Milena Jesenská on Franz Kafka (1924)

Franz Kafka. The day before yesterday, Dr. Franz Kafka, a German author who had lived in Prague, died in the Sanatorium Kierling in Klosterneuburg near Vienna. Only a few people knew him here because he was a recluse, an erudite person frightened by life. He had been suffering for years from a lung disease and although he underwent medical treatment, he also knowingly fostered and intellectually encouraged it. “When the soul and the heart can no longer bear the burden, then the lungs take half of it upon themselves so that the weight can be at least somewhat evenly distributed,” he wrote once in a letter, and so it went with his illness too. It conferred on him a sensitivity that verged on the miraculous and an almost frightening mental integrity; as a human being, conversely, he offloaded the entire weight of his intellectual fear of life onto his illness. He was shy, fearful, gentle and good, but the books he wrote were gruesome and painful. He saw the world as full of invisible demons, battling and destroying defenceless humans. He was too clear-sighted, too wise to live, and too weak to fight: but his was the weakness of noble, beautiful people who are unable to fight against fear, misunderstandings, unkindness and intellectual dishonesty, who are aware of their powerlessness from the outset, who submit and thus shame the victor. He had the kind of knowledge of humanity that is only granted to those who live alone, whose highly sensitive nerves have a psychic grasp of a whole person from a mere facial expression. His knowledge of the world was unusual and deep. He was himself an unusual and deep world. He wrote the most important books in contemporary German literature. They contain, without tendentiousness, the generational battle of modern times. They possess a true nakedness that makes them seem still naturalistic, even when they are expressed symbolically. They have the dry irony and the sensitive gaze of a person who beheld the world in such a stark brightness that he was unable to bear it and had to die, being unprepared to retreat and save himself, as others do, from any kind of subconscious intellectual error, however noble. Dr. Franz Kafka wrote the fragment The Stoker (which appeared in Czech in Neumann’s Červen [June]); it formed the first chapter of a wonderful, as yet unpublished novel. The Judgement, which describes the conflict between two generations. The Metamorphosis, the strongest book in modern German literature. In the Penal Colony and the sketches Meditation and The Country Doctor. His last novel, Before the Law has been ready to print in manuscript for years now; it is the kind of book that leaves the reader with the impression of such a self-contained world that there is no need to add a single word. All his works depict the horror of secretive misunderstandings and of being at fault through no fault of one’s own. He was a person and artist of such scrupulous conscience that he remained alert when others were deaf, and were feeling safe. Milena Jesenská.

Milena’s obituary to Franz Kafka in Národní listy of 6. 6. 1924, as published in German translation in Forum, Vienna, 1962.