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 m…