The Traffic Of Writing: Technologies Of ‘Verkehr’ in Franz Kafka’s Briefe an Milena

Abstract

Franz Kafka’s celebrated epistolary ‘love’ relationship with Milena Jesenská was influenced by a late‐nineteenth‐century techno‐bureaucratic development: the separation of travelling bodies from travelling letters – or, in official Austrian jargon, of ‘Personenbeförderung’ from ‘Nachrichtenübermittlung’. My ‘psycho‐techno‐logical’ reading of Briefe an Milena turns our attention away from the writer’s familiar private dilemmas (fears of intimacy, neurasthenia, narcissism) and toward the discursive, technocratic constellations that shaped long‐distance eroticism in the early twentieth century. Shot through with remarks about railway strikes, time‐tables, telegrams, and stamps, Briefe an Milena demonstrates how fin‐de‐siécle technologies of intercourse helped to determine one writer’s emotional attachments and detachments. More specifically, Kafka’s writings document how he employed a disembodied network of letters, telegrams and stamps (‘Briefverkehr’) in order to contain what he (along with the contemporary psychoanalysts, Freud and Abraham) viewed as a dangerously sexualised, feminised rail system (‘Eisenbahnverkehr’). Briefe an Milena thus documents the tension between technologies of absence and presence in the construction of modern love. Central to my discussion is a lengthy, oddly passionate stamp‐exchange between Kafka and Milena that has been totally ignored by Kafka scholars. The emotional character of this exchange hints at the lovers’ attempt to bridge the technological gap between presence and absence that at once sustains and undermines their affection.