The Complete Collected Letters of Kafka

by Franz Kafka, Shaun Maley (translator)

This modern translation of Franz Kafka’s collected letters provides a deeply personal view of one of literature's most profound and enigmatic figures. These letters, addressed to friends, family, and romantic partners, reveal Kafka’s complex relationships and his constant negotiation between the demands of his inner world and the expectations of society. Across decades of correspondence, Kafka writes with wit, vulnerability, and piercing insight, bringing his correspondents—and the reader—into his uniquely poetic and turbulent mind deeply rooted in Nietzsche and Schopenhauer.

Through letters to Max Brod, his lifelong confidant, and Oskar Pollak, a kindred spirit, Kafka reflects on art, philosophy, and the difficulty of human connection. His romantic correspondences with Milena Jesenská, Felice Bauer, and Hedwig Weiler reveal an intimate, often conflicted portrayal of love, oscillating between passion and self-doubt. Letters to family members like his sister Ottla and his father expose a man grappling with familial obligations, love, and resentment. Kafka’s correspondence with intellectual contemporaries such as Gustav Janouch and Ernst Rowohlt highlights his engagement with the literary world and his Schopenhauerian-Nietzschean perspective on the human condition.


Kafka’s letters extend beyond his closest relationships to include figures in his professional and intellectual circles. He wrote to Gustav Janouch, a younger admirer and aspiring writer, and engaged in correspondence with Ernst Rowohlt, his publisher, discussing literary matters. Childhood connections, such as Hugo Bergmann, resurface in his writings, offering glimpses into Kafka’s earlier years. Kafka also addressed letters to Felix Weltsch, a member of his circle and a fellow intellectual, as well as Robert Klopstock, a friend he met during his later years. Other significant individuals include Julie Wohryzek, another of Kafka’s romantic interests, and Grete Bloch, a confidante of Felice Bauer who became embroiled in Kafka’s romantic entanglements. Kafka’s letters to Josefine Hochfeld, a cousin, and David Hilbert, a mathematician whose ideas fascinated Kafka, reflect his broader social network.

He also corresponded with Carl Sternheim, a playwright, and Georg Langer, a philosophical peer. The letters sometimes touch on figures like Albert Einstein, whom Kafka admired from afar. These figures offer a prism through which the author’s thoughts, fears, and hopes are refracted. The Complete Collected Letters of Kafka is a vivid tapestry of the relationships and ideas that shaped a man whose literary genius continues to captivate readers worldwide.

566 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 20, 2025

About the author

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking writer from Prague whose work became one of the foundations of modern literature, even though he published only a small part of his writing during his lifetime. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka grew up amid German, Czech, and Jewish cultural influences that shaped his sense of displacement and linguistic precision. His difficult relationship with his authoritarian father left a lasting mark, fostering feelings of guilt, anxiety, and inadequacy that became central themes in his fiction and personal writings.
Kafka studied law at the German University in Prague, earning a doctorate in 1906. He chose law for practical reasons rather than personal inclination, a compromise that troubled him throughout his life. After university, he worked for several insurance institutions, most notably the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties included assessing industrial accidents and drafting legal reports, work he carried out competently and responsibly. Nevertheless, Kafka regarded his professional life as an obstacle to his true vocation, and most of his writing was done at night or during periods of illness and leave. Kafka began publishing short prose pieces in his early adulthood, later collected in volumes such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor. These works attracted little attention at the time but already displayed the hallmarks of his mature style, including precise language, emotional restraint, and the application of calm logic to deeply unsettling situations. His major novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika were left unfinished and unpublished during his lifetime. They depict protagonists trapped within opaque systems of authority, facing accusations, rules, or hierarchies that remain unexplained and unreachable. Themes of alienation, guilt, bureaucracy, law, and punishment run throughout Kafka’s work. His characters often respond to absurd or terrifying circumstances with obedience or resignation, reflecting his own conflicted relationship with authority and obligation. Kafka’s prose avoids overt symbolism, yet his narratives function as powerful metaphors through structure, repetition, and tone. Ordinary environments gradually become nightmarish without losing their internal coherence. Kafka’s personal life was marked by emotional conflict, chronic self-doubt, and recurring illness. He formed intense but troubled romantic relationships, including engagements that he repeatedly broke off, fearing that marriage would interfere with his writing. His extensive correspondence and diaries reveal a relentless self-critic, deeply concerned with morality, spirituality, and the demands of artistic integrity. In his later years, Kafka’s health deteriorated due to tuberculosis, forcing him to withdraw from work and spend long periods in sanatoriums. Despite his illness, he continued writing when possible. He died young, leaving behind a large body of unpublished manuscripts. Before his death, he instructed his close friend Max Brod to destroy all of his remaining work. Brod ignored this request and instead edited and published Kafka’s novels, stories, and diaries, ensuring his posthumous reputation.
The publication of Kafka’s work after his death established him as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. The term Kafkaesque entered common usage to describe situations marked by oppressive bureaucracy, absurd logic, and existential anxiety. His writing has been interpreted through existential, religious, psychological, and political perspectives, though Kafka himself resisted definitive meanings. His enduring power lies in his ability to articulate modern anxiety with clarity and restraint.