Letter to the father

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Scan of the first page of the manuscript

The letter to the father is a letter written in 1919 by Franz Kafka to his father , which was never sent . It was published posthumously in 1952 in the Neue Rundschau and is a preferred text for psychoanalytic and biographical studies on Kafka.

After Franz Kafka met Julie Wohryzeck during a spa stay in Schelesen (Bohemia) in January 1919 and got engaged to her a few months later, his father reacted indignantly to his new and improper marriage plans. It is believed that this prompted Kafka to write the letter between November 10 and 13, 1919. The wedding was originally planned for November but did not take place. The ostensible reason was a futile search for an apartment.

The extensive letter consists of 103 handwritten pages (45 pages in the typewriter version) on which Kafka tries to cope with his father conflict by writing. He attributes many of his difficulties in life to the total difference in character between himself and his father. The letter ends with the hope that it would both calm them down a bit and make life and death easier.

content

Contrast father-son

First and foremost, the intolerance is worked out in the letter. Hermann, the powerful, impulsive, irascible father (son of a butcher) without education, who has worked his way up. The son Franz, effeminate and dependent on his father's prosperity, completely frightened, inaccessible and wrapped up in his spiritual world.

Kafka family

In the struggle for and with the father, the sisters were involved to varying degrees and in the end they were no comrades-in-arms for the brother. Valli submitted to the father, like the mother. Elli was a child from whom little was expected. But she broke away completely from the Kafka family, founded her own family and became an accepted woman. Ottla seemed to have been much harder and more consistent in her fight with her father than Franz, who quickly gave up. She was the real child of the father's stamp.

The mother was torn between the children and the father. She is portrayed as very motherly and human, but at the same time referred to as a driver for the father. She only supports her children in the area that the father allows and has little influence on the relationships between the father and his children.

Sexuality and marriage

When it comes to sexuality and marriage, too, the father had more coarse ideas than the brooding, sensitive son. Twice (first to the 16-year-old son, then to the 20-year-old older son), the father Franz gave solid advice on how to protect himself from unpleasantness when - in the usual way at the time - he sought sexuality in brothels with prostitutes. The father expressly encouraged Franz to have this sexuality so that he would not have to think about getting married right away. He was referring to a marriage with a person of disrespect like Julie Wohryzeck .

Kafka found the subject of marriage and the role of a husband to be so completely occupied by his father (similar to life as a businessman) that it was out of the question for him.

Judaism

The son accuses the father of “nothing of Judaism ” that does not include any deeper religiosity. Visiting the synagogue was on the one hand frightening for Franz, on the other hand it was like staying in a secret playground. There was no real religious moment in which he might have met the father. At the same time, Kafka expresses his admiration for the Yiddish actor Jizchak Löwy , who his father compared to vermin and made contemptuous of.

Kafka's letter

The son describes his writing as an independent way of leaving his father. Despite his father's rejection, he had tried again and again - albeit in vain - to gain his recognition and wanted to bring his publications closer to him.

Various motifs appear in the letter that appear before and after in Kafka's literature. Related issues arise especially in the judgment , the gigantic nature of the father, his unpredictable dissatisfaction to which the insecure son could not react verbally, and his absolute judgment first of the fiancé, then of the son. According to the letter, the father twice compared people with disgusting vermin - the subject of the story The Metamorphosis . The harmony of the Kafka couple comes across to the reader in the story Das Ehepaar . The minor importance of the mother in the letter is reflected in Kafka's letter, which always wrestles with the father. A mother is not present, as in the story Elf Sons with the lonely father who condemns all his offspring.

shape

Explanation of the letter form

Kafka described the letter to Milena Jesenská as an attorney's letter full of tricks. This letter was never given to his father, but Kafka gave it to Milena in 1920.

The letter is a literary indictment and defense that is difficult to unravel, all in one for the respective people: the father, Kafka himself and also for the marginally appearing mother. At the end of the letter, even the father himself appears as an argumentative person. But he does not speak in the simplicity that is to be expected of him, but in the son's usual style .

