How Kafka’s fraught relationship with his father shaped his writing
Kafka’s father expected him to succeed in the family business, but he pursued literature, which the former never fully accepted. To Kafka, writing became a form of rebellion against his father
Franz Kafka’s own relationship with his father was famously fraught. Hermann Kafka grew up in poverty in a small Czech village. His marriage to middle-class Julie Löwy, move to Prague, and eventually the founding of the family retail business in the very centre of the city all constituted personal and professional triumphs. As the eldest child and the couple’s only son to survive infancy — by the time Franz turned five, his two younger brothers had died of childhood illnesses, at the ages of six months and fifteen months — he was expected to carry the momentum of the family’s social ascent.
But Franz was uninterested in the family business and, despite his prestigious law degree and an attractive new job as a civil servant in the field of accident insurance, by 1912 — when he wrote The Judgement — he had found neither personal fulfilment nor, he felt, his father’s acceptance. Hermann did not understand or approve of his son’s literary ambitions and their attendant emotional torment.
A letter to his father
By all accounts, Kafka’s father was brawny, coarse and domineering. Most of these accounts, of course, stem from the son himself. In 1919, he penned one of the most extraordinary documents of his life: a long letter to his father, in which he employs all his literary and rhetorical talent to cast light on their difficult relationship. It is truly a great piece of writing: energetic, precise, fully formed, written all the way through — unlike so much of Kafka’s literary writing, there are no loose ends or unfinished sentences here.
‘Dearest Father,’ it begins, ‘you asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could even approximately keep in mind while talking.’ What follows resembles one of those imaginary rants one composes in her head in response to some particularly enraging encounter or exchange, hours after the fact: one where your logic is devastatingly unassailable but at the same time you manage to sound entirely rational, reasonable, courteous even.
In the letter, Franz details particularly telling childhood memories; describes how he has always felt weak and frail alongside his father’s overbearing physicality; blow by blow, goes through his father’s role in various formative experiences of his adult years — failed engagements, professional milestones and finally his writing. Whenever a piece of his was published and came in the post, his father would not have a look, would not even stop his card game, but just say — in what we surmise must have been a dismissive tone — to ‘put it on the bedside table’, presumably never to be read.
‘My writing all about you’
And yet ‘the aversion you naturally and immediately took to my writing was, for once, welcome to me’, Franz claims, ‘because to me that formula’ — ‘put it on my bedside table’ — ‘sounded something like: “now you are free!”’ Even if this did not constitute any real freedom, he explains, his writing created a unique space for communication with his father in a way that was impossible in real life: ‘My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.’
Many readers over the years have taken Kafka’s letter to his father as the master key to his whole oeuvre, the smoking gun to prove that the meaning of his strange stories can in fact be determined, that what they ultimately mean is this: Franz felt stifled by Hermann and writing offered an opportunity to rebel, but the rebellion always ended up futile. There are certainly many elements in The Judgement that resonate with such an interpretation: the fantasy of a weak, frail father, who turns out to be strong and in control after all; the centrality of the family business; the son’s act of writing being eventually revealed as ineffectual, unequal to the father’s power.
Even the final, mysterious judgement of the father in the story finds an echo in the later letter: ‘What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgements. It was as though you had no notion of your power.’ It is as though the story hyperbolically illustrates the extent of the father’s power. Franz might be the writer, but it is Hermann’s ‘words and judgements’ that wield power in the real world.
Excerpted from Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba, with permission from Hachette India