2. To Elli Kafka in Prague
Triesch, 21 July 1900, Saturday
Little Ella, what do you look like now, I’ve already so completely forgotten you that it’s as if I’d never stroked you. Best regards
Your
Franz.
Triesch: During Kafka’s school and university years, he often spent his summer vacations with his favorite uncle, the country doctor Siegfried Löwy (1867-1942), in Triesch (Czech: Třešť), Moravia.
“Little Ella”: Kafka’s then eleven-year-old sister Gabriele, called Elli or Ella. By addressing her in this way, Kafka is probably alluding to the title of a prose sketch in Peter Altenberg’s 1897 collection Ashantee (In the Vienna Zoological Garden among the Negroes of the Gold Coast, West Coast).
Elli Kafka: (b. Prague, 22 September 1889–d. 1942) Gabriele Kafka (later Hermann),called Elli, was the oldest daughter of Julie and Hermann Kafka. She attended the German girls’ school on Fleischnergasse and later a private institute for the continuing education of girls. On November 27, 1910, she married the businessman Karl Hermann, with whom she had three children: Felix (1911-1940), Gerti (1912-1972), and Hanna (1919-1942). According to her brother, Elli Hermann had previously been an awkward, never-satisfied, morosely stumbling creature (see Kafka’s January 10–11, 1913 letter to Felice Bauer), but he was astonished by how marriage transformed her personality. Throughout her life, Elli—like her sisters—remained under the influence of her brother, who followed the development of her children with interest. Still, she did not follow his advice on child-rearing, particularly his suggestion to send the children to a school outside Prague. This did not affect the close bond between the siblings. During the First World War, Kafka accompanied his sister on a visit to her husband, who was stationed in Hungary (see Kafka’s April 27, 1915 diary entry), and he even went on summer vacation with his sister and her children to Müritz on the Baltic Sea the year before he died. Six months later, in the winter of 1923–24, while her brother was experiencing hardship in inflation-stricken Berlin, Elli Hermann participated in the family’s support efforts by sending letters and care packages.
With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the Hermann family fell into financial difficulties; the bankruptcy of the family business and Karl Hermann’s death in 1939 left Elli Hermann largely dependent on the support of her sisters. Together with her daughter Hanna, she was deported to Łódź on October 21, 1941, where her trail is lost. Elli Hermann probably died in a camp in 1942.
English Translation Copyright © 2024 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.