Description
Kafka, Franz (1883 – 1924)
Kafka’s earliest known piece of creative writing
An extraordinary original autograph aphorism by Franz Kafka, at the age of fourteen. Kafka carefully writes out in fountain pen ink a recognisably ‘Kafkaesque’ sentiment:
‘Es gibt ein Kommen und ein Gehn
Ein Scheiden und oft kein — Wiedersehn
Prag den 20. November [1897]
Franz Kafka.
English translation:
‘There is a coming and a going
A parting and often no — reunion’
Prague, November 20th [1897]
Franz Kafka’
Kafka’s words seem imbued, already, with a preternatural sense of forboding, of coming grief, and are announced with the strange, still logic that haunts his later work. This autograph contribution is contained within a liber amicorum (131 x 84 mm., 20 leaves of which 12 blank, contemporary red blind stamped cloth) once owned by Kafka’s schoolfriend, Hugo Bergmann. Many other pages contain inscriptions by Bergmann’s other friends. An extraordinary opportunity to own the first known creative sentiment written by one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
Hugo Bergmann (1883-1975) was Kafka’s closest friend in high school. It was in Bergmann’s house that Kafka first announced he was going to become a writer. He became a philosopher, first rector of Hebrew University and the founder of Israel’s National Library. On his 90th birthday, Bergmann reflected on the meaning of Kafka’s aphorism in his liber amicorum, and offered an interpretation: ‘When Kafka wrote these words at Barmitzvah age, did Kafka have in mind the deep meaning that we attach to his words today? – I don’t know… we can probably interpret these lines as a warning to his generation’. (Bergmann, Tagebücher und Briefe, volume 2, Königstein, 1985 p. 698).