Letters to Milena is a book collecting some of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...

's letters to Milena Jesenská

Milena Jesenská

Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator, who refused to abandon her Jewish friends and was deported to and died alongside them in Ravensbrück concentration camp....

 from 1920 to 1923.

Publication history

The letters were originally published in German in 1952 as Briefe an Milena, edited by Willy Haas

Willy Haas

Willy Haas was a German screenwriter. He wrote for 19 films between 1922 and 1933. He was a member of the jury at the 8th Berlin International Film Festival.-Selected filmography:* The Burning Soil...

, who decided to delete certain passages which he thought might hurt people who were still alive at the time. The collection was first published in English by Schocken Books

Schocken Books

Schocken Books is a publishing company that was established in Berlin with a publishing office in Prague in 1931 by the Schocken Department Store owner Salman Schocken. It published the writings of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka and S. Y...

 in 1953, translated by Tania and James Stern

James Stern

James Stern Anglo-Irish writer of short stories and non-fiction.The son of a British cavalry officer of Jewish descent and an Anglo-Irish Protestant mother, Stern was born in County Meath, Ireland. After working in Southern Rhodesia as a young man, he worked for his family's bank in London and...

.
A new German edition, restoring the passages Haas had deleted, was published in 1986, followed by a new English translation by Philip Boehm in 1990. This edition includes some of Milena's letters to Max Brod

Max Brod

Max Brod was a German-speaking Czech Jewish, later Israeli, author, composer, and journalist. Although he was a prolific writer in his own right, he is most famous as the friend and biographer of Franz Kafka...

, as well as four essays by her and an obituary for Kafka.

Quote

The easy possibility of writing letters must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world. Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one's own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing.