Reading
© Nadine Poncioni
© Nadine Poncioni
“I can hardly write you anything anymore except what concerns only us, us in the throng of the world, only us.”
Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská. A reconstruction.
At the beginning of 1920, the then 23-year-old Milena Jesenská approached the older, still unknown writer Franz Kafka at Prague’s Café Arco and asked if she could translate his stories into Czech. From this encounter developed an intimate love affair that unfolded largely through an intense exchange of letters.
During this time there were only two personal meetings—four days in Vienna and two in Gmünd (Lower Austria). Milena’s letters to Franz have been lost; they were presumably destroyed at her request after Kafka’s death by Max Brod, a close friend. Kafka’s letters to Milena were published in 1952 (after Milena’s death and against her family’s wishes), first in English in New York. Overnight the addressee became famous, even though her last name was not mentioned in the first edition. Only after the end of the Cold War did the literary exploration of the gifted author, journalist, and political activist Milena Jesenská begin in the early 1990s.
Tamara Metelka and Nicholas Ofczarek take the audience in this reading into the witty, desperate, profound, poetic, and grotesque exchange between the two lovers. Opposite Kafka’s letters stand Milena’s letters to Max Brod, her journalistic work, short stories by Kafka, and her moving, razor-sharp obituary for Franz Kafka, published three days after his death on 3 June 1924.
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 in Prague, Austria-Hungary; † 3 June 1924 in Kierling, Klosterneuburg) was a German-language writer. Most of Kafka’s works were published only after his death by Max Brod, a close friend and confidant whom Kafka had appointed as his literary executor. Kafka’s works are counted among the canon of world literature. His depiction of unfathomably threatening and absurd situations even gave rise to the adjective “Kafkaesque.”
Milena Jesenská (born 10 August 1896 in Prague, Austria-Hungary; died 17 May 1944 in Ravensbrück concentration camp) was a Czech journalist, writer, translator, and political activist. When the German Wehrmacht occupied the Sudetenland in 1938 and the rest of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Milena Jesenská helped persecuted people escape the Nazis. She died on 17 May 1944 in Ravensbrück and was only 47 years old. In 1994, the Yad Vashem memorial named Milena Jesenská “Righteous Among the Nations.”
When Nicholas Ofczarek and Tamara Metelka bring Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská to the stage, an evening of rare intimacy and electric tension unfolds. Between longing and silence, closeness and abyss, a dialogue emerges between two people who meet in language – and yet never truly reach one another.
Ofczarek and Metelka lend this correspondence the urgency with which Kafka’s words still burn. They read, play, and live the letters – as a linguistic approach, as a dance of the soul. The violin answers tenderly, defiantly, like an echo of the passion burning between the lines.
An evening about writing as salvation, about love as impossibility – and about the music that binds both.
A finely chiseled chamber play of language, sound, and feeling – intense, fragile, true.
Hear Kafka anew – with three artists who make the unsayable tangible.
