Letter to His Father
Kafka setting out to his father exactly what the man did to him. The paternal function stated without a fictional cover.
You asked me recently why I maintain that I am afraid of you.
Kafka wrote this letter in November 1919 and meant it to reach his father, Hermann; he handed it to his mother, who never passed it on, and it stayed unpublished in German until 1952. Across its length he sets the relationship down in order, weighing the father's physical bulk, temper and commercial success against his own smallness, and working through childhood scenes, schooling, the family business, Judaism, and the failed engagements the father had derided.
For a clinician the letter reads as a sustained first-person record of how a son organises himself around a dominating parent, and how outside authority is taken inward and kept there as self-reproach. Kafka goes further than complaint; late in the text he writes the father's reply in his own hand, staging the accusation and its rebuttal in one voice. It offers primary material on guilt, submission, and a parent felt as the measure of every later act.
About the author
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (1883 to 1924) was a German-language writer who lived and worked in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. His fiction, including The Trial and The Metamorphosis, follows ordinary people caught before an impersonal authority they cannot reach or understand, often weighed down by guilt. Trained in law and employed at an insurance office, he wrote at night. Most of his work appeared only after his death, published by his friend Max Brod against Kafka's own instructions.
Details
- 1952
- German
- 9780805212662