18. To Paul Kisch in Munich

Prague, 4 February 1903, Wednesday

The story? No, it doesn’t seem to me a good story. If I had read it in a book, I might have read past it without much regret and without much thought.

Another pen-and-ink story and not even with a special pen or in special ink. A story that, without an inkwell, wouldn’t have been written, wouldn’t have come into being, and not without sheets of white paper on which one carefully writes down correctly yes correctly things half read and half heard. (To write like this, after one has read Goethe and and, I’d be inclined to regard as strange) A small tremor, a small mood, a small life [not small, but made small] well-wrapped in respectable German main and subordinate clauses nowhere wrought by necessity—I don’t have to write, but I write—and nowhere lived along with. One example I still have in my memory: The lovers are standing at the window, embracing, it’s Christmas. Cruelly the pen writes: “Outside frolicked the cavalry of white snowflakes.” There you’ve struck the lovers dead.

Being young doesn’t mean economizing and being young doesn’t mean honoring grammar. But the story is frugal and you owe less to language than you think.

So an unnecessary story, I would have said, if I’d said anything at all, and would have shut the book. Now you’ve read the story aloud to me. You read well, very simply and yet movingly. You meant to be moving. One believes in honesty and in experiences. One is sad when she dies, and would like to take your hand. But then much comes in addition that doesn’t come from the story. In the next moment one is cool and morose, has nothing good or bad to say, and has the painful sense that one cannot fulfill expectations one would gladly have fulfilled

That’s how I feel about your story. You wanted honesty, otherwise you wouldn’t have written.

Please send me something of yours sometime I believe the things you’re writing now in Munich won’t even recognize the Prague things. One must get different eyes and fingers and souls in such sharp air.

Here the air is thick musty could be cut with kitchen knives and comes out of bedrooms. One must be on guard here against ideas, no sooner has one let them loose than they have pot-bellies and sweat. It was 3 weeks ago when I was thinking of something like a Montmartre tavern something screamingly wild. But within a week that Montmartre tavern had relocated to the city park N 4 of all places at—, was called aesthetic-ethical—it’s not to be written out, was well-mannered, drank bad liqueur and nibbled. Oskar arranged it. It’s supposed to be repeated every 2 weeks. You’ll replace me when you come. Because I am replaceable. By the way, one doesn’t exactly get bored, there are some quite clever people there. That’s all. Yes yes while one yawns here on the sofas, Munich is raging. But one contents oneself, holds one’s hands over one’s belly, if one has one, smiles to oneself and yawns. So it’s a true miracle that one does remain scarecrow-thin.

Your Franz

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“The story?”: Paul Kisch confirms in a letter to Max Brod dated August 26, 1937, “that Kafka, at that time”—i.e., in the winter semester of 1902–03—“was still reading and commenting on” his “stories and poems” (“Franz Kafka: Karten und Briefe an Paul Kisch,” Sinn und Form 40 (1988), pp. 816-817).

“It was 3 weeks ago…every 2 weeks.”: Kafka is evidently describing his first encounter with a circle of followers of the philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917). The group met regularly at the Café Louvre on Ferdinandstraße (hence also called the “Louvre Circle”), or in apartments near the city park belonging to the Freund couple (see the annotations to Kafka’s February 7, 1903 letter to Paul Kisch) and to Prague professor Anton Marty (1847–1914), Brentano’s student, whose course on “Fundamental Questions of Descriptive Psychology” Kafka had attended the previous summer semester (based on a record of the courses Kafka attended from the winter semester of 1901-02 to the end of the summer semester of 1905, preserved in the archives of Charles University in Prague).

“Oskar arranged it.”: Alongside Oskar Pollak, the so-called Louvre Circle included other former classmates and friends of Kafka’s, such as Hugo Bergmann, Emil Utitz, Felix Weltsch, and Max Brod. Kafka maintained a certain distance from the group and, in the following years, took part in its gatherings only irregularly.

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Paul Kisch: (b. Prague, 19 November 1882–d. Auschwitz, 1944) Paul Kisch, the oldest of five sons of Hermann und Ernestine Kisch, shared a friendship with Kafka that went beyond their time together at the Altstädter Gymnasium. After completing his secondary education, Kisch began his university studies in German language and literature in the winter semester of 1901–1902 and joined the Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten (Reading and Lecture Hall of German Students), as did Kafka and most of their former classmates. In the winter semester of 1902–1903, Kisch continued his studies at the University of Munich, a plan he appears to have initially pursued together with Kafka and Emil Utitz, another mutual school friend. By the summer semester of 1903, however, Kisch had returned to Prague. In the years that followed, under the influence of the Prague Germanist August Sauer, Kisch developed German nationalist sentiments, which found expression in his active membership in a dueling student fraternity. Frequently clashing with the authorities in Prague over his emphatically German nationalist conduct, he moved to Vienna in 1907, continuing his studies there and working as a journalist. In the spring of 1908, Kisch considered converting to Protestantism but abandoned the plan out of consideration for his mother.

Kisch earned his doctorate at Prague’s Charles University in 1912 and, in the summer of 1913, took over the editorial position at the Prague daily Bohemia that had been vacated by his brother Egon Erwin Kisch. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kisch relocated to Vienna, where he worked on the editorial staff of the Neue Freie Presse and contributed to numerous other newspapers and magazines. The annexation of Austria into the German Reich in 1938 forced him to return to Prague, where, that same year, he married Karoline Apfelthaler, a friend of his since 1912. In 1943 Paul Kisch was deported; he was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944.

English Translation Copyright © 2025 Ross Benjamin

This translation is based on Franz Kafka: Briefe. Kommentierte Ausgabe. Herausgegeben von Hans-Gerd Koch © S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 1999.