Kafka knew the family can be a prison. Less known are his ideas about what a sensible and truly devoted childhood education should be. But Kafaesque pedagogy isn’t the nightmare one might instinctively expect.
Arne Andersson, Sjösättningsmiddag för fartyg 201 T/T Alton Jones. Bohuslän Museum, Sweden – Europeana (public domain)
1. Who can educate a child?
Kafka’s families can be fatal traps. In The Metamorphosis, it is the beloved sister who passes the fatal sentence on the now-vermin Gregor Samsa (on whose vermin-form the family can no longer financially depend); the Letter to His Father, an accusation of abusive parenting, written but never delivered, abounds with traumatic details (for instance when Hermann Kafka left young Franz alone on the balcony in his nightshirt, because he « kept on whimpering for water »); and in The Man Who Disappeared, Karl Roßmann is sent away by his parents because a maid has seduced him (a typically Kafkian inversion of the logic of punishment: it’s the victim who gets banished). The family can certainly be « a haven in a heartless world », as Christopher Lasch put it; it can also be a prison or a regime.
Kafka knew it: less known are his ideas about what a sensible and truly devoted childhood education should be. These are offered in a long-distance epistolary exchange with his sister Elli in 1921 that can be read in the Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors collection.1 The facts are quickly told. Elli is uncertain whether to send her ten-year-old son Felix to a progressive school in Hellerau, near Dresden; Kafka, on the other hand, has no doubts. Send the boy to school! He invokes the pedagogy of Jonathan Swift’s admirable Lilliputians — « parents are the last of all others to be trusted with the education of their own children, » we read in Gulliver’s Travels — but twists the thesis to a new extreme. Every family, he notes, is first and foremost an animal bond, even a single organism, though extremely unbalanced. « The selfishness of parents — the authentic parental emotion — knows no bounds » in that zero-sum animal polity: « tyranny or slavery, borne of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents. » And if the kids don’t live up to the standards set by their parents, they are not expelled — how could they be, in such a binding organism? — but devoured. Kronos, who fed on his offspring, is thus « the most honest of fathers »: at least he does not pretend.
To be sure, parental enslavement can also express itself with ostensible tenderness; but for Kafka the wounds it leaves in children are no less profound for being tenderly inflicted. Parenthood doesn’t automatically imply good educatorhood: quite the opposite, by Kafka’s logic, and he highlights that the very word Erziehung — spanning « education » and « upbringing » is ill-used here. « It shows no trace of real education, that is, the quiet, unselfish, loving development of potentialities of a growing human being or merely the calm toleration of the child’s independent development ». Parents do feel an « animal love » — which Kafka acknowledges as an unfathomable mystery — but only the pedagogue gives respect, which is vital for a true upbringing. The fact that Kafka was not a father, nor would he ever become one, thus gave the argument force: anticipating the objection, he admonished Elli not to reject the advice merely because it came from her childless brother. And finally — as a consolation that is in fact the coup de grace — he reminds his sister of a « school textbook poem, that you must surely know »: it’s the story of a vagrant who returns to his home village after many years, and absolutely no one recognizes him but his mother. Kafka calls this without irony the true miracle of motherly love, but also makes it a miracle of self-chasing, claustrophobic logic: had the son stayed at home, « she wouldn’t have needed to recognize him at all, because he would never have come back to her ». To re-cognize requires someone or something to depart and change; living together would have confined him to her cognizing. Kafka’s verb, erkennten, becomes both plain and elusive in this context: it means « to know », but also hints at some deeper understanding. On a much smaller scale it’s like the noun « Law » (Gesetz) in The Trial: you obviously understand what it means, until the circumstances force you to admit that you don’t.
