Felice Bauer

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Felice Bauer (born November 18, 1887 in Neustadt in Upper Silesia ; † October 15, 1960 in Rye , New York , USA ) was Franz Kafka's first fiancée.

origin

Felice Bauer came from a lower middle-class Jewish family. The father Carl Bauer worked as an insurance agent , while the mother, Anna Bauer, geb. Danziger, daughter of a dyer. Felice had four siblings: Else (1883–1952), Ferdinand (1884–1952), Erna (1885–1978) and Antonie (1892–1918), called Toni . In 1899 her family moved from Upper Silesia to Berlin.

Relationship with Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka met Felice on the evening of August 13, 1912 while visiting his friend Max Brod , whose sister Sophie was married to a cousin of Felice Bauer. Felice, who had started her commercial school education in 1908 because of her father's financial difficulties, worked as a stenographer for a Berlin record company from 1909 . A year later she moved to Carl Lindström AG , where she was promoted after a short time. When she got to know Kafka, she had already risen to the position of authorized signatory. After Franz and Felice twice locked and again entlobt had, they separated in 1917 in Prague final.

Kafka dedicated the story The Judgment, written in 1912 and published in 1913, to her (subtitle: A story for Felice B. ).

Marriage, family and married life

In contrast to Franz Kafka, due to her good professional position, she was very responsible for the upkeep of her family from an early age. Soon after the final termination of her relationship with Franz Kafka, she married Moritz Marasse (1873–1950), 14 years her senior, in 1919. This marriage resulted in two children: the son Heinz (1920–2012) and the daughter Ursula (1921–1966). The happiness of the family ended with the Great Depression in 1929 and the success of the National Socialists in the Reichstag elections in 1930 . With financial losses, the family moved to Switzerland in 1930/31 , from where they emigrated to California in 1936, where Felice Bauer had to support the family with handicrafts. In 1950 her husband died. Towards the end of her life, Felice Bauer was forced by an illness and the resulting financial difficulties to sell the numerous letters she had received from Kafka to the publisher Salman Schocken . Elias Canetti , who did not know Bauer's living conditions, criticized the sale lightly. The bundle of letters was published in 1967 as letters to Felice and in 1973 in an English translation.

The musician Adam Green is a great-grandson of Felice Bauer. His grandfather was Heinz Marasse. His daughter Leah married Mark W. Green. There were two sons from this marriage: Joël David Green (* 1978) and Adam Green (* 1981).

literature

  • Franz Kafka: Letters to Felice and other correspondence from the engagement time . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1967; ibid. 1982, ISBN 3-596-21697-4 .
  • Elias Canetti : The other process. Kafka's letters to Felice . Hanser, Munich 1969, ISBN 3-446-11169-7 ; Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-7632-2814-4 .
  • Heinz Politzer : Franz Kafka's completed novel. On the typology of his letters to Felice Bauer. In: Wolfgang Paulsen (ed.): The afterlife of romanticism in modern German literature. The lectures at the Second Colloquium in Amherst / Massachusetts. Stiehm, Heidelberg 1969. (= Poetry and Science. XIV.) Pp. 192–211.
  • Johannes Urzidil : Epilogue to Kafka's Felice letters. In: Wolfgang Paulsen (ed.): The afterlife of romanticism in modern German literature. The lectures at the Second Colloquium in Amherst / Massachusetts. Stiehm, Heidelberg 1969. (= Poetry and Science. XIV.) Pp. 212-219.
  • Niels Bokhove: De moeder aller avonden [The mother of all evenings] , in: Kafka-Katern 8 (2000) 3, pp. 69–73. - Reconstruction of Kafka's first meeting with Felice Bauer on August 13, 1912.
  • Louis Begley : The vast world that I have in my head . DVA, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-421-04362-7 , pp. 125f.
  • "Avant de lire Rousseau, je l'ai" écouté "", Le Monde, Samedi 14 juin 2014. An interview with the Geneva literary critic Jean Starobinski (1920–2019). There: "Nous avions un très bon enseignement de l'allemand au collège [di Gymnasium] de Genève ..... J'acquis assez tôt un ou two textes de Kafka dans la langue originale. Un camarade de collège, récemment réfugié d 'Allemagne, m'amenait fréquemment chez ses parents. Je bavardais en allemand avec sa soeur, son père et sa mère ... Le temps de connaître un peu mieux la biography de Kafka, j'apprenais, bouleversé, que la mère de mon ami avait été la première fiancée de Kafka, à laquelle il avait tant écrit [Lettres à Felice, Gallimard, 1972]. "
  • Marianna Lieder: The other July crisis , in: The literary world , July 12, 2014, p. 1
  • Unda Hörner: Kafka and Felice . Novel. ebersbach & simon, Berlin 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Hans-Gerd Koch: "Devilish in all innocence". Franz Kafka and the Berliners Felice Bauer and Grete Bloch , in: Language in the Technical Age , 2002, pp. 379–391, here pp. 388f
personal data
SURNAME Bauer, Felice
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Fiancee of Franz Kafka
DATE OF BIRTH November 18, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Neustadt / Upper Silesia, today Prudnik
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1960
Place of death Rye, New York