would not leave Ernst, nor would she fade away in the darkness enveloping Franz's soul. So Franz renounced the only person who had ever understood and loved him for who he really was. "And perhaps it is not true love if I say that you are for me the dearest thing; to love is the fact that you are for me the knife with which I pry into myself."
Kafka died in a sanatorium in 1924, Milena continued her life. She divorced her husband, returned to Prague and remarried. In the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she would die in 1944, she told Margarete Buber-Neumann about that obscure writer, who died before achieving fame, and their secret love. Margarete kept her promise after the war by writing Milena, Kafka's friend.
