Writing Through The Night

Metamorphosis, episode 1. In which we explore how Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer in autumn 1912 provided both escape and anxiety, ultimately catalysing the creation of his famous novella.

Jan 24, 2025

Having explored ‘The Judgment’ in our previous discussion, I will now begin a new (probably weekslong) series focusing on The Metamorphosis. Readers wishing to follow along—you may want to dust off your copies of Kafka’s most famous novella. While subsequent essays will delve into close readings of the text, today, I’ll examine the turbulent biographical context of autumn 1912, when Kafka interrupted his work on his novel Amerika: The Missing Person and wrote his fantastical masterpiece. Understanding the personal crises and intense correspondence that marked this period might provide crucial insight into the psychological landscape from which Gregor Samsa, our monstrous slimy salesman, will soon emerge.

Let’s get straight to the point: in early October 1912, Franz Kafka contemplated committing suicide.

His mother’s constant demands that he take a more active role in the family’s struggling asbestos factory had become unbearable. Even his beloved sister Ottla, usually his ally, had sided with their parents! In a call-for-help letter to Max Brod, he described that unique moment ‘I stood for a long time at the window and pressed against the pane, and there were many moments when it would have suited me to alarm the toll collector on the bridge by my fall.’ 1 This image of the fall is, of course, redolent of the final moments of Georg Bendemann in ‘The Judgement’…

But, unlike Georg, Kafka didn’t jump.

With characteristic dark humour, he reasoned that ‘staying alive interrupts my writing less than death—even if I can speak only, only of interruption.’ Besides, he added, he would move within ‘the innermost spaces’ of his work (Amerika), even while dealing with the factory and his ‘satisfied parents.’

This episode marked a crucial turning point. Just weeks earlier, as we’ve seen previously, Kafka had met Felice Bauer at Max Brod’s apartment. Now, their correspondence was becoming increasingly intense, providing both an escape and a new source of anxiety. During these same autumn months, while juggling family pressures, office work, and his growing epistolary obsession, Kafka would write The Metamorphosis—the famous story of a man transformed into a big bug, rejected by his family, including a sister who initially supports but ultimately betrays him.

The intersections between life and novella, between letters and fiction writing, are not coincidental. As Reiner Stach notes, ‘The intensity he had craved for so long was now an embraceable reality, which is why he talked about nothing but the intensity of writing and could write only in an outburst that faithfully reflected the dynamism within.’ 2 This intensity would manifest in both his letters to Felice and his fiction, though the relationship between the two was complex and often contradictory.

Antonín Lukavský, *House No. 31636*, 2007.

So, let’s go back to Kafka’s circumstances during that time. The Prague Asbestos Factory had become a battlefield. Hermann Kafka watched his investment—which included his daughter Elli’s dowry and Franz’s share—seeping away. As Stach notes, ‘It became apparent just a few months after the start of production that they had completely miscalculated their finances.’ The family’s response was predictable: they all turned their ire toward Franz, whose apparent indifference to the business seemed incomprehensible.

Kafka’s resistance to involvement wasn’t mere stubbornness, however. His day job at the AUVA already consumed his energy, leaving little time for writing. The thought of adding afternoon visits to the factory felt like a death sentence to his literary ambitions. Yet his parents, who worked twice as long days despite being in their late fifties and not always in the greatest shape, couldn’t fathom how their twenty-nine-year-old son dared consider his daily nap and his writing hobby more important than saving the family business:

That he took the liberty of sleeping when others were working was proof to his family that laziness was the only thing that kept him from traveling to Žižkov on his free afternoons for one or two hours.3

The pressure mounted through his mother Julie, who spent her days absorbing Hermann’s tirades and was tasked with relaying them to Franz in a slightly less confrontational form. This strategic deployment of maternal mediation (a routine that we’ll encounter again later on in Kafka’s Letter to His Father) was a familiar pattern in the Kafka household. As Franz would later write to Felice: ‘My mother is my father’s devoted slave, and my father her devoted tyrant, which is fundamentally why there has always been perfect harmony.’4

