R. Scott Broadway

Professor Dawn Reno

ENC 1102.101/H

25 November 1998

CORE #4

Kafka: Toward the Root of the Nightmare

Subject: The short fiction, diaries, and letters of Franz Kafka relating to his father

Audience: Readers of the Journal of the Kafka Society of America versed in Kafka criticism and interpretation. Should have knowledge of Kafka’s short fiction and of his "Brief an den Vater" ("Letter to His Father"). Also, must have knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis of dreams and the history of the World Wars.

Purpose: To prove that the guilt and anxiety in Kafka’s works resulted from Kafka’s troubled relationship with his father. In addition, to show that despite political symbolism in some of Kafka’s fiction, Kafka used oppressive patriarchy to show his feelings toward his father.

Franz Kafka is perhaps the most "biographied" writer of the twentieth century, despite that he fell victim to tuberculosis at age forty-two. This is due to the length of Kafka’s diaries, the letters that Kafka left behind, and the amount of biographic information preserved by Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend and editor. His life, and consequently his writing, was littered with failure, rejection, and alienation. His father, Hermann Kafka, represents the primary source of this pain. Hermann placed his son under tremendous pressure to succeed, never believing in him, nor acknowledging his writing. Literary critic and writer Philip Rahv introduces Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka by saying, "if Kafka . . . arouses in us a sense of immediate relatedness, of strong . . . identification, it is because of the profound quality of his feeling for the experience of human loss, estrangement, guilt, and anxiety. Other critics have noted that Kafka’s symbols predict Nazism and totalitarianism; however, Kafka’s symbols are of father figures, patriarchy, and oppression. These themes were prominent in Kafka’s short fiction, diaries, and letters because his father had such a negative psychological impact upon him.

Nearly all Kafka scholars and biographers acknowledge that Kafka’s father was a powerful and oppressive force in his life. Hermann Kafka, self-made and domineering, supported his wife and family by founding a successful wholesale haberdashery in Prague. Although his wife came from a higher social class, she completely submitted to him and became "absorbed" into the family business. Hermann did not approve of Franz’s tendency to write, and sought to turn him into something more profitable. As young Franz grew up, Hermannn determined many aspects of his life: he enrolled him in demanding German schools and later urged him into law school at the German University of Prague. Hermann also secured Kafka a job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, a position with good security and fair hours of work. However, Kafka’s father also looked down upon his writing habits; nearly all Kafka scholars and biographers acknowledge that Kafka’s father was overbearing and disdainful of his "impractical inclinations and spiritual wanderings." In writing, though, Kafka could be free from his father. Or could he? His stories include obvious elements of his father’s demeanor, forceful and controlling. The short stories are very symbolic in style, and often resemble fables because they contain stereotypic characters and a plot that moves toward a lesson or message. A more apt description would be allegory or myth, since Kafka often blends elements of the fantastic, such as transformations and surreal landscapes, with realistic description and action. In nearly all of his fiction, Kafka includes an isolated character who must accept death or rejection, such as Gregor in "The Metamorphosis" or Joseph K. in The Trial. This isolation is the key to Kafka; he felt isolated from his father, from society, even from himself.

Two of Kafka’s most famous short stories, "The Judgment" and "The Metamorphosis," show a domineering father who disowns or even inflicts harm upon his son. In "The Judgment," the main character, Georg Bendemann, decides to write a letter to a friend living in Russia. Georg has not corresponded with this friend in years, and he would like to tell him of his recent engagement to a young woman. Georg lives with his father; his mother passed away two years ago. Georg now runs the family business, yet his father dictates the manner in which it must be operated. When Georg consults his father about the letter to his friend, his father exclaims, "How could you have a friend out there!" His father then tells Georg that he has been corresponding to the Russian friend for years without Georg’s knowledge, and he chastises Georg for being close to neither his friend nor his own father. He then condemns Georg to drown himself in the river, which Georg immediately fulfills. Parallels between Kafka and Georg immediately arise: both had controlling, demeaning fathers, and both had mothers who were not active in their lives. Both fathers dictate their sons’ professions. In addition, recent Kafka critic Kate Flores notices the parallel between the domineering nature of both fathers. She describes them both as "a morbid old man, obsessed with thoughts of death, his wife’s death and his own, a brooding, embittered, self-involved old male, self-important, self-righteous, self-pitying." Clearly, Kafka shows the reader aspects of his own father, controlling and "self-important."

