Kafka, the story of the writer

Kafka, family I love you either

Dans l’ensemble de l’œuvre de Franz Kafka, la question de son origine est récurrente autour de l’impossibilité de trouver sa place entre le présent et le passé, poids constant sur ses épaules, notamment à travers la religion, le judaïsme, dont il a été coupé. Sa relation à la question généalogique est compliquée, il est en effet en proie à une crise identitaire : Born in Prague, German language and Jewish religion, he struggles to find his place and considers that he had "no personal part of any tradition".

He finds it difficult to register in a family history, between the one that produced him, and that which he will produce "Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with a violent desire for ancestors, marriage, descendants. All, ancestors, marriage and descendants reach out to me, but too far from me. There is for all things, for ancestors, marriage, descendants an artificial, pitiful substitute. We create this substitute in the spasms of pain, and assuming that one is by the alone violence of the spasms, we are by the distressing poverty of the substitute ". 

For him marriage and family are an essential part of the accomplishment of a man and he wishes to register in a line, a genealogical story but struggles to do so. The notion of tradition seems central in his life and his work, and he seeks to explore it, attests to his taste for the Yiddish theater and the study of Hebrew. 

Conversely, Kafka lived celibacy as a deliverance and a curse: "The way to God goes through the family and the woman". But his ambivalence does not stop there, indeed if on one side he explores tradition, he tries from another to flee it and sees it as a curse. Because of the plurality of his religion, his nationality and his language he feels banned from society and this family heritage would have put his existence in danger, suspended from birth, in particular in view of his religion and the context prevailing at the time. Surviving would be more for him of the challenge of the challenge. Like a tragic echo to this reflection, its three sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla will perish in deportation, 20 years after his death. 

This conflictual relationship with tradition is also linked to that very tormented that he shared with his father, based on fear. The paternal figure is for him a source of conflict, making him lose the meaning of the family, which he will only have with his little sister Ottla, to which he wrote a series of letters published in Letters to Ottla. 

Kafka will never start from the family, judging himself incapable of being a good husband and a good father, or even unworthy of that. 

Moral of history: Behind each writer hides a story, as behind each person, with his wounds and his hopes.