With the centenary of Franz Kafka’s death this year, attention to his every surviving sentence feels ubiquitous, and much of the credit—or blame—can be ascribed to his dear friend Max Brod. Kafka begged Brod multiple times to burn, “unread,” everything he left behind when he died, including his diaries, letters, notes, and the manuscripts for his three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and the unfinished Amerika. If Brod had heeded these pleas, the author who is today synonymous with bureaucratic irrationality, gnawing self-doubt, and existential estrangement would be known solely for Gregor Samsa’s saga in The Metamorphosis and a handful of other stories published during his lifetime. But Brod believed he knew best, and Kafka’s self-condemned work survived the pyre, helping fuel not only this year’s endless think pieces and reissues, including an unexpurgated version of his diaries restoring what Brod once deemed indecorous, but also a miniseries that interprets his fiction through sentiments expressed in his personal writing and a film about his final romance, allowing audiences to swoon over the love affair between a forty-year-old Kafka dying from tuberculosis and a Polish camp counselor half his age, Dora Diamant.
Another woman dragged into twenty-first-century discourse due to her association with Kafka and Brod is Felice Bauer, to whom the author dedicated his breakthrough work, “The Judgment.” Kafka wrote that story in a single sitting on September 22, 1912, just two days after sending his first letter to Bauer, whom he’d met some five weeks earlier at Brod’s family home in Prague. The letter initiated a five-year relationship with Bauer that included two unrealized marriage engagements, and sparked a three-month flurry of creativity for Kafka that yielded not only “The Judgment,” but also The Metamorphosis and five chapters of Amerika.
Kafka and Bauer met a handful of times between 1912 and 1917, most notably for ten days in the Bohemian spa town of Marienbad in July 1916, but their relationship was largely epistolary and, aside from the Marienbad trip, seemingly chaste. Kafka destroyed the letters Bauer wrote to him, but she kept those he wrote to her and, in 1955, sold them to Brod for $8,000. The letters were first published in 1967, seven years after Bauer’s death, in a volume titled Letters to Felice. Also included in that edition are letters that Kafka wrote to Grete Bloch, a close friend of Bauer’s who nevertheless does not come off as terribly loyal. According to Kafka, Bloch was somewhat of a double agent, playing a prominent role in scuttling his first engagement to Bauer. And Brod would later make an even more shocking claim, ultimately debunked, that Bloch gave birth to Kafka’s illegitimate son.
Literary scholars quickly pounced on the letters, starting with Elias Canetti, whose book Kafka’s Other Trial breathlessly parses the billets-doux with the fervor of a subredditor poring over freeze-frames from the latest House of the Dragon trailer. The future Nobel laureate’s criticism certainly has scholastic merit, if for no other reason than that it acts as a précis of Letters to Felice, but it can also be rather sweaty and over-the-top. It’s particularly easy to imagine anybody who knew Bauer taking umbrage at her depiction in the book, which is precisely how Czech author Magdaléna Platzová begins Life After Kafka, her 2022 novel inspired by Bauer and dedicated to her descendants. The novel, newly translated into English by Alex Zucker, opens appropriately enough with a letter, this one written by Joachim, a fictional version of Bauer’s son Henry, to Canetti, decrying his “rash and sensationalist book.” Joachim writes that his mother only sold her letters because of his filial pressure, and never aimed to profit off of her relationship with Kafka (though Canetti doesn’t explicitly make this claim). Bauer never even discussed Kafka with anyone in the United States, Joachim continues, despite “that unhappy five-year period [shaping] the rest of her life in a fundamental way.”
