Franz Kafka

Name:	Franz Kafka
Date of Birth:	July 3, 1883
Occupation:	Novelist and writer
Ethnicity:	Jewish-German

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Jewish-German Prague born novelist and writer. He is considered one of the most important representatives of German-language literature of the 20th century.

Relation to women

He never married. Kafka had an ambivalent relationship with women. On the one hand he felt attracted to them, on the other hand he fled from them.

Kafka's first love was the high school graduate Hedwig Therese Weiler, who was born in Vienna in 1888. Kafka met her in the summer of 1907 in Triesch near Iglau (Moravia), where both were spending their holidays with relatives. Although the holiday acquaintance led to an exchange of letters, no further meetings took place.

Felice Bauer, a lower-middle-class Jew, and Kafka met for the first time on August 13 1912 in the apartment of his friend Max Brod. She and Kafka communicated mostly through letters over the next five years, met occasionally, and were engaged twice. Kafka's extant letters to Bauer were published as Briefe an Felice (eng.: "Letters to Felice"); her letters didn't survive.

Sexual encounters with his girlfriends Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenka seem to have been frightening for him. But Kafka's visits to brothels are known. Simultaneously, Kafka was a man with diverse platonic relationships with women in conversations and letters, especially during his stays at spas.

In his journal, he wrote:

"Coitus as punishment for the happiness of being together. Living as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that is the only way for me to endure marriage. But her?"

According to Brod (friend of him and another German novelist), Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire.

Kafka's biographer Reiner Stach states that his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled with a fear of "sexual failure".

Speculations about his sexual orientation

In Kafka's diary entries, his friendships with Oskar Pollak, Franz Werfel and Robert Klopstock are addressed with enthusiastic, homoerotic overtones.

Homoerotic allusions are clearly evident in his work. Already in one of his earlier, larger stories, Description of a Struggle, the narrator and an acquaintance have a fantastic conversation on a hill about their mutual relationship and the resulting injuries. Karl Rossmann in The Lost develops an almost incomprehensible attachment to the stoker he has just met on the ship. The stoker had invited him to his bed. As he leaves, he doubts that his uncle will ever be able to replace this stoker.

In the castle, Karl enters the room of the official Bürgel. In his exhaustion, he lies down in bed with the official and is welcomed by him. During his sleep, he dreams of a secretary as a naked god.

See also

• The Metamorphosis
• German incelosphere
• Ethnicel (due to him being Jewish)
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Otto Weininger