Franz Kafka was a great check writer who has come to own a part of the human
emotional spectrum which we can now call the kafkaesque and which thanks to him
were able better to recognize and to gain a measure of perspective over and
relief from cather's world isn't pleasant it feels in many ways like a
nightmare and yet it's a place where many of us will even if only for a time
in the dark periods of our lives
end up where in the world defined by Kafka when we feel powerless in front of
authority judges aristocrats industrialists politicians and most of
all fathers when we feel that our destiny is out of our control when we
bullied humiliated and mocked by society and especially by our own
families where on kafka's orbit when we're ashamed of our bodies our sexual
urges and feel that the best thing for us
might be to be killed or squashded without mercy as if we were an
inconvenient and rather disgusting bedbug Franz Kafka was born in
Prague in 1883 the eldest child of a terrifyingly psychologically abusive
father and a mother who was too weak and in all of her husband to protect her boy
she should have done
kafka grown up timid bookish meek and full of self-hatred he wanted to become
a writer but it was out of the question in in his father's eyes so one of the
greatest German literary genius since gerte was forced to spend his brief
life on Earth working in a series of jobs utterly beneath him in a law
office and then an insurance company he had a number of unsuccessful relationships
with women he couldn't marry or raise a family and was tormented by the strength
of his sex drive which made him constantly turned to brothels and
pornography kafka published very little in his lifetime just three collections
of short stories including his best-known work the metamorphosis and he
was entirely obscuring unnoticed
just his gigantic posthumous reputation is based on three novels the trial the
castle and America which were all unfinished because kafka was so
dissatisfied with them he gave orders that they be destroyed after his death
fortunately for Humanity these were diaobeyedd it shouldn't sound prurient or
reductive to suggest that one of the major keys to understanding Caprica is
to fatten the nature of his relationship with his father kafka never wrote directly
about this man in any of his works but the psychology of the novels is directly
related to the dynamics he enjoyed as the very unfortunate son of Herman
kafka. any boy who was ever felt inadequate in front of
or unloved by a powerful father will wants relate to what capital went
through in his childhood. in November 1919 at the age of 36 five years before
his death kafka wrote a forty seven-page letter to Harmon in which he tried to
explain how his childhood had deformed him like many victims of abuse kafka
never stopped hoping for some kind of forgiveness from the person who was so
wrong to him
dearest father went the letter you asked me recently why I maintain that I'm so
afraid of you as usual I was unable to think of any answer to your question
partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you and partly because an
explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details
than I could ever keep in mind while talking. the grown kafka are based
himself before this father what I would have needed was a little encouragement and a
little friendliness but I wasn't fit for that what was always incomprehensible to
me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could
inflict on me with your words and judgments it was as though you had no
notion of your power kafka complained one of the particularly traumatic incident
when as a young boy he called out for a glass of water and hia irritable father
pulled the boy out of his bed carried him out onto the balcony and left him
there to freeze in nothing but his night shot kafka writes I was quite obedient
after that period but it did me so much
incalculable inner harm even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting fancy
that the huge man my father the ultimate authority would come almost for no
reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the
balcony and that meant I was a mere nothing for him
boys need their father's permission to become men and Herman kafka didn't give
France a chance at a very early stage you forbade me to speak your threat not
a word of contradiction and the raised hand that companyed have been with me
ever since France's sense of inadequacy was total I was weighed down by your
mere physical presence I remember for instance how often we undressed in the
same bathing hot there was i skinny weakly slight you strong tall broad I
felt miserable specimen when we stepped out you holding me by my hand a little
skeleton unsteady frightened of the water
incapable of copying your swimming strokes I was frantic with desperation
it could hardly have been worse except it was kafka finished the letter gave it
to his mother Julie to pass to Herman but typical of her weakness and cowardice
she didn't she held onto it for a few days then returned it to France and
advice that it would be better if I busy hard-working husband never had to read
such a thing
the poor son lacked the courage ever to try again in the judgment of kafka's great
short story written in nineteen twelve a young businessman gil is engaged to be married
and lives in a flat with his widowed father he's about to get away from home
the father is old and frail geiock tucks him up in bed but then the father mysteriously
regains his strength Springs up right towers over geiock and denounced him for
betraying everyone his friends his father and the memory of his mother
geiock can make only feeble protests eventually the father condemned geiock to death
by drowning and geiock obediently rushs out and plunges into the nearby river
after passing sentence the father cries out you were an innocent child really
but at heart you were at diabolical human being
the idea of horrific arbitrary judgment was to be a constant in Kafka's fiction
it reappears in the unfinished novel the trial written two years later but now
capita had developed it away from a father to a vast legal apparatus with
judges lawyers guards and extensive bureaucratic procedures when Joseph K is
arrested on the morning of his 30th birthday he isn't told what he is
charged with he barely makes any attempt to find out he feel so guilty inside he
just knows that he deserves punishment he does try to declare in court that
he's innocent still without knowing what the charge is and high as a lawyer but the
court gradually grinds him down he becomes unable to think of anything
words failed him he can no longer do his job properly and is defeated in the game
of office politics finally a year after his arrest two grotesque looking
officials come to Joseph's case flat they lead him to a quarry outside the city
and execute him by plunging a knife into his heart between the judgment in the
trial kafka wrote The Metamorphosis a short story in which a traveling
salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into an insect akin
to a beetle or a bedbug it's a story of self-disgusted about the treachery of
the family and like the trial about terrifying arbitrary power when Gregor
crawls across the floor he is in danger of being stamped on by his own father
gregoe's family find it managed quite well without him they can find him in his
room and chuckle rubbish at him the family hold a Council and decide that
the insect in the bedroom can't really be Gregor this not refer to the
insects it instead of him they decide that somehow the insect has to go
Gregor listening agrees and dies quietly . after greg's death the family are
slightly ashamed of their behavior but only slightly.
kafka suffered from ill health for a lot of his life. in 1924 when he was
forty-one he developed laryngeal tuberculosis which prevented him from
eating almost anything without huge pain
you wrote a short story his last called the hunger artist. it tells a story of
a public performer who makes his living undertaking fast for the pleasure of the
public one time he manages to fast for forty days but gradually the hunger
artists audience gets bored of his work however hard he fasts they're no longer
impressed he gets put in a dirty old cage and weakens terribly before he dies
he asked for forgiveness and confesses that he should never have been admired
since the reason he fasted was simply that he couldn't find any food he
enjoyed shortly after he dies he's replaced in his cage by a panther and
animal full of vigor whom the crowd loved and who has a voracious appetite a few
days after finishing the hunger artists Caprica died and was buried in the
Jewish cemetery in prague within a few years of his death his reputation began
by the Second World War he was recognized as one of the greatest
writers of The Age not withstanding all his close family were gassed by the
Germans in the Holocaust he is a monument in German literary history and at the
same time he is a sad ashamed terrified part of us all. kafka once wrote that
the task of literature is to reconnect us with feelings that might otherwise be
unbearable to study but which desperately need our attention a book
must be he wrote be the axe for the frozen sea within us his books were among the
most touching frightening and accurate t axes ever written.