Franz KafkaLiterary Fiction · Classics·1883–1924
Brief an den Vater
Brief an den Vater
- Pages
- 108
- Published
- 1952
- Language
- German
Synopsis
Brief an den Vater is a long, unsent letter Franz Kafka wrote to his father, Hermann, in November 1919, while staying in Schelesen. It was prompted by his father's disapproval of his plan to marry Julie Wohryzek, a match Hermann thought beneath the family.
Kafka answers a lifetime of reproach by describing how his father's size, temper and certainty made him feel small and afraid, and how that fear shaped his writing, his work and his attempts at marriage. Kafka's mother is said to have kept the letter rather than deliver it.
It was first published in 1952, after his death, and is read both as a family document and as a key to the guilt and authority that run through his fiction.
How it reads
Prose complexity 7/10
Content warnings (2)
AbuseTrauma
- Lettre au père: Reconstruction littéraire d'une enfance traumatique. C'est un Kafka tourmenté qui écrit une lettre à son "tyran" de père, Hermann Kafka. Une lettre, qui ne sera pas remise à son destinataire (une qui n'était peut-être jamais supposée l'être), écrite dans l'espoir de "nous apaiser un peu, et nous rendre à tous deux la vie et la mort plus faciles". C'est donc une confrontation qui n'aura jamais lieu. Franz est persécuté par l'ombre de son père. Il voit en ce dernier l'homme que, lui, n'est pas. À travers ces pages, on a un aperçu du malaise insondable du fils, et de son profond tiraillement: une admiration hyperbolique d'une part, et une peur / un dégoût / une intimidation d'une autre part. Ce voyage introspectif est écrit d'une sensibilité déchirante et d'une sensibilité crue. Tout comme il est question plusieurs fois dans ce livre: il s'agit de "l'enfant", et du "père". Tentant de se détacher de ses expériences, "dans la conscience de sa culpabilité", Franz ne fait que s'y allier davantage. Le rendant plus vulnérable encore, et à tout jamais. Cela va sans dire: c'est lecture qui m'a profondément marquée. . " [...] ce qui m'empoigne doit nécessairement te laisser froid et inversement, ce que tu juges innocent peut me paraître coupable et inversement, ce qui, dans ta vie, reste sans conséquence, peut devenir le couvercle de mon cercueil."
- 3.5 Quotes i liked: What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, a little keeping open of my road, instead of which you blocked it for me, though of course with the good intention of making me go another road. But I was not fit for that. And it is characteristic that even today you really only encourage me in anything when you yourself are involved in it, when what is at stake is your own sense of self-importance. Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it. And I feel as if I could consider living in only those regions that either are not covered by you or are not within your reach. There is a view according to which fear of marriage sometimes has its source in a fear that one’s children would some day pay one back for the sins one has committed against one’s own parents.