But the real blow came when Ottla joined the chorus of complainants. ‘She knew that the family’s lament that Franz alone was to blame for his father’s embitterment and poor physical condition was unjust. But she could not understand why her brother wouldn’t at least briefly stand in for his brother-in-law now that there was an emergency.’ Her intervention struck Kafka as a profound betrayal. As Stach observes:

Kafka panicked. That Ottla, his only confidante, was opposing him in front of their mother in such a matter was a blow: she represented his last connection to the family. Her turning on him meant his expulsion, a new “judgment,” the devastating effect of which would be recast a few weeks later as fraternal excommunication in The Metamorphosis.5

This family dynamic would find its way into Kafka’s fiction with eerie precision. Just as Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete initially shows him kindness before turning against him, Ottla’s shift from ally to opponent marked a crucial moment in Kafka’s emotional life. The parallel is indeed striking: both Gregor and Franz find themselves isolated within their families, their most trusted supporters eventually siding with the hostile majority.

In his distress, Kafka wrote to Max Brod: ‘And yet, now in the morning, I must not conceal this, I hate them all, one after the other, and think that in these fourteen days I shall scarcely be able to summon up the good-mornings and good-evenings.’ 6 Yet even in this dark moment, Kafka’s characteristic sardonic wit emerged: ‘But hatred—and this again is directed against myself—really belongs more outside the window than peacefully sleeping in bed.’

It was in this state of desperation that Kafka’s correspondence with Felice Bauer began to intensify. What started as casual letters evolved into a near-obsessive exchange that would see him writing daily, often late into the night. Between October and December 1912, he sent approximately one hundred letters to Berlin—a remarkable output for someone who claimed to struggle with his writing. For about a year, however, Kafka barely touched his diaries; all his energy was focused on his letters and fiction.

The intensity of this correspondence is evident in Kafka’s meticulous, even obsessive, attention to postal logistics. He enlisted three different people at his office to bring him mail, describing each one’s role with almost comical precision in a letter to Felice that almost prefigures the bank employees of The Trial and the assistants in The Castle:

The first is the clerk Mergl, humble and obliging; but I feel uncontrollable antipathy toward him because I have observed that once my hopes are centered mainly on him, your letter arrives only on the rarest of occasions... The second messenger is the head of the mailing department, Wottawa, a little old bachelor with a wrinkled face covered in a variety of colored blotches and bristling with stubble, his wet lips constantly munching a cigar; but he is divinely handsome when he stands in the doorway, pulls your letter out of his inside pocket, and hands it to me... My third hope is Fräulein Böhm. Indeed, handing me the letter makes her positively happy. She comes in beaming and hands me the letter as though it were from a third party, but actually concerns only the two of us, her and me. [to Felice, 15 Nov. 1912]

But very soon, Kafka’s anxiety about receiving letters became almost pathological. When no letter arrived on a particular day, he sent increasingly desperate messages: ‘Dearest, please don’t torment me! Please! No letter even today, Saturday—today, when I felt sure it would come, as sure as day follows night. But who insisted on a whole letter? Just two lines, a greeting, an envelope, a card!’ [15 Nov. 1912]. The physical absence of a letter created an almost unbearable void: ‘If the pocket is empty, and the head—with thoughts of nothing but you racing around in it—should be ready for office work, then a serious contrast is created, and believe me, dearest, it is extremely difficult to deal with.’ [24 Dec. 1912].

