DESARROLLO DE MERCADO E INNOVACIÓN FINANCIERA

Prague resident Franz (or František) Kafka himself, the friend and erstwhile lover of Milena Jesenská from 1920 to 1923, lived a condition of transience, insecurity and a continuing search for his own definition of comfort and wish to settle in a home. In 1922 he wrote to Milena about his new apartment, and particularly what he felt he was able to close the door on:

But as it is the apartment belongs to my happiness, everything quiet, the bathroom, the kitchen, the hall, the three further rooms, not as in those communal apartments, the noise, the lechery, the incest of the dissolute,

uncontrolled bodies, thoughts and desires where in every corner, between all the furniture, illicit affairs, improper accidental things occur, illegitimate children are begotten, and where all the time life proceeds not as in your quiet empty suburbs on Sunday, but as in the wild, overcrowded, suffocating suburbs during an uninterrupted Saturday night.³²⁴

Kafka gives an example perhaps, of the anti-home, the home which no-one would or could wish for and this occurs both in his personal writings and his fiction. The

description above is an extraordinary depiction of his fears of living with others and what they might get up to. For Kafka, an ideal would be to be alone by choice, though with either a maid or a female relative, quietly creeping in, taking care of his material needs.

One of the more general myths about Kafka is that he never managed to leave his parent’s house (and that he was impoverished). In his life, although Kafka had the ability to

continually attempt to cure the deficiencies of his accommodation - he had a salary and, in illness, a subsequent pension, and several places to go when things went awry, as they did often - he was however, unable to permanently resolve his housing troubles until the last year of his life. In fact from the time of his first engagement to Felice Bauer in 1914, Kafka conceived and made plans and arrangements, took leases, and moved to find another home other than his father’s house. Themes which arose, tangentially in his

letters and diaries, about choosing a home reflected in such measure that he was, at one time, a young man with hopes, though ambivalent most of the time, for creating a family home, but who also at times craved only the solitude and eternal quiet of a well

provisioned dungeon in which he could write.

In November 1911, prior to his attempts to find another home, when he still did not imagine this, he wrote in his diary:

I want to write, with a constant trembling on my forehead. I sit in my room in the very headquarters of the uproar of the entire house. I hear all the doors close, because of their noise only the footsteps of those running between them are spared me, I hear even the slamming of the oven door in the kitchen. [...] it comes back to me again that I might open the door a narrow crack, crawl into the next room like a snake and in that way, on the floor, beg my sisters and their governess for quiet.³²⁵

By 1914, in fragments of stories in his diary for that year he set small scenes in houses with strange landladies, or neighbours in the next room who insist on coming to wrestle every evening. Narrators return of evenings, to homes, or rooms, or seek them.³²⁶

Other than occasional trips for holidays and stays in sanatoria for health reasons, Franz first moved away from his parent’s home during the War, exchanging accommodation with his sister Valli to a house in Bilekgasse, (now Bílková) due to the War and her husband’s absence³²⁷. He was 32. This did not last more than a month, but he was then

inspired to find a location to write: “Finally took a room. In the same house on

Bilekgasse”. Soon though his need for quiet is interrupted by his landlady and neighbours talking “Absolute despair. Is it like this in every house?” Finally after a month, he gave notice, gently attributing the lack of quiet to an internal state that he could not overcome.

Moving soon after to Dlouha, Franz is pleased by the room’s friendliness and beauty and a view from the windowalong the street to the Tin church, something which he came to value more and more.³²⁸

Very soon he experiences all of the ambient and attendant noises common to being in a central busy part of the city, from the carriages going by and then “the noise in the

afternoon. From time to time a crash in the kitchen or the corridor. Yesterday in the attic above, perpetual rolling of a ball, as if someone for some incomprehensible reason were bowling.” This was the lift in thebuilding. Franz veers from a sudden type of

contentment with his room, an ease, inside after a walk in Chotek Park, then torments.

“Today, kept from sleep, from work, from everything by the noise”³²⁹

This reflects early on, his ambivalence about domestic life and the seemingly normal life of the home in the house, a lifelong theme in some ways of his struggles to find a perfect situation. He believes himself to be unwelcome in a house nominally belonging to someone else, like the protagonists in The Judgment and The Metamorphosis, he is not comfortable at home either physically or psychically, in effect not ever at home. Kafka reproduced the peculiar arrangement of a room made out of a pass-through space to his parents’ bedroom in The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa’s is also not really a room but part of a closed off passage.

In the midst of his epistolary relationship with Milena Jesenská in January of 1922, and after the official ending of his triple engagements, Kafka wrote to Milena in 1922:

– to be alone in a room is perhaps the condition for living, to be alone in an apartment – to be exact: temporarily – a condition for happiness (one condition because what good would the apartment be to me if I weren’t alive, if I didn’t have a home in which I could rest for instance…).³³⁰

Kafka had perhaps more false starts at marriage and homes than could be imagined, and in the same way as he had prior to his relationship with Milena, he found that making a home was what it was that was impossible. He wrote to Milena a short time (or as they are not dated, a few letters before) before he finally broke the bond between them:

Few things are certain, but this is one of them. We shall never live together in the same apartment, body to body, at the same table, never, not even in the same town.³³¹

It was only after Kafka found this at the very end of his life when he moved with Dora Dymant to Berlin that his misgivings about living, in myriad ways, had settled. He described it in his penultimate letter to Milena:

I live almost in the country, in a small villa and garden, it seems to me I’ve never yet had such a beautiful apartment, I’m also sure I will soon lose it – it’s too beautiful for me:³³²