(1952/1953)
Only seldom do the intimate relics of a significant personality meet the expectations invested in them. All too often, what they finally reveal is the immense consumption of substance by which the great work, the lasting achievement, fed on the human substrate. Just as often, what emerges is how slight—at times banal, at times macabre—was the occasion that provided the spark to ignite the great blaze. What a disappointment, for instance, for the high-minded interpreters of Rilke now to learn from the recollections of his erstwhile lover that the poems to God in the Book of Hours originally were invocations of earthly love in which only the name was substituted!
Such experiences make us wary when trace upon trace of Franz Kafka’s life is now brought to light—be it in its original form or as a replica cast in a friend’s remembrance. But the consuming fire of this so quickly expired existence appears to have destroyed everything in and around itself that was not substantive and worthy of preservation—even though Max Brod, his friend and literary executor, could not fulfill the poet’s last will to burn what had nonetheless remained.
Already in his biography of Franz Kafka, which first appeared in 1937, Brod prepared us, by means of hints and individual quotations, for a key document from that estate, the “Letter to My Father,” written in November 1919, in which the thirty-six-year-old Kafka unfolds the central conflict of his life. In the years that have passed since Max Brod’s first hints, the author of the novels The Trial and The Castle has become one of the focal points of the world’s literary interest. Yet the pressure of curiosity about the background to this bewildering and disturbing oeuvre was unable to overcome the reticence of the estate’s guardian, Max Brod; only now has he deemed the time right for the great document to be set before the public: S. Fischer’s Neue Rundschau (in its second issue of 1952) has printed it in its entirety, and it will also be included in the forthcoming volume of Kafka’s collected works.
This is indeed one of the essential documents of human existence as such! The postponement of its publication has as its fortuitous consequence that it can no longer fall victim to the by now receded wave of psychoanalytic fashion. How much has been stripped of its human validity and lowered into the shadowy realm of the abnormal by being all too rashly tagged with that school’s vocabulary! However, the temptation remains to declare the overwhelmingly strong experience of his father that finds expression in this letter of Kafka’s to be the nucleus around which his work condensed, even if Sigmund Freud’s psychic underworld is not brought into play.
Let us try to recreate this relationship between father and son by means of a brief scene. A boyhood friend of Kafka’s, Gustav Janouch, reports how after a walk with Franz the father is already standing at the door waiting: a colossal man, his very physical appearance oppressive, irresistible in his claim to dominance. “Franz. Go home. The air is damp.” The order, which brooks no objection, is issued in a booming voice. Franz whispers to his friend shyly: “My father. He is anxious about me. Love often wears the face of violence,”1 and disappears into the house behind his father.
This father has all the properties assigned to anonymous powers in Kafka’s novels and stories—the labyrinthine instances of the court in The Trial, the shady bureaucracy of The Castle. He is an “absolute” father, inaccessible in his distance, inescapable in his presence. Under his power, one can feel all otherwise reliable realities, as it were, “melt into air”; what remains is the awareness of an unfathomable nothingness. The son’s efforts to assert himself against this father, indeed merely to be able to exist beside him, are as futile and hopeless as they are necessary. The “Letter to My Father” is the last of these attempts and at the same time the summary and account of all earlier ones. Kafka never delivered this quite respectful attempt at a reckoning to his father. That is almost symbolic: against this father there was no appeal.
But now a question arises that gives the letter a significance going beyond the personal, indeed beyond literary history: Is this image of his father, which the thirty-six-year-old Kafka sees before him in writing the letter, a faithful recollection of the real father of a childhood long past, or is it the father made larger than life, raised to the mythical realm? Does not this “huge man,” “the measure of all things,” he who does everything “almost for no reason at all,” epitomize an awareness of the absolute and of being subjected to it in a way that can never emerge from the sphere of human realities? Can Kafka’s oft-cited sense of transcendence be traced back to his experience of his father? In that case, it is a psychic phenomenon by which modern depth psychology may be troubled before compartmentalizing it. Or is not the reverse the case: that the experience of the father is possible and can be understood only on the basis of a deep-rooted awareness of transcendence? In that case, it is for us to ask how this transfiguration of the absolute can come about and what validity it is to be accorded with regard to our intellectual and spiritual situation.
Kafka originated from Prague’s German Jewry, which, on the boundary between Western secularization and the ardent faith of the East, made the vain attempt to go along with the former while retaining the latter. He did not succeed in filling his primal awareness of the absolute with that world’s religious ideas; it remained faceless, lacking a center, anonymous, spread like a leaden atmosphere over the landscape of this life. From an inner necessity, from the suffering caused by such anonymity, Kafka “occupied” the void of this godless religiosity, at first and then time and again with his father—who may of course have been eminently fit for that purpose—but later also with the images and symbols of his writings.
How little his father was the source and origin, how much he was only the embodiment and function of this outlook, is demonstrated by a little childhood episode to which the “Letter to My Father” alludes. A relatively harmless and, what is more, justified nocturnal punishment of the child is reflected thus: “Even years afterward 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 pavlatche [balcony], and that consequently I meant absolutely nothing as far as he was concerned.” The father, with his colossal stature, both represents and obstructs the center of a sense of life and the world, where once had stood the terrible majesty of the Old Testament God and which now was abandoned.
