Kafka, the story of the writer

Kafka, Love-Hate Relationship with Family

In the entirety of Franz Kafka's work, the question of his origin is recurrent around the impossibility of finding his place between the present and the past, a constant weight on his shoulders, particularly through religion, Judaism, from which he felt cut off. His relationship with the question of genealogy is complicated; he is indeed tormented by an identity crisis: born in Prague, of German language and Jewish religion, he struggles to find his place and believes he has 'no personal stake in any tradition'.

He struggles to fit into a family history, between the one that produced him and the one he might eventually produce 'without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for ancestors, marriage, and descendants. All of them—ancestors, marriage, descendants—reach out to me, but too far from me. There exists for all things, for ancestors, marriage, and descendants, an artificial, pitiful substitute. We create this substitute in the spasms of pain, and assuming that one is not by the mere violence of spasms, one is by the desolate poverty of the substitute'.

For him, marriage and family are an indispensable part of a man's fulfillment, and he wishes to be part of a lineage, a genealogical history, but struggles to do so. The notion of tradition seems central in his life and work, and he seeks to explore it, as evidenced by his taste for Yiddish theater and the study of Hebrew.

On the other hand, Kafka lived celibacy as both deliverance and a curse: 'the path to God passes through family and woman'. But his ambivalence does not stop there; while on one hand he explores tradition, on the other he tries to flee it and sees it as a curse. Due to the plurality of his religion, nationality, and language, he feels ostracized from society, and this family heritage would have put his existence in danger, in limbo from birth, particularly given his religion and the prevailing context of the time. Survival would be more of a challenge for him. As a tragic echo to this reflection, his three sisters Elli, Valli, and Ottla perished in deportation, 20 years after his death.

This conflicted relationship with tradition is also linked to his very troubled relationship with his father, based on fear. The paternal figure is a source of conflict for him, making him lose the sense of family, which he will only have with his younger sister Ottla, to whom he will write a series of letters published in Letters to Ottla.

Kafka will never found a family, judging himself incapable of being a good husband and father, or even unworthy of it.

Moral of the story: behind every writer lies a story, as behind every person, with their wounds and hopes.