Kafka's Moonlight Tryst: Love in the Time of Nietzsche
As I indicated in last week’s post, Franz Kafka’s first extant letter documents a romantic encounter that took place in the summer of 1900, shortly after he completed his Matura (aka Graduation, A-levels, Abitur, Bac…) at age 17. While holidaying with his family, he met a young woman named Selma Kohn Robitschek. In that short letter, dated September 4, 1900, Kafka alludes to this fleeting romance:
How many words in this book.
They are meant for remembrance. As though words could carry memories.
For words are clumsy mountaineers and clumsy miners. Not for them to bring down treasures from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ bowels.1
The poetic, metaphorical language anticipates Kafka’s enduring preoccupation with recording transient moments of insight via the written word. What I find surprising are his doubts that his “unskillful hand and crude pen” (in other words, his own writing) can accurately capture lived experiences, preferring instead the “white, undemanding pages” of memory. The conflict between the fleeting nature and authenticity of the moment and the enduring, flawed nature of the written word will be a recurring motif in Kafka’s writings.
But what exactly transpired between Franz and Selma that summer? According to Reiner Stach’s biography, the young couple “decided to sneak out into the spacious garden late in the evening when everyone was asleep, where, on the slope of a hill, there was a bench that looked out onto a loop of the Vltava River as it glistened in the moonlight.” There, in a secluded grove, “Franz, who had brought along a candle, pulled Nietzsche’s Zarathustra out of his pocket and began to read aloud passages he had recited in silence during the day.”2 By the way, the mountain metaphor in the letter above seems directly inspired by Nietzsche’s style and imagery.
This vignette paints a rather romantic image, contrary to the prevailing notion of Kafka as a tormented, asexual recluse. Heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas at the time, Kafka sought to express his aversion to conventional morality and his vision of life’s transience. By reading Nietzsche aloud to his sweetheart, Kafka used literature and philosophy to impress her, of course, but also to push against social norms and authorities.
Yet it is doubtful that their summer romance involved any physical intimacy beyond perhaps some nervous making out. According to Stach, Kafka’s parents kept a close eye on the youngsters. Moreover, Kafka himself seemed hesitant to openly express sexual interest in girls despite his movie star looks. He felt insecure about his tall, gangly frame, lamenting the “cheap clothing his parents gave him to wear, which seemed to draw even more attention to this ugliness.”3
Kafka’s sexual education at home had more to do with avoiding risks than with cultivating pleasure or eroticism. Until quite late in adolescence, he probably had little knowledge of the birds and the bees. “The term Wöchnerin (a woman who has recently given birth) had been familiar to him since early childhood—he heard it quite often at home—but it appears likely that even at the age of fifteen, he had no knowledge of his own biological origins.”4 Sex was presented as a “minefield” of temptations and diseases, fueling a potent mix of curiosity and anxiety.
With Selma, he had the freedom to indulge his bookish, dreamy side. However, society’s expectations dictated that he demonstrate his virility and manliness sooner or later. Kafka’s father, Hermann, who was quite open about his own sexual proclivities, had a peculiar way of encouraging his son’s development: he offered to take Franz to a brothel! An offer the mortified Franz understandably refused. This uncomfortable situation would continue to resonate throughout Kafka’s future relationships with women: “if he took his father’s advice (as he actually did later on), the path led straight into the dirt; if, on the other hand, he did not take this advice, he was only confirming the preconception that he was a feeble son who lacked independence and was somehow unmanly.”5
The adolescent’s struggle between mind and body, repression and liberation, continued well into adulthood. He will later engage in a series of intense yet ultimately ill-fated romances, all the while wrestling with feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and shame, as if tortured by desire while simultaneously driven by a constant urge to chase women, with a fear of “sexual failure” and poor body image despite his striking appearance. Yet, the seeds of this struggle can scarcely be detected in the tender scene of young Franz and Selma, sharing a moment of moonlit intimacy, poetry, and innocence within the confines of that peaceful garden on the brink of adulthood.
But what do you think? Can you empathise with Kafka’s pubescent turmoil and thrill of intellectual and sensual discoveries? Post your thoughts below.
After this brief idyll with Selma Kohn, Kafka developed a profound bond (intellectual and possibly otherwise) with his schoolmate Oskar Pollak, documented in a series of letters we’ll explore next week: stay tuned!
Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, loc. 82.
The Early Years, loc. 3804.
Ibid., loc. 3412.
Ibid., loc. 3352.
Ibid., loc. 3502.