Franz Kafka's Letter to the Father - Review

By railing against his father, Kafka reveals who he really is

It is widely known that Franz Kafka's relationship with his father was both problematic and a driving force in his creative output. It is not possible to appreciate the depth and complexity of Kafka's feelings for his father without reading the letter that he wrote to him in 1919 (two years after being diagnosed with tuberculosis and five years before his untimely death). In this letter - which ran to about seventy pages - the 36-year-old Kafka seeks to build a rapprochement with the most important person in his life. He does this by laying bare the recriminations and traumas that have haunted him since early childhood and made him an introverted hypochondriac with suicidal tendencies and an overriding need for acceptance.

Kafka couldn't bring himself to hand the letter to his father himself, so he tasked his mother, on whom he was on much more intimate terms, with performing this errand. On reading the letter, Julie Kafka saw at once that no good could come of this, and so she returned the letter to her son, who duly filed it away with his other writings. After Kafka's death in 1924, the missive fell into the hands of the author's literary executor, Max Brod, who published it under the title which he chose, Letter to His Father (Brief an den Vater). Now considered an essential part of his oeuvre, the letter is the document in which Kafka reveals himself most fully and, in doing, so, provides some crucial insights into not only his warped, fragile psychology, but also his great literary works, notably his short story Metamorphosis and his two monumental novels, The Trial and The Castle.

Kafka's intention in writing his letter is clear from the outset. He had been mindful of the estrangement that had existed between him and his father since infancy and, realising that he had only a few years left to him, he was desperate to place their relationship on a more adult footing, one based on mutual respect and understanding. As he rips open his heart, Kafka cannot bring himself to blame his father for the pain he has caused him. Indeed, he repeatedly points the accusing finger at himself, condemning himself for not being able to feel the sense of gratitude which he knows is his father's due. Throughout the letter, Kafka's feelings of resentment towards the man who has effectively ruined his life are tightly wrapped around an all-consuming sense of guilt. Kafka cannot bring himself to exculpate himself from the sin of loathing his tormentor.

Hermann Kafka was a colossus under whose immense shadow the slight and timorous Franz could only cower. Physically powerful, the father was a successful man of business and those who worked for him were easily intimidated by him. His Judaism was of the most perfunctory kind (something that Kafka berates him for in his letter) and he was by all accounts an overbearing, uncultured brute with too high a regard of himself. In the Schocken edition of the Letter, the contrasting personalities of Franz and Hermann Kafka are readily apparent in two side-by-side photographs.

The portrait of the proud businessman, his head held back slightly, his left eyebrow raised with eyes directed at the viewer with a faint air of disdain, is every inch that of the 19th century patriarch, a man of means and substance. By contrast, his son looks more like a solicitor's clerk, a weedy young man afflicted with a crushing sense of inferiority. His head bowed forward slightly, his dark eyes burn with a penetrating intelligence and yet there is an unmistakable glint of fear and anxiety within them - a demeanour that expresses sadness and submission. It seems scarcely credible that two such dissimilar men could be father and son.

From the graphic accounts of episodes in his early childhood, which Kafka relates in his characteristically unemotional, matter-of-fact manner, it is clear that the writer was routinely subjected to mental cruelty by a proud and brutal man who couldn't tolerate any kind of moral or physical weakness in anyone. Kafka describes himself as a puny thing, barely a walking skeleton, a flagrant disappointment to the well-proportioned hulk of a man who had sired him. One episode in Kafka's life reveals a sadistic side to his father. Late one evening, when the little boy cried out for a glass of water, his father dragged him out onto a balcony overlooking a courtyard and locked the door on him. It was just one of a series of humiliations to which the young Franz was subjected, leaving left him with a pitifully low esteem and a festering hatred for authority.

Kafka then goes on to describe what was probably the most traumatic incident in his early life. He had committed some childish demeanour, as a result of which his father went into a flying rage and rounded on the boy, itching to administer a just chastisement with a sudden swipe of the hand. But the blow never came. Hermann Kafka came to his senses and couldn't bring himself to strike the terrified child, so, in addition to being frightened out of his skin, little Franz was left resenting his inability to feel gratitude for his father's act of mercy.

How better it would have been to have had the punishment and got it out of the way, Kafka asserts in his letter. Instead, he is left with a permanent psychological wound, one that will inhibit his personal development and prevent him from forming deep and lasting relationships with other human beings. It is this same hurt that provides the core essence for his art as a writer. The thorns of injustice that Hermann Kafka mindlessly plunged into his son's heart in childhood provided the stimulus for the writer's most widely regarded work, The Trial, which Kafka completed just a few years prior to his Letter.

Few writers have the lucidity and power of self-analysis that Franz Kafka possessed. It is this quality that makes The Letter such a harrowing and revealing work. Why did Kafka feel the need to write? Why was he so preoccupied with justice and authority? Why did he never marry? Who exactly was Franz Kafka? These questions persistently assail anyone with an interest in this most enigmatic of writers, and numerous conjectures have been offered, none as convincing as the answers that Kafka provides for us in his letter to his father.

Writing, the author insists, was the only escape that was available to him; every other avenue of his active life was impinged on by his father, the father he feared and resented. Only by scribbling in secrecy with his pen was Kafka able to find the freedom he craved. Yet, though he could exist quite happily by himself, Kafka also desired the company of others - especially women. Despite his strong attraction for the fair sex, he couldn't bring himself to marry, and the reason he offers in his letter was that he felt marriage belonged to that part of the world which had been claimed by his father. In other words, he couldn't bear to see himself as he saw his father: the self-supporting, self-assertive homebuilder. Like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis, Kafka regards himself as a thing apart, a kind of mutant changeling that could never become a fully formed human being.

For someone gifted with such extraordinary powers of self-observation, it seems unlikely that Kafka could ever have believed that any good could come of writing such an incendiary missive. Why couldn't he see what was so readily apparent to his mother, that the letter would only result in an even greater rift between father and son? It is probable that Kafka never intended his father to see the letter, that its real purpose was an exercise in catharsis, to allow him to work through the issues that had long tormented him and in doing set himself free. The extent to which he was successful in this is debatable, although he did, through his subsequent relationship with his translator Milena Jesenská, manage to attain some measure of emotional security and independence. Had he lived a little longer, this may even have resulted in a final relinquishing of all those terrible past traumas.

The tragedy of Franz Kafka's life is that he was never able to rid himself of the injustices meted out to him by his father when he was at his most vulnerable. Left with a permanently disfigured self-regard, he withdrew from the real world in which he saw himself as a feeble misfit, and took sanctuary in a world of his own creation, a darkly humorous distorted reflection of the one he sought to escape. Kafka's art was born of genuine suffering, and perhaps this is why we treasure it so highly.