"The Metamorphosis" also shows Kafka’s attitude toward his father, however, it does so using more symbolic techniques. The main character, Gregor, is a travelling salesman who supports his father, mother, and sister. A "good" son, he provides a living for his entire family and still manages to save money that may soon allow his sister Grete to attend a trade school. He awakens one morning to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect. When Gregor finally opens his bedroom door for his family, his mother faints and his father clenches his fists in rage. His father drives him back into his room, squishing Gregor’s wide thorax through the narrow door and consequently injuring him. His sister, Grete, occasionally brings him food and milk, yet this hospitality slows and decays until Gregor’s father eventually forbids the practice. Locked in his room and neglected by his own family, Gregor sulks in his own filth, pondering the guilt his family has placed on him. His father refuses to recognize that the creature is, in fact, Gregor, and he does not want this blight to bring dishonor to the family; his father does not remember that Gregor was once a good and responsible son. His father does not look beyond surface appearances and consequently places the blame on Gregor for his transformation. When Gregor breaks out of his room once, his father pummels him with apples; one of them lodges in the soft tissue of his back and causes a raging infection that eventually kills him. Similarly, Kafka’s own father lambasted him with criticism, the effects of which scholars continue to study in Kafka’s writing. Gregor’s family may represent a society that isolates the abnormal, yet the fact remains that Gregor’s father bears resemblance to Kafka’s father in his patriarchal demeanor.

Kafka’s external writing was different from his internal writing, however. In his diaries, he was able to record and thereby expunge some of the pain caused by his father. Posthumously published, the diaries of Franz Kafka were edited by Max Brod, his close friend and confidant. These diaries contained events of everyday life, musings and pieces of short fiction, recollections of dreams, and Kafka’s response to the people and events around him. Brod notes that Kafka kept separate blue notebooks devoted to purely literary ideas that did not "reference . . . the everyday world." Thus, any literary ideas within the diaries were spawned by stimuli in Kafka’s life. Ironically, Kafka’s father does not appear often in the diaries, and when he does, it is typically a passing reference; for instance, "Father and Mother playing cards at the same table." Perhaps Kafka was in denial about his father. Perhaps he had mentally conquered the endless criticism and started ignoring it. Perhaps he did not want to waste the ink by ranting about his father. However, Kafka did record his dreams in his diaries, and his father is mentioned in four of the thirty-six recorded dreams. Calvin Hall and Richard Lind from the University of North Carolina published an entire book based on dreams found in Kafka’s diaries. They psychoanalyze Freudian content in the dreams, finding that "complexes and conflicts" present in his dreams can be supported in his fiction. One dream in particular shows particular spite toward his father, the entry from September 21, 1917. It describes his father giving a lecture on social order, but the audience for the lecture rejects his ideas. This shows Kafka’s anger and somewhat vengeful attitude toward his father; he wanted his father to feel the same rejection that he felt himself. Hall and Lind also prove that Hermann Kafka’s domineering nature caused in Kafka other feelings. They show that since his mother was so obedient to his father, Kafka felt like he had lost his mother. They also show that Kafka showed signs of homosexual behavior and feminine orientation caused by his father’s dominance; this is a form of fear of castration by the father. Hall and Lind declare that, according to Freud, castration anxiety and fear of losing one’s mother are "the two great fears of childhood," and that "their traumatic effects and how the child defends against them profoundly influence personality and behavior throughout life."

Kafka’s sentiments toward his father reached a peak in November of 1919 when he typed the forty-five page "Brief an den Vater" ("Letter to His Father"). He gave it to his mother, hoping she would deliver it to Hermann. According to Brod, she never delivered the letter, but instead returned it to Kafka. The writing in the letter does not resemble his allegorical style in fiction, nor does it resemble the daily, descriptive style in his diaries. Rather, it contains direct attacks and brutal irony meant to express to his father his true feelings. It is not rude, but very formal and very direct. It begins as such:

Dearest Father,
You asked me recently why I . . . am afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly . . . [because] I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation . . . would mean going into far more details than I could . . . keep in my mind while talking. And if I now try to give you answer in writing, it will still be very incomplete, because, even in writing, this fear and its consequences hamper me in relation to you and because the magnitude of the subject goes far beyond the scope of my memory and power of reasoning.

He goes on to state that his father accepts no guilt for his treatment of Kafka ("unless it be for having been too good to me"), and instead blames Kafka himself for being a poor son. Kafka did admire his father’s smile, although he never saw it, as well as his strong body, although he feared its potential. Kafka was inherently weak, anxious, and introverted, but his father’s constant disapproval convinced him of his own inadequacy. Kafka shows that he is not wholly a result of his father's influence:

I'm not going to say, of course, that I have become what I am only as a result of your influence. That would be very much exaggerated . . . if I had grown up entirely free from your influence I still could not have become a person after your own heart. I should probably have still become a weakly, timid, hesitant, restless person . . . and we might have got on with each other excellently . . . Only as a father you have been too strong for me . . . I alone had to bear the brunt of it – and for that I was much too weak.

Perhaps his most biting statement refers to his father’s disdain upon his reading and writing: "My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast." Kafka did not necessarily want his ideas accepted by his father; he wanted to be able to speak to his father and be heard.