Kafka himself never appears in Platzová’s novel, but his legacy is fundamental to both Bauer’s life as imagined by Platzová and the overall arc of the book, which interleaves elements of firsthand authorial reportage with flights of fictional, albeit factually informed, fancy. For example, the opening letter to Canetti draws on a one-hour conversation that Platzová had with the real-life Joachim/Henry in 2011, just two years before he died, and later in the book an entire chapter is devoted to recounting that meeting. Other nonfiction chapters describe Platzová’s initial efforts to contact Bauer’s descendants, track down specifics of Bloch’s tragic life, and suss out the fictional story she wants to tell. At the most basic level, that story is an attempt to reclaim Bauer and Bloch from their one-sided characterizations by Kafka, to provide an antidote to “the poison of the letters.” Platzová’s fictional chapters are grounded in facts, but also take creative license, most dramatically by having Bloch’s purported love child with Kafka play a prominent role. Other personalities from Kafka’s letters also crop up, including Brod and his sister, Sophie, and Ernst Weiss, a Prague literary figure who was actively opposed to Bauer and Kafka’s relationship.
Bauer lived a relatively full life after settling in the Los Angeles area in 1935 with her husband and two children, and Platzová portrays her as, above all, a guardian to those she loved. When her husband has a stroke on a business trip to Paris, she goes to be by his side before bringing him back to LA, where she cares for him until his death twelve years later, doing her best to shield him from upsetting news of the world, including the horrifying revelations about the Holocaust. In one nonfiction chapter, Bauer’s real-life granddaughter Leah tells Platzová that her grandma “never spoke about unpleasant or difficult things” because “she didn’t feel it was proper.” Bauer’s decision to keep Kafka’s letters for nearly forty years is also shown as an act of protection, both of him and herself, but once Joachim tells his mother that he will sell them after her death, she can’t bring herself to destroy them and so entrusts them to Brod.
Platzová spends several chapters with Joachim, checking in during his first marriage to a young radical named Lisette, his various post-divorce flings as he reestablishes his independence, and his second marriage. Joachim’s behavior toward Lisette often echoes Kafka’s toward Bauer, as revealed in the letters, with Joachim talking about his desire to be allowed to work in peace, his manipulative efforts to get Lisette to marry him, and his “[insane] jealousy” when he can’t control her.
Bloch is another focus of the novel, though her life after settling in a small Tuscan town is lamentably more circumscribed, as she is rounded up in the last desperate months of World War II and transported to Auschwitz, where she is killed. With less to fictionalize, Platzová supplements her consideration of Bloch’s life with information gathered from Anna Pizzuti, an Italian historian who has dedicated herself to researching and documenting the lives of Jews interned in Italy during the war. Kafka, Bauer, and Brod were also Jewish, and the novel charts the various ways Jews adapted to being forced to flee their homes in the run-up to World War II, and how, in exile, friendships become stand-ins for one’s homeland.
The novel’s most intriguing character, if only for his Anastasia-like emergence from the past, is Appelbaum, the man who claims to be Kafka and Bloch’s son. The only surviving, real-world documentation of this child is a letter in which Bloch mentions that her son Casimiro died at age seven. Appelbaum seizes on this singularity to offer a meta-commentary on Platzová’s project: Brod’s “proof” of his/Casimiro’s death is “a single letter,” Appelbaum says, and yet here I am standing in front of you. For his part, Applebaum doesn’t care what is “true” anymore, telling Joachim, “I am what I am, period.” But implicit in his critique of Brod’s theory, which he damns as “an attractive and safely remote proposition that served to bolster his status as the one true expert on Kafka,” is the question of what one should believe, a letter or a life, a writer or a living being. This criticism also applies to those like Canetti, who base their characterizations on a single point of view. Platzová’s novel seeks to, among other things, counterbalance or at least interrogate such one-sided accounts.
Appelbaum also questions the relative importance of one’s “true origins,” meaning Judaism, versus one’s parentage, a theme that will be familiar to readers of Platzová’s 2016 novel The Attempt, which was also translated by Zucker. As with Life After Kafka, The Attempt imagines the life and legacy of historic figures, including women tied to notorious men, via characters based on the anarchist activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, the latter of whom tried to assassinate business magnate Henry Frick in 1892. It’s possible to focus solely on the political aspects of The Attempt, emphasized by both its original Czech title, Anarchista, and Platzová’s decision to bookend the narrative with fleeting scenes set in Zuccotti Park during the heady days of Occupy Wall Street. But the first half of that novel centers on Jan Schwarzer, who, like Appelbaum, is wrestling with where he comes from and what truly matters, parentage or how one feels connected to the past, which ultimately boils down to another question Platzová poses with Life After Kafka, namely what—or who—gets to define you.
