I didn't know that is your profession, anyway, ein schloss zu meinem fruchtsalat kriegst du nicht.
Franz Kafka, who died in 1924 at the age of 40, never married; yet, as his name gradually emerged from (mostly self-imposed) obscurity, his readers' fascination with his love life grew accordingly. Kafka's relationships with women were captured in a detailed correspondence, most of which has been published and interpreted by his biographers.
His letters to his Czech translator, Milena Jesenska , reveal a man excited and tormented by a deeply erotic yet unattainable woman; the correspondence with his fiancée, Felice Bauer , shows his determination, and his failure, to achieve a state of balance in a relationship with a woman who was, intellectually, not a kindred spirit. His last and least-documented love affair was with Dora Diamant , with whom he spent the last year of his life. Her full story is told for the first time by Kathi Diamant (not a relation) in Kafka's Last Love.
This biography is based on 15 years of research into the life of a woman who disappeared almost without a trace. As Diamant vividly shows, Dora's connection with Kafka did not end with his death.
When they met in a north German seaside town, in the summer of 1923, Dora was a 25-year-old woman working for a Jewish children's charity. The children were refugees from the East, just as she was; she had arrived in Berlin from Poland a few years before, having rebelled against her father's Hasidic upbringing. She had traded East European Jewish orthodoxy and mysticism for secular Western enlightenment. She found freedom and independence, but at the expense of losing her family, most of whom later died in the Holocaust.
She knew nothing about the writer Franz Kafka, but was powerfully drawn to him from the moment she saw him, even when she believed that the woman he was with was his wife
(it was, in fact, his sister). Kafka, who had a profound interest in Hasidism and Jewish orthodoxy but very little knowledge about either, was fascinated by Dora's East European roots.