Bureaucratic claustrophobia, alienation, guilt, hopelessness — these are just a few of the leitmotifs in Franz Kafka’s creations. This year marks the centennial anniversary of his death, and a bounty of titles about and by the misunderstood and tormented Czech author are being released to celebrate his legacy. But in her novel Life After Kafka, Magdaléna Platzová conjures a Kafka of her own.
Platzová has excelled at melding fiction with historical elements. Her 2006 novel Aaron’s Leap is based on the real-life story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who taught art to children in a Nazi transport camp. Her award-winning 2016 novel The Attempt, based on Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, spans decades and deals with the legacy of radical politics and relationships.
Like Aaron’s Leap, Life After Kafka is historical fiction, and Platzová, once again, writes about displacement and the horrors of the Holocaust. But the main focus of the novel is Franz Kafka’s relationship with Berlin-raised Felice Bauer, his longest (1912-1917) and most complex romance (they were engaged twice). The couple’s relationship was mostly an epistolatory one – except for a brief vacation together in the spa town of Marienbad – and is buoyed by the 600 letters and postcards that Kafka wrote to Felice. The author includes excerpts from these letters, culled from 1967’s Letters to Felice, and nonfiction chapters detailing her research to brilliantly envision the Kafka-Bauer relationship.
Moving fluidly between time periods and locations, the novel follows Felice’s life, starting in 1912 Prague where she meets Kafka who is a lawyer for an insurance company. We travel to Geneva with Felice who was fleeing the Nazis, and we land with her in Los Angeles in the mid 1930s where she raised a family with her husband Robert (real name Moritz Marasse). To summon Felice and Kafka, we hear from their confrères including Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor and best friend. We also learn about the couple from Salman Schocken, publisher of many of Kafka works; Grete Bloch, an Apate-like character; and Bauer’s son, Joachim (real name Henry).
The novel begins in 1975 with a scathing letter from Joachim to Elias Canetti, author of Kafka’s Other Trial. In the letter, Joachim describes his mother as “warm and generous … [caring] for war orphans at the Jewish Home in Berlin.” He portrays her as inventive and happy. But then Joachim admonishes Canetti for writing that Felice was “insensitive and self-serving” for selling the letters. Joachim’s love for his mother is further expressed through his declaration that Canetti should be “more cautious in [his] fabrications next time.” Joachim is critical to the story, so Platzová weaves in defining moments of his life.
We first meet Grete Bloch in 1935 at a party at Felice’s Geneva apartment: “Grete sits reclining in one of the armchairs … with the blueish shadows around her eyes, she looks like a cadaver.” According to Reiner Stach, Kafka’s preeminent biographer, Bloch met Felice in Frankfurt at a trade show. Bloch eventually gained Felice’s confidence to become the liaison between Kafka and Felice. According to Stach, Grete revealed Bauer family secrets to Kafka and in the novel she is seen as indiscreet: “Felice, I have something awful to tell you. You’re going to hate me for it, but I can’t keep it to myself. He doesn’t want to marry you!” Bloch later lived in exile in Italy and Platzová captures her disquiet there: “And like flames creeping along the edges of a sheet of paper before they swallowed it up for good, madness was creeping along the edges of her soul, while at the core it was barren and empty. The pain …”
Max Brod plays a major role in the novel because “Without [Brod] there would be no Kafka.” Kafka famously left instructions for his best friend to burn his diaries and manuscripts when he died. But Brod, who recognized Kafka’s talent, edited and arranged posthumous publication of his novels and diaries. Brod also believed that Kafka fathered a son with Grete Bloch, a tension in the book.
The nonfiction chapters about Platzová’s research are intriguing because we learn more about Felice through the characters’ memory. In 2011, the author met with Henry (Joachim) a year before his death. Henry was oblique, not confirming his mother’s love for Kafka because talking about him “was taboo.” She also met with Henry’s daughter, Leah: “My grandmother Felice never spoke about unpleasant or difficult things.” Platzová also reached out to Anna Pizzuti, a scholar on Jewish refugees in Italy, who refuted refutes Brod’s statement that Bloch gave birth to Kafka’s illegitimate son, who appears as Casimiro Appelbaum, an imposter in the novel. Reiner Stach also contests Applebaum’s and Brod’s claim.
[Left — Felice Bauer and Kafka, 1917] Platzová conveys the mercurial nature of Felice’s relationship with Kafka: “she was flattered to have a writer wooing her … [but] she had never been interested in his writing; that wasn’t what she wanted. It was him she liked.” Still, Kafka, dedicated his 1913 short story “The Judgement” to her. Kafka’s raison d’être was to be an author, at all costs: “He may have genuinely wanted Felice, but his writing did not.”
Years later, in Paris, Felice met with Ernst Weiss, Kafka’s friend, who details why he believes the Kafka-Bauer relationship was torn asunder: “He never should have stayed at that dreadful insurance company. It was killing him. And you acted like you didn’t see it … How could she be so bright and yet so deaf and blind? I thought. I was so angry at you for being so obtuse. He was begging, Felice. He knew his life was at stake. He wanted nothing but to leave his job at the office and write.” Stach confirms that Weiss “develop[ed] an aversion to [Felice] for stopping his friend from fulfilling his destiny.”
Kafka’s anxiousness resonates through the characters in the novel and the following excerpt from a letter to Felice: “For I am desperate, like a caged rat, insomnia and headaches tearing at me; how I get through the days is quite beyond description. To be free from the office is my only possible salvation, my primary desire.”
In 1955, Felice, ill and under financial duress, decided to sell Kafka’s letters to Schocken for $8,000. She had preserved them for over 40 years, an indication of how much Kafka meant to her — or how much she wanted to suppress. The author depicts the post-prandial transaction as Felice presents Schocken with a shoebox containing the letters: “The thought suddenly flashed through her mind that when Schocken opened it up, Franz would be lying there inside.” The letters, along with some addressed to Grete Bloch, were published in 1967, seven years after Felice’s death. In 1987, Sotheby’s sold the letters for $605,000.
[Published by Bellevue Literary Press win August 6, 2024, 256 pages, $17.99 trade paperback]