Letter to His Father

Letter to His Father is a lengthy personal letter by Franz Kafka, addressed to his father, Hermann Kafka. The document is an extended, one-sided argument in which Kafka attempts to explain a lifelong fear of his father and to trace how Hermann's temperament and methods of child-rearing shaped Kafka's character, his failures, and his inability to marry.

Kafka opens by recalling that Hermann recently asked why Kafka claims to be afraid of him. Kafka could not answer in person, partly because the fear itself inhibited him and partly because the explanation involves too many details to hold together while speaking. He summarizes what he takes to be Hermann's view: Hermann worked hard, sacrificed everything, and gave his son comfort and freedom, yet received only coldness and ingratitude. Kafka accepts this only insofar as he agrees Hermann is blameless, but insists he is equally blameless. If Hermann could acknowledge this mutual innocence, a kind of peace might follow.

Kafka establishes the root of their conflict as a fundamental incompatibility of temperament. He identifies himself as a Löwy, after his mother's family: shy, secretive, prone to faltering. His father is a "true Kafka" in strength, health, appetite, eloquence, and self-confidence. Because Kafka's brothers died in infancy and his sisters came much later, he bore the full force of his father's personality alone as a small child.

To illustrate the damage, Kafka recalls a formative childhood episode. One night he whimpered for water, not from thirst but partly to amuse himself. After threats failed, Hermann carried the boy out to the pawlatsche, an outdoor balcony, and shut the door. Kafka does not call the act wrong but uses it to characterize his father's methods: The incident impressed upon him that his father, the ultimate authority, could act almost without cause, and that he was "such a nothing" to Hermann. This feeling of nothingness, Kafka argues, came to dominate much of his life.

Kafka describes the crushing effect of his father's physical presence and intellectual certainty. He recalls undressing at a swimming cabin, his skinny body beside Hermann's strong frame, and feeling despair. Intellectually, Hermann ruled from his armchair with absolute confidence; every other view was dismissed as abnormal. Even Kafka's independent thoughts were burdened from the start by disparaging judgment, making it nearly impossible to carry any idea to completion.

Kafka enumerates Hermann's rhetorical tools of upbringing: scolding, threats, irony, a malicious laugh, and self-pity. He details the hypocrisy of his father's table manners as a microcosm of the relationship: The child was forbidden to discuss the quality of food or leave scraps on the floor, while Hermann did all these things freely. From these contradictions, Kafka derives a division of the world into three parts: one in which he lived as "the slave" under laws invented only for him; a second, infinitely remote world in which his father governed; and a third where the rest of humanity lived happy and free. He argues that Hermann's temperament made calm discourse impossible and that under these conditions he "unlearned how to speak," falling silent in his father's presence.

Kafka examines the role of his mother, Julie, acknowledging her goodness while arguing it inadvertently reinforced Hermann's hold. She functioned as a beater in a hunt: If Hermann's harshness might have produced defiance, Julie's kindness and intercession drove the boy back into his father's circle. When she secretly protected Kafka, the boy became a guilty deceiver accustomed to devious paths.

Kafka describes his three sisters' varying fates under the same paternal force. Valli submitted without much damage because she resembled their mother. Elli, who in childhood had been fearful and over-submissive, broke free after leaving home and marrying. Ottla, the youngest, combined the Löwy family's defiance with the Kafka family's strength and remained locked in combat with her father. Kafka reveals that he and Ottla discussed Hermann frequently, describing these conversations as attempts to talk through "this terrible trial" between the children and their father (23).

Kafka traces his flight from the family business, which became a source of torment once Hermann's intimidating nature merged with it. Watching Hermann scream at employees and call a clerk with tuberculosis a "sick dog" taught Kafka his father could be unjust, a lesson he could not learn from his own case because his accumulated guilt always seemed to prove Hermann right. He also addresses Hermann's habitual stories of childhood hardship, arguing these could have served as encouragement but instead functioned as humiliation, since Hermann held up his own independence as a model while forbidding his children's independence as ingratitude.

Kafka traces his relationship to Judaism through three phases: childhood guilt for not attending temple enough; adolescent bewilderment at his father's demand for piety when Hermann's own practice amounted to near-nothingness; and a later understanding that Hermann had brought a residual faith from his village origins, sufficient for his own constitution but too thin to transmit to a child.

Kafka identifies his writing as the one area where he achieved partial independence, comparing himself to a worm that, stepped on at one end, tears itself loose with the other. Hermann's habitual dismissal of his books paradoxically felt liberating, yet Kafka qualifies this freedom as a delusion: His writing was about his father, a deliberately prolonged farewell forced by Hermann but proceeding in the direction Kafka determined. His choice of profession followed a similar logic of incapacity: He chose law not from interest but because it most easily accommodated his indifference.

The letter builds toward its central crisis: marriage. Kafka defines founding a family as the highest human achievement, the one thing that would make him his father's equal, yet also the domain most closely connected to Hermann. He compares himself to a prisoner who wants both to escape and to rebuild the prison as a pleasure palace, goals that cancel each other out.

He recounts two episodes, separated by two decades, in which Hermann addressed his son's sexuality. When Kafka was a teenager, he raised the subject of sex with his parents, and Hermann responded with practical advice about pursuing such things "without danger," leaving Kafka with the impression that sexuality was filthy. Much later, when Kafka announced his intention to marry Julie Wohryzek, Hermann dismissed the match contemptuously, an act Kafka identifies as the deepest humiliation his father ever inflicted through words. Despite two carefully deliberated engagements, Kafka argues that neither woman disappointed him; rather, he disappointed them both. The essential obstacle is not specific worries but "the general pressure of anxiety, of weakness, of self-contempt." He is convinced that leading a family requires everything he recognizes in his father and that he possesses almost none of it.

Near the letter's close, Kafka constructs an imagined rebuttal from Hermann's perspective. The imagined father charges that the letter only appears to acquit Hermann while actually proving Kafka's innocence and Hermann's guilt, amounting to manipulation. He distinguishes between a "knightly fight" between equals and the fight of "vermin" that stings while sucking blood, accusing Kafka of the latter.

Kafka responds by conceding the objection carries some justification but argues it originates from the self-mistrust his father's upbringing instilled. He closes with a modest hope: that something close enough to the truth has been achieved to reassure them both and make living and dying easier. He signs the letter simply "Franz," without resolution or expectation of reply.