Letters to Milena

While at times Milena’s ‘genius for living’ gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship. Sometimes when one wakes up in the morning one thinks that truth is right next to the bed, like an open grave with a few wilted flowers, ready to receive. Finally it turned out she had had this photograph in her hand when she was burning all her papers and letters before leaving for Berlin; she had looked for it again this very afternoon, but in vain.