“Ever since I could think, I have had such profound anxieties about asserting my spiritual and intellectual existence that I was indifferent to everything else,” Kafka writes to his father. In a world that is subject, without mercy or certainty, to nameless freedom, to the most playful omnipotence knowing neither law nor rule, the care for self-assertion permeates existence into its roots and substance. “But since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me—in sober truth a disinherited son—naturally I became unsure even to the thing nearest to me, my own body.” This confession suddenly casts a bright light on an elementary motif in Kafka’s writing, finding its clearest expression in the famous story The Metamorphosis: the unsecuredness of the body, which in this grotesque vision alienates itself into an animal state, into a repulsive insect to which the human ego nevertheless remains bound.
Divisions such as this, between the ego and the body, recur throughout the world of Kafka’s writing; they are but the consequences of a primal division that tears man and the absolute asunder unbridgeably—for Kafka: the son and the father. To him, the world is torn into three parts, as he argues against his father: “one in which I, the slave, lived under laws that had been invented only for me and which I could, I did not know why, never completely comply with; then a second world, which was infinitely remote from mine, in which you lived, concerned with government, with the issuing of orders and with the annoyance about their not being obeyed; and finally a third world where everybody else lived happily and free from orders and from having to obey.” What is this “third world” that seems to stand outside the drama of transcendence and yet does so much to exacerbate that drama by adding an ideal image, illusory and unattainable of an indifferent absolute? This third world is that which is clearly detached from the process of salvation and damnation, the secularized sphere of the modern age’s mere immanence, of one-dimensional temporality. It causes the pain of him who finds himself—by accident, arbitrarily, uncomprehended—exposed to the absolute. It creates the strangeness, the shamefulness of all that is implicated in the “process”2 of transcendence, the loneliness and ridiculousness of the “select,”3 as the Old Testament calls the chosen and favored. This third world claims alone to be “the” world, “real” reality, and the shame, by which Kafka’s figures are gripped, is nothing but the extreme of isolation within this “third world,” that which is generally and for them, too, the only one that is recognized and taken seriously. But in the midst of this world of solid reality, which continues around them unperturbed, they are apprehended by the absolute, “arrested,” become entangled in the trial, and are judged.
Kafka does not describe a religious world, but nor does he describe its exact opposite; he describes what is new and singular about a world that entirely fulfills itself in its immanence and sets itself as absolute, yet in which persists, in awful solitude, bearing the stigma of exclusion, the drama of being “chosen,” of being “selected”—yet the dignity of these terms has become inverted, they signify torment, shame, guilt, humiliation. And this is what confronts Kafka, embodied in his father.
Kafka attempted two forms of self-assertion against this fate, against his father: writing and marriage—attempts at nonetheless taking root in that “third world.” On his attempt to create a body of literary work, he himself passed judgment by ordering its destruction. His attempts at marriage—“the most grandiose and hopeful attempts at escape”—he believes to have failed due to the overweening power of his father, who, in this, his “very own domain,” as head of the family and simply father, would have suffered no one beside him. Under often grotesque difficulties and misunderstandings of the kind found everywhere in Kafka’s writing, he thus failed at what to him was “the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.” Before the absolute in this transfiguration, his father, the effort “to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little” was hopeless. The paternal colossus covers the entire habitable earth, leaving his son only the realm of the uncanny4 in which to exist. That is more than a real father can ever “mean”; it is the sphere of Prometheus, Sisyphus, Atlas, and Tantalus. In the son’s consciousness, from an unsatisfied longing for the absolute, this father grows to be balefully larger than life, lending his name the anonymous, his face to that which lacks a countenance.
What is happening here is not accidental. The fate of an epoch whose relation with the absolute seems no longer able to find fulfillment in its traditional forms has here found exemplary human expression. Where otherwise the void of the absolute is “occupied” with political, aesthetic, erotic symbols, here the “huge man” acts as a placeholder for transcendence. And it is surely no coincidence that, after all, the name of the “father,” which already in the remotest past was fused with the name of God to form the epitome of trust in the absolute, should now, amid the crisis of that trust, fall to the terrible anonymity of nothingness.
Translated by Joe Paul Kroll5
Originally published as “Der absolute Vater,” Hochland 45 (1952/53): 282–284; from Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Literatur 1945–1958, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 109–114.
1. [Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees (New York: New Directions, 1971), 24.]
2. [Prozess, meaning both “process” and “trial.”]
3. [Die Herausgegriffenen, literally “those picked out,” a term that was not to be found in any of the German Bible translations I consulted. It may be that Blumenberg meant die Herausgerufenen, “those called forth,” in the sense of the people called forth from Egypt by God, or of the lonely prophets. In the New Testament, the Greek ἐκκαλέω, “to call forth, summon,” became ἐκκλησία, the gathering or congregation of those called and thus the Church. I am grateful to Judith Becker, Berlin, for suggesting this explanation.]
4. [Das Unheimliche, literally “the unhomely.”]
5. Quotations from “Letter to My Father”: Translated by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins; revised by Arthur S. Wensinger. Copyright Schocken Books Inc.