This obsession manifested even in his dreams. On 17 Nov., the very night he first conceived the idea for The Metamorphosis, he described a dream to Felice about envelopes resembling cornucopias, which reveals both his longing for endless communication and also perhaps an unconscious anxiety about being overwhelmed by it (notice the Kafkaesque image depicting the mechanical arms):

A mailman brought two registered letters from you, that is, he delivered them to me, one in each hand, his arms moving in perfect precision, like the jerking of piston rods in a steam engine. God, they were magic letters! I kept pulling out page after page, but the envelopes never emptied. I was standing halfway up a flight of stairs and (don't hold it against me) had to throw the pages I had read all over the stairs, in order to take more letters out of the envelopes. The whole staircase was littered from top to bottom with the loosely heaped pages I had read, the resilient paper creating a great rustling sound. That was a real wishdream! [17 Nov. 1912]

In essence, the letters became a sort of comfort object for Kafka. Or even more than that, as Stach notes, ‘they became sexual fetishes. He spread them out in front of him, laid his face upon them, kissed them, inhaled their smell. On walks or short business trips, he took Felice’s letters along with him, to fortify himself. At times he cared less about the content of a letter than its timely appearance.’ 7 This physical relationship with the letters suggests they served as more than mere communication—they were tangible proof of connection in a period of his life where Kafka felt increasingly isolated and rejected.

Hermann Naumann, *Die Verwandlung*, 1955.

And yet, from letter to letter, the emotional pendulum of Kafka’s missives to Felice fluctuated with dizzying speed. On 9 Nov. 1912, he got cold feet about the relationship, panicked, and drafted what appeared to be a definitive break:

Dearest Fräulein Felice, you are not to write to me again, nor will I write to you. I would be bound to make you unhappy by writing to you, and as for me I am beyond help... If you want me to return your letters, of course I shall do so, much as I should like to keep them. But if you insist on having them, send me a blank postcard as a sign that you do. I on the other hand beg you to keep my letters.—Now quickly forget the ghost that I and go on living happily and peacefully as before. [9 Nov. 1912]

Note the paradoxical, double-bind request to stop writing to him while also asking for yet another letter, albeit an empty one. Yet he never sent this letter, and just two days later, his tone had shifted dramatically: ‘For I am now in the mood, whether you like it or not, to throw myself at your feet and give myself to you in a way that not a trace or memory of me is left for anyone else’ [11 Nov. 1912].

These violent mood swings characterised their entire correspondence. Kafka could move from absolute devotion to crushing self-doubt within the space of a single letter. His happiness upon receiving her letters was matched only by his despair when they failed to arrive. ‘Today, Tuesday, nothing at all. How can I make the best of that?’ he wrote during one such drought. ‘I would treasure the briefest postcard greeting! Dearest, don’t detect reproaches in this, they are not there, but detect love, and love’s anxiety, of which everything I write is full’ [24 Dec. 1912].

The intensity of his emotional investment is clearly tied to repressed jealousy, suspicions, fear of abandonment. When letters didn’t arrive as expected, Kafka’s imagination ran wild with possibilities. He would speculate about lost mail, family interference, or worse—Felice’s possible indifference. As Stach notes:

Kafka could not maintain the shaky, temporary balance between closeness and detachment that typifies all initial overtures. He knew that he had to wait, yet when he got into bed at two or three at night after pleasantly intense work on “The Stoker,” his brain began to fantasize endless letters, hammering away in one attempt after the other, until the light of dawn.8

This jealousy, too, emerged in curious ways. References to other people in Felice’s letters—particularly men—could send him into a tailspin: ‘I am jealous of all the people in your letter, those named and those unnamed, men and girls, business people and writers (writers above all, needless to say)’ [28-29 Dec. 1912]. Even her attending dancing parties and involvement in amateur theatre productions caused him anxiety, as he fretted about rehearsals and potential romantic entanglements. This behaviour, often pleading or controlling, reminds us of similar patterns in Marcel Proust’s La Prisonnière (The Prisoner), where the narrator’s intense jealousy in his obsessive relationship with Albertine reaches its peak.

That being said, the correlation between Kafka’s epistolary fever and his creative breakthrough is also striking. Before meeting Felice, except for his diary and a few pieces of what we would nowadays call ‘flash fiction,’ his writing output had been frankly minimal. Yet in the months following his encounter with Felice, he produced some of his most significant work, including, as we’ve seen, ‘The Judgment’ (written in a single night), The Metamorphosis, and Amerika. This surge in productivity wasn’t merely coincidental.