Why is there such an extreme difference in Kafka’s discussion of his father within the diaries and the letter? Even Brod comments in the postscript: "when you keep a diary, you usually put down what is oppressive or irritating. By being put down on paper painful impressions are got rid of." This does not explain Kafka’s lack of discussion of his father within the diaries. Perhaps Kafka was afraid that his father might indeed find the quarto notebooks and read them; in such instance, Kafka would not have wanted his father reading an outright diatribe on himself. However, he wrote just such a diatribe in the letter of 1919. At that time, Kafka had dealt with his father’s scrutiny for the past thirty-eight years. The intentions of the diary and the letter were inherently different, and this caused the difference in their language. Kafka’s meant for his diary to be an exploration into himself, not a rant about his father. Inversely, the letter was meant to be an emotional plea to his father. This intrinsic difference shows that Kafka’s fear of and anger toward his father were more evident in the letter.

Alienated from his family, Kafka sought the companionship of others to fill the emotional gap. He met Brod in college, and the two became best friends. Kafka mentions Brod much more than his father within the diaries. Kafka held Brod in greater favor than his father because Brod accepted him as a friend and as a fellow writer. Kafka also mentions Felix Bloch, another friend, quite frequently in his diaries. Additionally, Kafka’s obsession with and partial fear of marriage showed that he longed for emotion in a family situation but was afraid of a marriage like that of his parents. He writes in 1921:

I do not envy particular married couples, I simply envy all married couples together; and even when I do envy one couple only, it is the happiness of married life in general, in all its infinite variety, that I envy – the happiness to be found in any one marriage, even in the likeliest case, would probably plunge me into despair.

He had serious known relationships with two women: Felice Bauer, Grete Bloch (wife of Felix Bloch), and Milena Jesenska. However, he and Brod also enjoyed the use of prostitutes. He longed for the happiness of marriage, but preferred temporary satisfaction because his low self-confidence made him fear rejection by women. Rejected by his father and consequently ignored by his mother, Kafka reached out to others (sometimes unsuccessfully) in order form a new and accepting "family."

* * *

It is well known that Kafka wrote in a tumultuous time and place in history: Eastern Europe during the opening decades of the twentieth century. World War I broke out in Serbia in 1914 because of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria-Hungary. Kafka continued to live in Austria-Hungary through the war, witnessing the advent of trench warfare and the futile slaughter of 10 million because of such battle. In his diaries, however, he claims that he will keep writing, casually mentioning "General Mobilization" and Germany’s declaration of war on Russia. He worked for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Group, where he met workers who were taken advantage of by unfair and demanding industries. It has been argued that political and social matters were the chief motivating force in Kafka’s fiction. These issues raised themselves in writings such as The Trial, "The Metamorphosis," and "In the Penal Colony." Before Gregor’s metamorphosis, he worked for a highly competitive agency of travelling salesmen. Long hours, demanding bosses, and lots of travel led him to say, "Oh God, . . . what an exhausting job I’ve picked on!" In "In the Penal Colony," the Officer responsible for executing felons resembles a member of the Nazi SS; this is supported by the claim that Kafka foretold Nazism. In Kafka’s novel, The Trial, the accused do not know their crime, are not present at their trial, cannot defend themselves, and are sentenced to death without knowing why. The similarities are astounding between Kafka’s portrait of justice and the sort of justice the Nazis enforced on the Jews in concentration camps.

However, these political themes in Kafka share a common theme: strong patriarchy. In an industrial situation, management must control the factory with an iron hand in order to maintain efficiency and keep profits as high as possible. Often, workers are abused because of unrealistic expectations placed upon them by their superiors; this parallels Hermann Kafka’s control of his son. Hermann, the owner of a business himself, secured his son a job with the Workers’ Insurance Company because he doubted his son’s potential to find an adequate, money-making job. Also, the justice system in The Trial can be seen as patriarchal, and resembles Kafka’s father. Hermann Kafka made his son feel guilty for being weak and anxious, yet this guilt was an irrational accusation because Hermann himself was the main cause of his son’s anxiety. Franz Kafka lived in fear of his father, who was as oppressive and omnipresent in his life as a secret police force. In these ways, Kafka’s father is the motivation behind Kafka’s symbolism, and the symbolism itself deals with political matters.

Perhaps Kafka used attributes of his father in his fiction as a warning. He feared the irrational, controlling, and self-motivated ideas of his father, and presented them as symbols in his work. Through the Holocaust, Adolph Hitler fulfilled Kafka’s prophecy of a government resembling The Trial. Hitler found followers willing to lose their individuality and obey the führer of the Fatherland. The Nazis obeyed their father and created a war machine; however, this machine collapsed and killed them like it killed the Officer in "In the Penal Colony." The Nazi followers allowed themselves to be controlled, and thus lost their voice to the ideals of the German state. Kafka’s dealt with his father’s demands, but he did not give up his individuality, his voice, his ideals. Kafka’s father would not listen to him, so he tried to find something that would: paper.

Works Cited

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