2. Why kill the double bass?
The great Swedish writer Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) was a devoted and careful interpreter of Kafka; he quoted from these very letters to Elli and likewise reflected lucidly on the Swiftian distrust of parents. In the article « Parental Complaints » (« Föräldrabesvär », 1949) and in the delightful essay « Why Kill the Double Bass? » (« Varför mörda basfiolen? » [1949], as far as I know not yet translated to English — my version comes from the Italian translation), Dagerman elaborated on the delicate subject of familial upbringing by channeling fathers who repress their passion — playing the double bass, say — because, as they solemnly affirm, « children come first ». But this laudable propensity often conceals a bitterness that then falls on the offspring: « How many double bass killers have lovingly whispered in their children’s ears: ‘Think what I would have become if you hadn’t been born! You have no idea how good I was at playing the double bass before you were born. But then you were born. And of course you were more important, my child, yes, you were’. »
As painful as it is to confess, resentment is the great taboo of parenthood: children monopolize attention and time, because they always come first. (Here, contrary to Kafka’s vectors, it is the child that tyrannizes the parent.) How to resolve such a conflict? That was not an academic question for Dagerman, a young father who wanted to give his kids the happiness he hadn’t enjoyed as a child, but who also needed to protect something more important than a passion: his writing. His solution — arduous and temporary, he was the first to admit — lay in introducing one’s own passion to the child, integrating a child into its parents’ world. Why choose? « It’s not that you always have to choose, whatever the existentialists say, » Dagerman dryly comments. « On the contrary, there are cases where choosing is dangerous, because the things we should choose between, far from being opposed to each other, actually complement each other. »
So while Kafka argued (anxiously) for an Erziehung outside of the family, the more optimistic Dagerman thought that an integration is hard but possible. But they share, I think, a vivid recognition of the radical otherness of the child’s world, a world that shouldn’t be bent to the rules of the adult. Dagerman’s example is poignantly attentive to the experience of art: for children, all frames are hung too high; and if the good educator wonders what the right height is, the family will either seek an intermediate solution — hang them halfway up, « so that everyone sees them just as badly » — or opt for opposite but equally tyrannical choices: hang them low and sacrifice themselves, or leave them where they are and sacrifice the child.
3. Rise to their feelings
These educational strategies are not in themselves original; they have been living theory and practice throughout the last century from Tolstoy to Maria Montessori via Colin Ward and Paulo Freire among many others. Like those progressive pedagogues, Kafka goes beyond mere condemnation of physical punishment and psychologically abusive methods. An education that does not recognize the independent development of children is a false education: one should strengthen the children’s own qualities and not impose others from outside. In advocating this delicate flowering process, Kafka’s letters betray something deeper than a theoretical interest: he was truly involved in the subject, likely because of his own personal history as a child.
In her chapter on « Childhood, Pedagogy and Education » from Franz Kafka in Context, Katharina Laszlo recalls that when choosing books for children, « Kafka not only selected those which he imagined would be suitable or enjoyable for them: he imagined what it would be like to read them as a child. »2 His letters to Elli allow us to lift a cartoonishly severe frown from the Kafka-cliché, and see him in this fresher light: a man who cared about the freedom of the youngest. A Kafkaesque pedagogy is not the nightmare one might instinctively expect.
It is exhausting to spend time with children. But, as the great Polish educator Janusz Korczak observed in When I Am Little Again (1925), it is exhausting not because we have to lower to their world, but because we must « rise ourselves to their feelings ». Korczak spent many years working in an orphanage in Warsaw and was eventually deported to Treblinka with his pupils. Kafka, I think, intuitively understood Korczak’s insight, and in 1924, a few months before his death, rose gracefully to such feelings.
He was living with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant, in Berlin. One day, during a walk in Steglitzer Park, they encountered a little girl who was distraught because she had lost her doll. Kafka promptly told her that the doll was not lost at all: it had instead gone on a journey. « And how do you know that? », asked the suspicious girl. « She wrote me a letter », Kafka replied; and he promised to bring it the next day.
Diamant’s account, given to Marthe Robert and translated by Anthony Rudolf in « Kafka and the doll »3, recalls that Franz set to work with utmost seriousness — « since the child must at all costs not be cheated, but truly appeased », she underlines, « and since the lie must be transformed into the truth of reality by means of the truth of fiction. » In the letter, the doll explained that she’d gone away for a change of air, but assured the little girl of her affection. The game continued: day after day, Kafka wrote and took the missives to the park, imagining new encounters and adventures for the doll, until a marriage was announced and with it the doll’s final parting — albeit reluctantly — from her young friend.
When I first encountered this many years ago, I was taken aback — Kafka’s lost epistolary novel, written for a single sad child! — and it still moves me, even as a secondhand anecdote or Kafka apocrypha. And through the lens of progressive education, the story transcends the sentimental. Kafka did not deny the facts or the pain of the doll’s disappearance, nor did he impose himself from above on a creature whose smaller world — as Dagerman reminds us — obeyed different rules. Instead, by entering that small world with great delicacy, Kafka made the loss tolerable: he gave it meaning. In his biography, Gérard-Georges Lemaire writes that in his encounter with the little girl, almost at the end of his life, Kafka finally found his ideal reader.