It’s as though the letters themselves had become a kind of literary springboard. Writing to Felice forced Kafka to sit at his desk daily, developing what would become his preferred method of composition: writing in one continuous movement, allowing his mind to wander freely. As he noted in his letters, not too much time should pass between writing sessions. For him, the writing had to happen quickly, without interruption, in the flow, almost as if he were channelling his subconscious.

This newfound rhythm emerged directly from his correspondence with Felice. As Stach observes, ‘Kafka attempted the impossible... It is as though he had decided in September 1912 to dig a tunnel from Prague to Berlin with his bare hands. While everyone else was travelling above him, in the bright light of day, he sought a relationship that was hidden, belonging only to him and Felice, a communication, as it were, between two rooms.’ 9

The intensity of this epistolary, burrow-digging relationship seemed to unlock something in Kafka’s creative consciousness. As we know, Kafka wrote ‘The Judgement’ on 23 Sept. 1912, three days after the start of his correspondence with Felice. Similarly, on 17 Nov., just three days after receiving Felice’s positive response to his use of the informal ‘Du,’ marking a new threshold in their intimacy, Kafka conceived, the idea for ‘a short story that occurred to me in bed in my misery,’ which would end up being The Metamorphosis. This novella took him three weeks to complete instead of one night, but his timing suggests that the emotional upheaval of their correspondence—with its alternating currents of intimacy and alienation—may have provided the psychological triggers and fuel for his fiction.

His letters from this period even reveal how the boundaries between correspondence and creation seem to blur. ‘The novel [Amerika] still won’t obey me,’ he wrote to Felice, ‘I hold on to it, but it resists me unawares, and I keep having to let it go for whole passages on end’ [12-13 Dec. 1912]. The language here mirrors the dynamics of their relationship—a constant push and pull between control and surrender.

Even more telling is how Kafka would interrupt his creative work to write to Felice, as a sort of counterpoint: ‘Dearest, once again I am putting aside this exceptionally repulsive story [The Metamorphosis] in order to refresh myself by thinking of you’ [24 Nov. 1912]. Yet this ‘refreshment’ came at a cost. His nocturnal letter-writing often left him exhausted, affecting both his day job and his creative work: ‘My work moreover has been so bad that I don’t deserve any sleep, and should be condemned to spend the rest of the night looking out of the window’ [29-30 Nov. 1912].

Miquel Barceló, *La metamorfosis*, 2020.

Gradually, the toll of Kafka’s double, triple, quadruple life—maintaining an intensive correspondence, his creative work, his day job, and all the rest—became evident, and the physical exhaustion was matched by emotional drainage. His family’s discovery of the correspondence added yet another layer of complexity. When his mother found one of Felice’s letters in his coat pocket and took the liberty of writing to her directly, Kafka’s reaction was explosive. As he described to Felice: ‘We had visitors... I went straight to my room, well aware that I would not be able to stand it there; I was amazed that the apartment didn’t disintegrate, such was the tension within me’ [22 Nov. 1912].

Max Brod, witnessing his friend’s distress, felt compelled to intervene. In a letter to Felice, he attempted to lucidly explain the situation: ‘Franz’s mother loves him very much, but she has not the faintest idea who her son is and what his needs are. Literature is a “pastime”! My God! As though it did not eat our hearts out, willing victims though we are’ [22 Nov. 1912].

The irony wasn’t lost on Kafka that his attempt to escape family pressure through his correspondence with Felice had resulted in yet another form of familial intrusion. Yet despite—or perhaps because of—these complications, Kafka’s creative output during this period remained remarkable. The Metamorphosis, written during this tumultuous time, bears the psychological imprints of his situation. The story’s themes of familial alienation, betrayal, and the transformation of the self mirror his own experiences during these months.

Sometimes the price of creation is paid in the currency of personal peace.

More to come soon.

Writing Through The Night

Metamorphosis, episode 1. In which we explore how Kafka's correspondence with Felice Bauer in autumn 1912 provided both escape and anxiety, ultimately catalysing the creation of his famous novella.

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