Kafka has illuminated his eternal father-son theme in the formal logic of legal speech and the techniques of literature and thereby created a kind of life analysis for himself. Its main elements are fear and struggle. But this letter is not literature in the strict sense of the word.

Relation to reality and subjectivity

The verifiable facts and Kafka's portrayal are sometimes drifting apart.

On the one hand, the letter deals with realities from Kafka's life. Some things are truthfully listed, such as the father's tough childhood, Kafka's problems with his partnership in the Prague asbestos factory or his sister Ottla's breakout into the working world of agriculture and of course the failed attempts at marriage.

On the other hand, the representation of Kafka's own person hardly coincides with the descriptions of other sources. He describes his school life as completely covered by the fear of failure. Classmates describe him - except in math - as a good student who was never in danger of being left sitting. He suffered from his work in the workers' insurance company and, on the one hand, felt unable to cope with it and, on the other hand, was bored with it. In retrospect, however, his employees praised him as a legal role model who was also regularly promoted.

His relationship with women was literally problematic. He saw himself inhibited, indecisive and inferior. In fact, however, he was attractive with his tall, slim figure, so that he increasingly gathered around him - not just literary - admirers.

The above also applies to the main concern of the letter, namely the confrontation with the father. This terrifying, unrestrained judgmental, vital being Hermann Kafka , to whom the son Franz saw himself at his mercy and with whom he constantly wrestled inwardly, is used by others, u. a. Max Brod , described as a normal Jewish businessman who was friendly and lively with both feet in his business.

Quotes

The son:

  • My letter is about you, I only complained there that I couldn't complain about your chest
  • I would have been happy to have you as a friend, as a boss, as an uncle, as a grandfather, even as a father-in-law. Just as a father you were too strong for me.
  • Your extremely effective oratory means in education, at least never failing to me, were: scolding, threatening, irony, evil laughter and - strangely enough - self-lamentation.
  • In reality, the marriage attempts were the greatest and most hopeful attempt to escape you, but the failure was correspondingly great.

The father (quoted by the son):

  • I tear you apart like a fish.
  • He's supposed to die, the sick dog.
  • The godly one left me a lot of mess.
  • Put it on the bedside table (based on Kafka's publications)

reception

  • Joachim Pfeiffer (p. 92 ff.) Sees here as typical literary techniques u. a. the distortion of perspective, the self-negation of parts of the text and above all the exaggeration. It is generally a protest against the world of the fathers, in which a social Darwinism (right of the fittest) prevails, in which Kafka's antiheroes stand in opposition to the idol of heroic masculinity.
  • Reiner Stach (p. 321 ff.) Describes the letter as the basic text of literary modernism, as a manipulative text that demands to be seen through and to be morally commented on.
  • Peter-André Alt (p. 566): “The advocate technique of argumentation, which Kafka himself admitted, is reflected in the castling of the player, who actually does not fight an open fight, but tries to prove the opponent's guilt via the detour of self-accusation . "
  • Gisela Elsner wrote a fictional reply letter from his father, in which he accuses his son of staging his inability to live and being a victim, since self-pity is part of the Prague bohemian attitude towards life and "the conflict between you and me has meanwhile given you more to talk about than the entire past world war ". In: Die Zerreißprobe , Hamburg 1980.

expenditure

  • Letter to the father. Edited and commented by Michael Müller, Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 978-3-15-009674-1 .
  • Postponed writings and fragments II. Edited by Jost Schillemeit, Fischer, Frankfurt / Main 1992, pp. 143-217, ISBN 978-3-10-038144-6 .

Audio book

Secondary literature

Web links

Wikisource: Letter to the Father  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Oldenbuorg Interpretations Joachim Pfeiffer Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis / The Letter to the Father ISBN 3-486-88691-6 , p. 90.
  2. ↑ Alt p. 563.
  3. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography. Munich 2005, p. 57.
  4. ↑ see vg p. 566
  5. ↑ The Kafka book. Editor: Heinz Politzer p. 11
  6. ^ Peter-André Alt pp. 559, 563
  7. ↑ see vg p. 563
  8. ↑ see vg p. 564
  9. ↑ see vg pp. 534, 642