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SMART NEWS


AN AILING FRANZ KAFKA CURSES WRITER’S BLOCK IN THIS HANDWRITTEN LETTER TO A
FRIEND

“I haven’t written anything for three years,” he admitted in the note, which
will go to auction this summer

Sonja Anderson

Daily Correspondent

June 6, 2024 3:06 p.m.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The correspondence is undated, but experts think Kafka wrote it in the spring of
1920. Sotheby’s


One of Franz Kafka’s characteristic lamentations of writer’s block, captured in
a handwritten letter from a sanatorium, is heading to the auction block.

Scrawled in neat German cursive, the undated correspondence is thought to have
been written in the spring of 1920, nearly five years after the publication
of The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s best-known work, according to a statement from
Sotheby’s. The writer was ailing from tuberculosis at the time, receiving
treatment in northern Italy, and, as he expresses, experiencing a creative dry
spell.



“I haven’t written anything for three years, what’s been published now are old
things, I don’t have any other work, not even something I’ve started,” reads his
letter to Austrian poet Albert Ehrenstein.

Kafka was writing to his friend Albert Ehrenstein, an Austrian poet and editor
of the literary magazine Die Gefährten. Sotheby's

Scholars presume Ehrenstein must have seen a work of Kafka’s in print, which
prompted him to ask Kafka to contribute to Die Gefährten—the Expressionist
literary journal Ehrenstein was editing, per the auction house.

Kafka wrote this letter only three years after his 1917 tuberculosis diagnosis.
But even before illness, he was no stranger to unproductivity. As Gabriel
Heaton, a books and manuscript specialist at Sotheby’s, tells the Guardian’s
Kate Connolly, the novelist is “the laureate of writer’s block, as we see from
his diaries.”

For example, Kafka’s frustration is especially apparent in a set of journal
entries written in the winter of 1915:

> January 20, 1915: The end of writing. When will it take me up again?
>  
> 
> January 29, 1915: Again tried to write, virtually useless.
>  
> 
> January 30, 1915: The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten
> days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You
> have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in
> advance of you.
>  
> 
> February 7, 1915: Complete standstill. Unending torments.
>  
> 
> March 11, 1915: How time flies; another ten days and I have achieved nothing.



Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. After
graduating from law school, he eventually landed at an accident insurance
company. According to Prague’s Kafka Museum, Kafka didn’t consider himself a
writer, as he wasn’t a “literary professional” who made a living with words.

His writing career consisted of “short periods of relative satisfaction and long
periods of despair over what he had and hadn’t written,” per the museum.
As CNN’s Amarachi Orie writes, Kafka struggled with anxiety, hopelessness and
isolation throughout his life—feelings that both inspired and hindered his work.



“When worries have penetrated to a certain layer of existence, the writing and
the complaining obviously stop,” he wrote in the letter to Ehrenstein. “My
resistance was not all that strong either.”

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 and died in 1924. Public domain via Wikimedia
Commons

Sotheby’s will open bidding on June 27. According to the auction house, the
letter is expected to sell for roughly $90,000 to $115,000.

Four years after this correspondence, Kafka died of tuberculosis at just 40
years old. In an unsent letter addressed to his friend Max Brod—found in Kafka’s
desk after his death—he asked that all his writings be burned unread. Brod
disregarded his friend’s request, and three of Kafka’s now-famous novels were
published posthumously: The Trial, The Castle and Amerika.



“The life and works of Franz Kafka have long been a source of fascination
throughout the world,” says Heaton in the statement. “The letter reveals how
writing made intense demands on him, and required deep reserves of inner
strength, as he grappled with deep insecurity and worry about the futility of
his work. We can also all be thankful that Kafka would continue to pick up his
pen despite his crippling writer’s block.”



Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.



Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.


Filed Under: Artifacts, Arts, Auctions, Books, Disease, Disease and Illnesses,
Letters, Literature, Writers
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