In his “Letter to the Father” –“Brief an den Vater” in its German original– Franz Kafka presents us with a tremendously original epistolary approach to parental relationships. The 45 pages long letter provides a crude, insightful diagnostic of his father’s personality and their respective differences. It includes passages like: “Compare us: I, to express it very synthetically, am a Löwry with a certain Kafka background, but, in contrast with these, I am not moved by a will to live, gain or conquer, but by the Löwry’s sting, that acts more secretively, more timidly, in a different direction, and many times simply hides. You, however, are a Kafka from head to toes, a strong man, healthy, with a good appetite, loud voice, eloquence, self-esteem, who knows himself better than those around him, gifted with perseverance, presence of mind, ability in dealing with others and a certain generosity, and of course all the faults and weaknesses that accompany such virtues, in which you submerge yourself driven by your temper and sometimes your wrath.”
Kafka’s written testimony is unique in its daring clairvoyance. But analysis is not all. In “Letter to the Father”, hostile from the title, in its denial of a possessive adjective –and use of the vs. my–, Kafka indicts his father precisely in his role as a father, digging deep into his own wound to be able to express himself in the right vein. These are some examples, denouncing oppressive authoritarianism (“You governed the world from your armchair. You were always right, and any conflicting opinion must have been absurd, extravagant, lunatic, abnormal. You had such faith in yourself that you could even afford being incoherent: that did not prevent you from being right.”); hurtful misconceptions (“You have always regarded me as industrious, be it due to paternal pride, ignorance of my true self, or for thinking that someone so frail physically must by definition be diligent. According to you, when I was little, I did nothing but study, and later, as a grown man, did little else than writing. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. Quite on the contrary, it is far less of an exaggeration to state that I have learnt little, and nothing in whole.”); or existential angst felt (“Sometimes I imagine the extended map of the world and you lying on top of it. And I have the feeling that the only the regions not covered by you or beyond your reach are inhabitable for me.”)
Kafka’s letter is a cultural landmark is dissecting parent-child relationships for its last twist, a masterly crafted literary ruse, when the father is lent a voice to exonerate himself from his son’s accusations in the final pages of the book. A guilt-free father and an end-responsible son thus come to a common position. Paying homage to a notion of self-leadership that I am becoming quite obsessed about, Kafka ends his epistle writing the following: “Accounting for the nuances in your objection, which I can and do not want to expose in detail, we have arrived, I think, at something so close to the truth that it can reassure us, making more bearable both life and death.”
