Franz Kafka's Personal Tragedy

Today is Franz Kafka’s 130^th birthday, and as good a reason as any to write on some of his autobiographical material. 

In 1919 he wrote a letter to his father, a letter that was never delivered. It was a brutally honest, unflinching effort to analyse and rebuild their relationship.

"You really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village community; it was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during your military service; but still, the impressions and memories of your youth did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life, especially since you did not need much help of that kind, but came of robust stock and could personally scarcely be shaken by religious scruples unless they were strongly mixed with social scruples. Basically the faith that ruled your life consisted in your believing in the unconditional rightness of the opinions of a certain class of Jewish society, and hence actually, since these opinions were part and parcel of your own nature, in believing in yourself. Even in this there was still Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all dribbled away while you were passing it on. In part, it was youthful memories that could not be passed on to others; in part, it was your dreaded personality."[1]

The letter reflects Kafka's personal tragedy- his strained relationship with his father, and his feeling of alienation- but it is also emblematic of his generation's experience. Kafka himself recognised that. "The whole thing is, of course, no isolated phenomenon. It was much the same with a large section of this transitional generation of Jews, which had migrated from the still comparatively devout countryside to the cities."

From the 1870s onward, Bohemian Jews witnessed an interesting phenomenon. A significant portion of Jews from the Bohemian villages moved to Prague, set up business ventures, prospered, and integrated themselves to a large degree into Czech and German society. Their attitude towards their religion grew lax, to say the least, and children of Kafka's generation grew up with a minimal, nominal Jewish identity at best. Synagogue attendance could have been as infrequent as a few days a year. "Four days a year you went to the synagogue, where you were, to say the least, closer to the indifferent than to those who took it seriously, patiently went through the prayers as a formality, sometimes amazed me by being able to show me in the prayer book the passage that was being said at the moment..." That was the synagogue. The situation at the Kafka household was "even poorer." The only thing observed was the first Passover Seder, which, "more and more developed into a farce, with fits of hysterical laughter, admittedly under the influence of the growing children. (Why did you have to give way to that influence? Because you had brought it about.)"

Even when they attended synagogue services, it seemed to the young Kafka a "purely social event," his father going through mere motions. Kafka's father, Franz later realised, did have a genuine attachment of sorts to Judaism, but it was related to childhood nostalgia and a sense of social status more than any inherent religious meanings or values.

"It was also impossible to make a child, overacutely observant from sheer nervousness, understand that the few flimsy gestures you performed in the name of Judaism, and with an indifference in keeping with their flimsiness, could have any higher meaning. For you they had meaning as little souvenirs of earlier times, and that was why you wanted to pass them on to me, but since they no longer had any intrinsic value even for you could do this only through persuasion or threat; on the one hand, this could not be successful, and on the other, it had to make you very angry with me on account of my apparent obstinacy, since you did not recognize the weakness of your position in this."

Kafka wryly summed up the lack of a vibrant, meaningful, and spiritual experience of Judaism, when he said, "this was the religious material that was handed on to me"

Is it any wonder that Kafka then remarked, "how one could do anything better with that material than get rid of it as fast as possible."

What Kafka's loss of identity boils down to is that a scarcely observant father could not browbeat or guilt his son into accepting a faith to which the former attached so little meaning. Kafka later grew closer to his Jewish roots by the influence of a friend, Jiri Langer. Langer came from a similar background, but ran away from home to become a follower for a while of the Hasidic Rebbe of Belz. By then, however, time was running out and Kafka never entirely regained neither faith nor identity before his untimely death.

[1]Franz Kafka, Letter to His Father. http://site.douban.com/113918/widget/notes/1857805/note/183418920/