When Franz Kafka lived in Berlin with his partner Dora Diamant, he is said to have met a little girl who had lost her doll. Since she was very sad, he wrote letters to the girl from the perspective of the lost doll, until one day he stood in front of the girl with a new doll and gave it to her. With this act he is said to have helped the girl get over the loss of the doll.

At the age of 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Berlin's Steglitz Park when he met a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka searched for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would search again.
The next day, when they still hadn't found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter "written" by the doll that said, "Please don't cry. I went on a journey to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures.”
So began a story that continued until the end of Kafka's life.
When they met, Kafka read out his carefully written letters containing adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found adorable. Finally, Kafka read her a letter with the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll that he had bought.
“She doesn’t look anything like my doll,” she said. Kafka gave her another letter in which he explained: “My travels, they have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and took it home. A year later Kafka died.
Many years later, the now adult girl found a letter in an unnoticed crevice of the doll. The tiny letter signed by Kafka read: “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end love will return in a different way.”
Fact check of Franz Kafka's doll letters
Unfortunately, this story about the writer Franz Kafka has not yet been proven.
Until now, only a few people had set out to search for the lost letters that would prove Kafka's actions. Apparently the story was told by his last partner Dora Diamant (first in English in 1948) and included in the book “When Kafka met me” (1995) by Hans-Gerd Koch.
In 1959, an attempt was made to find the girl from this story and thus also Kafka's doll letters through a Steglitz district newspaper. But no one had come forward.
In 2001, the Kafka translator Mark Harman made another attempt - this also ended unsuccessfully. Why literary scholars have so far not been interested in finding the letters again is a mystery to Harman.
The letters could possibly be among the texts confiscated from Dora Diamant's apartment by the Gestapo in 1933. But to this day they are considered lost and research has not yielded any results as to whether the letters were among them.
Dora Diamant herself was never asked about the letters - even though she lived in London until the 1950s. Die Zeit , apart from two interviews in literary magazines, there was no academic interest in her.
Origin of the illustration
The illustration that shows Kafka with the girl and the doll comes from Isabel Torner in 2016:
Conclusion:
The story about the “doll letters” could actually have been true, as Dora Diamant told it. Unfortunately, the letters are still missing today and there is no other evidence other than the stories of his partner, who only died in 1952.
Still, whether it's true or not, this story teaches something very important: charity .
Further sources: The Daily Frown , franzkafka.de
Photo credit / article image: Isabel Torner
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