Man and His Maker: Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’

Almost 90 years ago, on November 10, 1919, Franz Kafka sat down to write a long letter to the one person he feared more than anyone. That person was his father, Hermann Kafka, a successful Prague businessman and a domestic tyrant of epic proportions.The 100-page letter took Kafka two months to complete. It was “a lawyer’s letter,” he told his friend and lover Milena Jesenská. In fact, it is a furious indictment. In his fiction, Kafka, a practicing lawyer, saw the world — and the law itself — from the prisoner’s dock. Here he appears for the prosecution. But of course, it wouldn’t be a letter by Franz Kafka if the charges it brought were not directed as much against himself as against his terrifying father.RELATED: King of Infinite Space: Louis Begley’s Kafka Book.The “Letter to My Father,” now freshly translated from the German by Howard Colyer and just published in Britain (Lulu, 83 pages, £6), remains, even today, a disturbing document. This is in part because Kafka’s bill of indictment is so specific; the childhood humiliations he suffered at his father’s hands sting as sharply for the 36-year-old man as they did for the child he was. Once, for example, the young Franz whimpered continually for a drink of water after he’d been put to bed. When his shouted threats had no effect, his father stormed into the bedroom, grabbed the startled child, and shut him out on the courtyard balcony in his nightshirt. It’s not surprising that Kafka remembered this episode — who wouldn’t? — but it is surprising that he writes about it as though it had happened a few minutes, not decades, before.Kafka dwells on this small but shocking episode in the “Letter.” It has become part of his private myth: His father shuts him out, yet will not let him escape. Even worse, as he says, in Mr. Colyer’s translation, “for years I was tormented by the thought that this giant man, my father, could almost without reason come to me in the night, and lift me out of bed, and leave me on the balcony.” In the original he uses the Czech word pavla? for that long balcony where he stood shivering in the dark, as though to emphasize both its strangeness and its hominess. In a significant sense, as the “Letter” makes plain, he remained permanently perched on that terrible balcony.The experience gave Kafka his “overmastering sense of nothingness.” It showed him that to his father he was “a nothing.” He feared his father firstly because he could humiliate and belittle him, and did so with gusto. (At the supper table when Franz, always a finicky eater, dawdled over his plate, his father would bellow, “Faster! Faster! Faster!”) But he feared him principally because he felt annihilated by his very existence; it was as though he and Hermann Kafka were living contradictories, one of whom must be false if the other is true.Kafka’s fear of his father never abated. Fear dictated the “Letter” from first sentence to last. “Recently you asked me,” he begins, “why I maintain that I’m afraid of you. And, as usual, I didn’t know how to answer, in part because of my fear of you; and in part because my fear rests on so many details that I couldn’t even have discussed half of it.”Mr. Colyer’s translation is quite direct and rather free. In his preface he states that he was most concerned to reproduce the raw “venting of feelings” in the letter as well as the extraordinary “momentum of the prose.” In both these aims he succeeds. Unlike earlier, and fussier, versions, his translation catches the naked energy of the original. But this success comes at a certain cost. He often elides or omits words and sentences; some passages read a bit too briskly and turn out, on comparison with the German, to be closer to paraphrase than to direct translation.Hermann Kafka never read his son’s desperate letter; it was never sent. Perhaps he would have dismissed it by roaring, “Not a word of contradiction!” as he did evening after evening at the family supper table. Or he might have brushed it aside, as he did his son’s few published writings, by directing him to “leave it on the bedside table.” Had he read it, he would probably have been disturbed less by the rage and hatred that boil up between so many of the lines — after all, rage and hatred were his native elements — but by the baffled and terrified love which infuses the letter from beginning to end.Then again, we have only the son’s side of the story. Once when Franz Kafka was strolling with his younger friend Gustav Janouch in Prague, they ran into Hermann Kafka leaving his shop. As they drew near, Hermann boomed, “Franz. Go home. The air is damp.” In a whisper, Kafka explained, “My father. He’s worried about me,” adding, “Love often wears the face of violence.”eormsby@nysun.com

Man and His Maker: Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’

Man and His Maker: Kafka’s ‘Letter to My Father’

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