Letter To The Father Brief An Den Vater Bilingual Edition Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka, Ernst Kaiser, Eithne Wilkins 9780804150750, 0804150753, B00CVS66AW instant download after payment.

Franz Kafka wrote this letter to his father, Hermann Kafka, in November 1919. Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, relates that Kafka actually gave the letter to his mother to hand to his father, hoping it might renew a relationship that had lost itself in tension and frustration on both sides. But Kafka’s probing of the deep flaw in their relationship spared neither his father nor himself. He could not help seeing the failure of communication between father and son as another moment in the larger existential predicament depicted in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son’s gesture, Julie Kafka did not deliver the letter but instead returned it to its author.

“This is the closest we have to Kafka’s memoirs, a story of mutual misunderstanding and alienation, charted in a series of evocatively sketched scenes... For all its power of psychological analysis, the tone is rarely self-pitying but almost forensically detached... The fact that Kafka nearly always gives his father the benefit of the doubt makes his accusations all the more devastating.” -  Carolin Duttlinger, The Times Literary 

“Kafka’s principal attempt at self-clarification is also one of the great confessions of literature.” —  F. W. Dupee, The New York Times Book Review
FRANZ KAFKA was born in 1883 in Prague, where he lived most of his life. He published only a few short stories, including “The Metamorphosis,” “The Judgment,” and “The Stoker.” He died in 1924, before completing any of his full-length novels. At the end of his life, Kafka asked his lifelong friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished work. Brod overrode those wishes.