For Kafka, Even Beer Came With Baggage
Franz Kafka wrote powerful stories about the powerless – and to make them frightening, he made them funny. Many of his darkest comedies, including the famous one about a salesman metamorphosing into a bug, appear to be rooted in the cowering – but deeply farcical – relationship he had with his domineering father, Hermann.
But if there was a sparkling boyhood memory that Kafka cherished – and recalled as he lay dying of tuberculosis in a sanatorium near Vienna — it was one involving that primal bonding ritual between father and son: sharing a beer.
In Is That Kafka? 99 Finds , a book of trivia recently translated from German into English, the eminent Kafka scholar Reiner Stach highlights his famous subject's enjoyment of beer and wine.
The image of Kafka in a sunlit beer garden in Prague is a refreshing one – and no doubt the writer spent many happy hours in this manner.
But with Kafka, even beer comes with baggage.
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His most joyous – and meaningful – memories of beer were of the drinking sessions he shared with his father. But these memories were also inextricably allied with the twin sites of his childhood humiliation: the dining table and the swimming pool.
Hermann was a blustering bully. But the deeper problem was that father and son had such different personalities, they were like slapstick antagonists. Hermann the confident and coarse shopkeeper vs. the timid Franz, who worked in insurance (Hermann derided it as a Brotberuf, or "bread job"), wrote weird stories in his room, became a vegetarian, and showed no interest whatsoever in the family dry goods store.
Away all day at the store, Hermann met his son and three daughters mainly at mealtime. The trembling young Franz grew to dread these dining-table encounters. At 36, Kafka wrote an emotional 47-page Letter to His Father , in which bottled-up images of those torturous meals boil forth in an accusatory torrent:
"There was a somber silence at table, interrupted by admonitions: 'Eat first, talk afterward,' or 'faster, faster, faster,' or 'There you are, you see, I finished ages ago.' Bones mustn't be cracked with the teeth, but you could. Vinegar must not be sipped noisily, but you could. The main thing was that the bread should be cut straight. But it didn't matter that you did it with a knife dripping with gravy. Care had to be taken that no scraps fell on the floor. In the end it was under your chair that there were the most scraps. At table one wasn't allowed to do anything but eat, but you cleaned and cut your fingernails, sharpened pencils, cleaned your ears with a toothpick. Please, Father, understand me correctly: in themselves these would have been utterly insignificant details, they only became depressing for me because you, so tremendously the authoritative man, did not keep the commandments you imposed on me."
The only time his father had a word of praise for him, wrote Kafka, was when "I was able to eat heartily or even drink beer with my meals." (Kafka handed this letter to his mother, who returned it without showing it to her husband.)
Beer made everything better. Father and son "had no common interests, no common language, and they almost never did anything in common," says Stach , who has written the definitive three-volume biography of the writer. "Thereforethe ... common drinking became a comforting symbol, a symbol of the closeness he had always missed."
I would have loved to have a beer with Kafka.
Beer made everything better. Father and son "had no common interests, no common language, and they almost never did anything in common," says Stach, who has written the definitive three-volume biography of the writer. "Thereforethe ... common drinking became a comforting symbol, a symbol of the closeness he had always missed."
Beer is great for use as social grease, as long as you know when to stop.
Great point.
"Kafka was not a heavy drinker, but, as he ironically said, a 'passionate drinker' — that is, he could drink beer and wine with intensive pleasure, like a gourmet, and for that he did not need large quantities," says Stach. "I don't think he has ever been really drunk in his life, because losing self-control made him feel extremely uncomfortable. However, he had a very strong social empathy, so it was a pleasure to him just to observe other people while drinking."
Some of Kafka's other works were not even close to humor ... "the Trial" comes to mind .
Ya got that right.
Kafka could write some of the weirdest stuff, but it would still make sense....
It wasn't so much weird as just way ahead of its time . Where is the 4th amendment when we need it ?!
It wasn't so much weird as just way ahead of its time .
Agreed. He reminds me of Clive barker in a way...
I'm not familiar with Barker's work . In what way are these 2 similar ? How was Barker "ahead of his time" ?