Letter to the Father/Brief an Den Vater - (Schocken Kafka Library) by Franz Kafka (Paperback)

About the Book

"One of the most astonishing and revelatory pieces of writing ever produced by this twentieth-century literary icon, presented in both the original German and the English translation. Kafka's letter to his father is at once an exploration of his relationship to his father, his need to write, and the source of his fear--one that his father prompts in him but that is beyond the scope of Kafka's memory and power of reasoning. There is no greater text about authority, the disfiguring effects of shame, and, in particular, Kafka's lifelong need to have his father's unobtainable approval"--

Book Synopsis

A son's poignant letter to his father--from the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, and one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. - "One of the great confessions of literature." --The New York Times Book Review

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka's probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son's gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.

Review Quotes

"This is the closest we have to Kafka's memoirs, a story of mutual misunderstanding and alienation, charted in a series of evocatively sketched scenes.... For all its power of psychological analysis, the tone is rarely self-pitying but almost forensically detached.... The fact that Kafka nearly always gives his father the benefit of the doubt makes his accusations all the more devastating." --The Times Literary Supplement

"Kafka's principal attempt at self-clarification is also one of the great confessions of literature." --The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

FRANZ KAFKA was born in Prague in 1883 and died of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna in 1924. After earning a law degree in 1906, he worked for most of his adult life at the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Only a small portion of Kafka's writings were published during his lifetime. He left instructions for his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished work after his death, instructions Brod famously ignored.