ARTicles vol. 3 i.3c: Sins of the Father

Doubts crushed Franz Kafka from all directions. When he sat down to write at 10 p.m. on September 22, 1912, he could reflect back on a year of external and internal pressures. The previous winter, his father Hermann had forced Kafka into a business partnership with his brother-in-law. At a time when the Yiddish theatre was kindling Kafka’s creative imagination, more mindless work on top of his job as an insurance clerk took time away from his passion, writing. Writing, however, gave him little pleasure these days. He agonized over the imminent publication of Meditation, his first collection of stories, worrying that he was about to “have something bad published with my eyes open.” He wished that the publisher would return the manuscript so that he could “lock it up again as if it had all never happened.” On that evening of September 22, he sat down for his nightly writing session. Suddenly, the floodgates opened: he wrote until dawn, completing his story The Judgment in a single sitting. In the weeks that followed, he wrote The Stoker, which would become the first chapter of Amerika. And by the end of the year, he had completed another story, The Metamorphosis. This creative period marked the flowering of Kafka’s style, notable for its vivid explorations of guilt. In all three stories, the protagonist’s guilt comes from the same source: the parents. In The Judgment, the young businessman Georg Bendemann lives with his invalid father. He has taken his father’s business to new heights of productivity and become engaged to marry. Although he must carry his father to bed, Georg still fears this “giant of a man.” Unexpectedly, the father leaps up in bed with sudden strength, mocks Georg’s fiancée, and reveals that he has secretly undermined his son’s relationship with a friend. Georg’s fears about his father’s power prove true; this successful adult crumbles when his father tells him “how long you’ve taken to grow up.” Judging his son unworthy, his father sentences him to death. Georg murmurs, “dear parents, I have always loved you,” and jumps from a bridge. The Stoker presents another child smothered by parental guilt, though in this case the parents are absent. Karl Rossmann’s family sends him to America when their maid seduces him and bears his child. Feeling abandoned, he takes up the cause of his ship’s stoker, who has suffered a minor injustice. Karl wishes “his parents could see him, fighting for a good cause in a strange land. Would they change their minds about him? Sit them down between them and praise him?” When his rich American uncle appears, he details Karl’s shameful past in public. Passed from his father to the stoker to his uncle, Karl seeks approval from each but finds rejection. In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa’s guilt comes not from his actions but from his body. To the horror of his family, he emerges from his room one morning in the shape of an insect. His father drives him back into the bedroom with a stick, “hissing and crying ‘Shoo!’ like a savage.” His parents cannot stand his repulsive appearance, and they keep him hidden from view. Before his transformation, Gregor had rescued his family from financial ruin, and now feels guilty that he can no longer support them. After months of concealment, he tries to communicate with them, only to be mortally wounded by his father. His death releases his family, and they move into a better apartment to follow their “new dreams and excellent intentions.” After the prodigious output of late 1912, Kafka pitched a new book to his publisher. He would title it The Sons, and it would present all three stories in a single volume. “They belong together both internally and externally,” Kafka wrote. “There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one.” The “obvious” connection is thematic: all depict children whose lives are defined by their parents. Guilt and shame at failing the family overwhelm the child’s identity. Georg’s father dissolves his hard-won success in an instant, Karl tries to prove his worth to his family long after they banish him, and Gregor discovers that his family is better off without him. The “secret” connection can be found in their personal origins. Years later, Kafka wrote a long letter of accusation to his father, though he never sent it. In it, he described how his father dominated his life, both intentionally and unintentionally. Hermann’s physical strength made the sickly Franz feel puny in comparison. His constant reminders that he had started from nothing and worked hard to give his family a good life made Franz feel guilty for not making more of himself. Hermann belittled his son’s artistic dreams “with an ironic sigh,” and ridiculed his friends and the women he loved. Above all, Kafka felt imprisoned by his father’s arbitrary commands: “either I obeyed your orders, and that was a disgrace, for they applied, after all, only to me; or I was defiant, and that was a disgrace too, for how could I presume to defy you?” The signature style that Kafka developed in writing these three stories arises from these anxieties. His characters live in a world where guilt exists without any crime to justify it. Applying his creative imagination to his personal experience of guilt, Kafka dreamed up a universe subject to the inexplicable laws of the family. Akiva Fox is a graduating dramaturg at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.