The good bad father

My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you.

— Franz Kafka, Brief en den Vater (Letter to his Father)

Hermann Kafka’s son was afraid of him; the boy hid out in his room reading, ignoring the humming of the pater familial dynamo in the parlor.

Hermann didn’t understand it; or perhaps he did in an inchoate sense he couldn’t organize into language. Franz was the oldest and only boy left, his brothers having died as babies, and as such he was the sole repository of Hermann’s entrepreneurial ambitions. There was a weight on the boy, and he couldn’t help but take Hermann’s very presence as a reproach.

Hermann was large and commanding—“a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature.”

No doubt Franz intended that remark ironically, but most of it was true: Hermann was unruly in a way that demanded not just attention but acquiescence. Franz was slight, negligible, and over-prone to introspection—like his mother’s people. Hermann got that.

On the other hand, the thing that Hermann couldn’t comprehend was the kid’s ingratitude. Hermann had been the son of a butcher, a poor boy who had no choice but to work or starve. He had been fortunate, that was true, but he had also been crafty and worked hard.

Even now that he had attained a certain station in the world and employed dozens of people, he still worked 12-hour days. So did Julie, Hermann’s wife and Franz’s mother; she was at the office for long hours. Franz and his sisters didn’t have to worry about starving. They could put on plays for one another.

Yes, it stung Hermann a little that the boy seemed so generous to his friends—those shabby, smug student types—and oblivious to his own father. Hermann was not so coarse that he couldn’t enjoy a good story or a play, not so thick that he couldn’t appreciate the work his son held so dear. He was a practical man, but not entirely bereft of poetry. His soul was not so crusted over that he couldn’t be proud of Franz and his art, but it was his nature to be practical.

One had to admit Franz was a strange child and an ill-equipped adult. There was a restlessness to his mind, a girlish flightiness. Hermann would have been happy if he’d stuck with chemistry or done something with his law degree. There was something presumptuous in the way Franz earned his degree then promptly stowed it away, taking an undemanding job with an insurance company and throwing that over for one that had better hours. He called them his bread jobs, implying that his real work, his stories and his plays, were more important than making a living.

Hermann thought maybe that was true, but that were it not for the support of his family Franz would have starved long ago. Despite his very obvious abilities, he was never prepared to make his way in a rough world. While he must have understood they were necessary, Franz resented all efforts made on his behalf, especially the asbestos factory fiasco.

It wasn’t true that Hermann had

forced Franz to take on more responsibility for overseeing the plant—in the beginning Franz was enthusiastic about the plan. Hermann expected him to eventually leave the insurance company, to at last understand the fundamental economic truth that he himself had grasped intuitively—that only those who worked for themselves were genuinely free.

But Franz stayed on at the company, winning little promotions and petty prizes, like the one he got for designing a safety helmet. Why was this busy work not as hateful to him as the gainfulness of the factory? Because it was my idea, Hermann thought. Franz always hated that it was Hermann who yoked him to his brother-in-law and sent him out into the actual material world of money and things.

Had he exerted the same modest energy in the family business, he might have made something of the factory. And he could have done his writing in the evening. Had he dedicated himself to the factory, he would have had more time to read and write.

Hermann still suspected it was Max Brod who got to him. Brod always looked like a weasel to Hermann, a shabby bohemian poseur. He was always filling Franz’s head with wild ideas, flattering his vanity. Brod didn’t like the idea of having a captain of industry for a friend; it didn’t suit his romantic notion of how artists ought to live.

Brod was Franz’s pimp and procurer, Hermann thought. A sneak and a gossip, someone not to be trusted. He took Franz to Paris and Italy and Switzerland, he flattered and inveigled him. He probably introduced him to that bum Yitzhak Lowy who got Franz mixed up in that seedy Yiddish theater. (Imagine Franz in Palestine—the boy who found his own bar mitzvah “dull and meaningless”—considering making Jewishness his profession!)

It was Brod who went to Julie and told her Franz was entertaining thoughts of suicide. And it was Julie who came to Hermann.

What could he say? That it was a silly, petulant and essentially hollow threat? That he did not believe a son of his could seriously contemplate self extinction and the long nothingness of the grave?

No, of course not. He relented, and Franz walked away from the factory. Then he took “temporary retirement”—what did that even mean?—from his insurance company job. He went through the floor, down into sickness and starry-eyed poverty. He didn’t have the money for a newspaper.

It was Brod who introduced him to this woman, this Dora banshee, flailing now on the ground at graveside. Hermann cannot bring himself to look at her, she who claims to have loved his son, to have been the spiritual equivalent of his wife. He cannot though he knows how it will look, like he is shunning her, that he is rejecting all that Franz wanted in his final moments.

It is not that. Hermann simply is who he is, and he understands the limits of his ken. It is not possible for him to take her in his arms and console her on the precipice of his son’s grave. He is a father and this is the third time he’s undertaken the unnatural duty of burying a son.

He knows that if he is remembered at all it will be as a villain, an inconsiderable tyrant who obstructed a genius he could not understand. He doesn’t care. He is a father. His heart is broken.