looking for Milena

After watching the amazing new Kafka movie in November, I started reading his letters to Milena Jesenská in the old paperback edition that has been in the family since August 1966. (I can actually remember seeing it on my parents' bookshelves as child.) I stopped reading half-way in, however, when a glance at the afterword informed me that the editor had left out lots of material for fear of offending people who were still alive at the time of publication. I understand that more recent editions are more comprehensive, and have also reconsidered the chronology which is a bit of a challenge. So I'll look out for one of those to read instead.

The situation is similar for the biography of Milena and the anthology of her work that I read a couple of years ago (but forgot to review). Both have now been bettered by the efforts of Alena Wagnerová who wrote a new biography and edited a new compilation of the journalistic work as well as one with Milena's letters to other people (those to Kafka are lost). All three are in Czech originally and have been translated to German, but apparently not into English according to the references list in the Wikipedia entry.

I'll look out for all of these books, but in the meantime here's my (now somewhat antiquarian) collection of earlier Milena-related sources:

When I was looking for other Kafka-related movies, I also discovered one about Milena which I had never heard of before:

Milena by Véra Belmont, starring Valérie Kapriskie in the title role. This dates from 1990 so may not exist on DVD?

becoming Franz K

Some thoughts on

Franz
by Agnieska Holland
Czech Republic 2025

We know Franz Kafka through so many reflections and distortions that the cultural phenomenon has long outgrown the real life writer and his work. Everything imaginable and its opposite has already been written about him so I don't need to feed the AI bots with more of that. Like everybody else on the planet, I have read more words about him than by him. Agnieszka Holland's film is also about the cultural phenomenon at least as much as about the person.

What I find really interesting is the reflected light falling on the other people in his life. I've always been a huge fan of Milena Jesenská, who only turns up quite late in this movie, and not quite like I had imagined her. I do recommend her journalism work,a selection of which I read a couple of years ago and forgot to review. I just saw that a new German version has been published (after the copyright expired) with a hefty 400 pages and a new title (see the cover below) - my copy only had 300. It's such a shame her letters to Kafka went missing. After seeing the movie, I've started reading his letters to her (in an edition I remember seeing on my parents' shelves when I was a child).

It was interesting to discover Felice Bauer, of whom I only knew the name, as well as Kafka's favourite sister, Ottla, who steals the show throughout the movie. The last lover, Dora Diamant is missing here, but she had a whole movie for herself (Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens (The glory of life)), which I sadly missed when it came out last year.

The other fascinating character in this story is the city of Prague. Luckily the city hasn't changed much since he was alive. All the important buildings in Kafka's life are still standing, enabling the director to jump back and forth in time effortlessly. Interestingly, the small and isolated German language community of Prague had an amazing run at producing writers in that generation, including Rilke, born 1875, Kafka, 1883, Egon Erwin Kisch, 1885 and Franz Werfel, 1890.

The movie poster used in Germany. Is the hand-written K part of the title or just a decorative element? Some sources cite the title as Franz, others as Franz K. Note that the sliced head echoes a metal sculpture of his head on display in Prague outside one of the (at least two) Kafka museums there. That sculpture also makes a brief appearance in the film.

The other important question is: will it get a UK release? Given Kafka's unbeatable brand recognition, I would expect it does, but I'll slap on my "films not shown" tag until that release is confirmed. Come to think of it, The glory of life, which came out in time for the centenary of Kafka's death, hasn't had a UK release yet. So maybe even the name Kafka doesn't guarantee a release these days ...

Heck, I even have a kafka tag, due to the fact that I visited Prague a couple of times when this blog was young and still had illusions ...

Review in epd-film

The new(ish) edition of Milena's journalism work (from 2020). I'm finding it rather hard not to buy the book when she looks at me like that, but I'm trying to establish whether there is anything in there that I don't have in my older collection of her writings (Alles ist Leben, published 1984 and republished several times with the same photo on the cover).

Prague slide show

I spent a rather lovely week at Prague, checking out the EuCheMS conference and also spending a lot of time roaming the city in the footsteps of Kafka, Dvorak, Jacopo Strada, Tycho Brahe, Kepler ...

Here's a slideshow of a small selection of my photos:

125 today

You know that you've made it as a writer if there is an adjective derived from your name that doesn't just mean "written by or in the style or time of X". In this very small club (together with Freud, Machiavelli, de Sade, and Masoch) falls Franz Kafka who would have turned 125 today. I once took a course on Kafka at university, close to his 100th birthday, actually, so the things I have now read surrounding his 5/4 century rang a few, somewhat muted, bells. Will have to re-read some of his books one day.

The five women populating his love life look interesting, I guess I would write kafkaesque novels too, if I were torn between these ...