In The Attempt, Platzová uses aliases for the historic figures, while in Life After Kafka she only fictionalizes the names of secondary characters. In enumerating these decisions in Life After Kafka, Platzová explains that “Kafka introduced [Felice and Grete] to literature long before I did, via his letters. [They] have become literary characters, and characters can’t be renamed; their names are what define them.” Their names may define them, Platzová seems to say, but they don’t dictate their stories any more than Kafka’s letters do. Nor do those characters’ explicit biographies dictate, constrain, or especially interest Platzová, as she explained in a 2014 interview about her first novel translated into English, Aaron’s Leap: “I like to think around, to dream, to be free in my writing. On the other hand, I am respectful of the facts and I would never make things up that did not happen or could not have happened.”
Such knowing, factual touchstones are sprinkled throughout Life After Kafka. Bauer stores Kafka’s letters in a box from Bata, the venerable Czech shoe store whose flagship location opened on Václavské náměstí, in the heart of Prague, just four years after Kafka’s death, and she reads aloud to her recuperating husband from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, a novel that Kafka adored and dreamed of one day reading to a large crowd. Different readers will certainly draw different parallels, but some passages failed to resonate clearly for me, particularly a chapter about the poet Viola Fischerová, who translated Kafka’s letters to Czech, and whom Platzová refers to only as V., seemingly to acknowledge the many years Felice Bauer’s identity was masked behind Kafka’s use of “F.B.”
When Platzová lets loose her imagination, the results can be striking. She has an incredibly evocative sense of scene, adding details such as which hats are in season in a particular city or what flowers are growing in a certain garden. Zucker, the preeminent translator of contemporary Czech fiction, is characteristically deft here, turning out an edition that few readers would ever suspect originated in a different language. Each character retains a distinctive voice, differentiated across eras. Narrative chapters sing while Platzová’s first-person accounts take on an almost conversational yet documentary tone of their own. And Zucker’s attentiveness shines through in descriptive passages, as with a scene in Switzerland, where Brod’s emissary, the publisher Salman Schocken, has landed after securing Bauer’s letters: “By three o’clock he was standing at the station in Pontresina, breathing deep into his lungs the warm fragrance of drying hay, freshly cut pine trees awaiting pickup, and the frosty breeze from the glaciers. The summer clouds frayed against the saw-toothed mountain peaks and regrouped themselves in the limitless blue overhead.”
Shortly after Brod publishes his biography of Kafka in 1938, Platzová imagines a scene in which Brod’s sister Sophie is explaining to Joachim, eighteen at the time, that his mother is mentioned in the book. Sophie wonders aloud “why Max felt he had to dredge up these personal matters,” adding “What is the point of dragging living people into literature?” Brod and countless subsequent writers and publishers would probably have answered—correctly—that “these personal matters” sell books, meaning the practice is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Perhaps a better question is what to do about those like Bauer, Bloch, and so many others who have already been dragged into the public eye without ever having sought the spotlight or any degree of immortality.
Platzová is certainly not the first author to try and reclaim such inner lives through fiction, but Life After Kafka, with its mix of research and imagination, arrives at an auspicious moment given the flurry of activity around Kafka’s life and work. Ours is also an era when much of society is concerned with and often consumed by trying to control one’s personal narrative. Kafka’s life demonstrates that no matter the degree of effort you expend trying to control things during your lifetime, your legacy is out of your hands. You might end up with a friend like Brod, who believes in you and strives to elevate you above all others, but does so in ways that might not have made you happy. Or you might end up with a champion like Platzová, who will prioritize the value in your story being told, rather than the value from telling your story.
© 2024 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.
