Letters to Ottla and the Family

Ottla Kafka(1892-1943) was Franz Kafka's beloved sister, with whom he maintained a close relationship for much of his adult life. Franz corresponded with her between 1909 and 1924 (when he finally succumbed to tuberculosis). Although Ottla was murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis, Franz's letters to her were preserved by her husband and children.

The letters include correspondence to Ottla, as well as a few letters to Franz's parents. They were first published in 1974, and an English language edition was published in 1982. In addition to Franz' letters, the book also contains photographs of Franz, Ottla, and others, as well as images from the picture postcards that he sent to her.

Readers under the influence of the Kafka Myth will show more likely be surprised at how very ordinary most of the letters are. They chiefly deal with ordinary things in each of their lives -- work, housing, relationships, the parents, and so on (with no signs of the anguish and torment the more naïve readers of Kafka's fiction might have expected). A few letters give hints into what is happening in Franz' personal life, including his strange and protracted correspondence relationship with Felice Bauer (to whom he was engaged twice and ultimately never married). Some letters are written to Ottla after she has left home to go to school for an advanced degree; and others to her shortly before and then after her marriage to Josef David. Still other letters were sent by Franz to Ottla and to their parents from one of the sanitaria which he visited for his tuberculosis treatments.

Some letters reveal glimpses into his odd personality. In July of 1914, in writing about the confrontation with Felice and her friends (a confrontation during which she broke off the engagement), he writes to Ottla: "Just a few words in haste before I attempt to go to sleep, at which I quite failed last night... I will of course write to you about Berlin. At the moment there is nothing definite to say about the question or about me. I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into the deepest darkness. "

A full six years later, he writes to Ottla of the time Felice first visited Praguer: "I could easily have had time off, but preferred lazing around the office, only spent the afternoon with her, and really did not realize the mistake until much later in Berlin when she reproached me for it; but it had not been lack of love, perhaps fear of being together " Yes, Felice, his fiancé.

In 1914, he penned a long fragment of a letter never sent to his parents, a precursor to the infamous "Brief an den Vater" (Letter to Father). In this early version, he begins to lay out his plan to quit his job, leave Prague, and try to support himself through his writing -- something that he never did have the wherewithal to actually attempt.

Lacking Ottla's letters to Franz (which have disappeared) it is often hard to grasp to what Franz is writing in response. Most of the letters to Ottla are best understood in the context of details of his life, as outlined in the various biographies that have now been published. For this reason and others, this collection of correspondence will chiefly be of interest to Kafka scholars who may use them to seek insights into the life, personality, and psyche of the enigmatic author. show less