KAFKA: FATHER AND SON
21
close to the truth will have been achieved. This should have a sooth–
ing effect on the two of us and make both life and death easier."
With this reservation, the contradiction between the two char–
acters is sharply delineated. The letter stresses the difference in the
heredity of the two families from which Franz Kafka sprang: the shy,
eccentric Lowys on his mother's side, and the strong, realistic Kafkas.
"Compare the two of us: I, to oversimplify, a Lowy with something
of the Kafka at the base, which 4.owever does not express itself in
the Kafka will to life, business, conquest.... You, on the other hand,
a real Kafka, as to strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, elo–
quence, self-reliance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge of
people, a certain
largesse
and, of course, all the faults and weaknesses
belonging to your very virtues; weaknesses that are brought out by
your changing moods and sometimes by your temper." To this com–
pare the qualities which Franz (in another work) describes as his
herhage from his mother's family: "Definance, sensitivity, sense of
justice, restlessness."
Toward the end of the letter, Kafka, in speaking of his vain
attempt to get married, again paints an animated portrait of his
father. "The most important obstacle to my marriage," he writes, "is
the ineradicable conviction that the support and conduct of
a.
family
require everything that I have recognized in you, the good and the
bad together, as you organically combine them: strength and arro–
gance; health and a certain immoderation; eloquence and unwilling–
ness
to listen; self-confidence and contempt for the abilities of others;
power over men and an inclination to tyranny; knowledge of people
and mistrust toward most. Not to mention such unmixed virtues as
diligence, endurance, presence of mind, fearlessness. Such are your
qualities-mine by comparison seem next to nothing. Could I, thus
equipped, venture into wedlock, when I saw that even you had to
s~ruggle
hard in your marriage and were positively deficient in your
relations with your children? Of course I did not ask myself this
question so explicitly; otherwise my common sense would have shown
me men quite different from you (Uncle R. for instance ) , who had
married and at least not collapsed under the strain-a considerable
accomplishment, that would have been plenty for me. But I did not
ask
this question, I
experienced
it from childhood on. I examined
myself not only in reference to marriage, but in my relation to every
trifting matter. Everywhere you convinced me of my incapacity, both
by your example and by your training (as I have attempted to
describe it ) . And what was true in connection with trifles could not
help but apply to the greatest step of all: marriage."
Here it seems impossible to deny the applicability to Kafka's
