Franz Kafka wrote his father a hundred-page letter in 1919 cataloguing everything that was wrong between them, and then never sent it. He gave it to his sister Ottla instead. That single act is the shape of this family: an indictment composed with enormous care, addressed to a man who would not have read it, and handed sideways to the one person who would. A genogram is unusually well suited to the Kafkas because the household's structure and its emotional structure diverge so sharply — the lines of descent are conventional, and almost nothing that mattered ran along them.
Hermann Kafka was a butcher's son from Osek who walked to school barefoot and built a haberdashery business in Prague by force of will. Julie Löwy, whom he married in 1882, came from a prosperous brewing family and was the better educated of the two; she worked long hours in the shop beside him. They had six children. Georg died at fifteen months and Heinrich at six, both before Franz was six years old, which left him the only son among three sisters — a position the Letter returns to again and again. Gabriele "Elli" arrived in 1889, Valerie "Valli" in 1890, and Ottilie "Ottla" in 1892.
The sisters' marriages divide neatly along the axis Franz cared about. Elli married Karl Hermann in 1910 and Valli married Josef Pollak in 1913, both matches arranged in the family manner. Ottla, alone, refused: in July 1920 she married Josef David, a Czech Catholic, against her parents' explicit wishes. Franz admired that refusal and never managed it himself. She was also the sister who took him in at Zürau after his first haemorrhage, and the one he was close to without qualification — which is why the strongest line on this diagram runs sideways between two siblings rather than up or down a generation.
Four women occupy the row beneath him and none of them became a marriage. He was engaged to Felice Bauer twice, in 1914 and 1917, on the strength of several hundred letters and very few meetings, and broke it off both times. He was engaged to Julie Wohryzek in 1919; Hermann's contempt for that match is the immediate occasion of the Letter. Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator, was married and living in Vienna when their correspondence began in 1920, and "Letters to Milena" is why this family reaches readers who have never opened a novel — it is the record of an attachment carried almost entirely in writing, at a distance both parties partly chose. Only Dora Diamant, whom he met in 1923, shared a household with him, for the last year of his life. He died of laryngeal tuberculosis in 1924, aged 40.
The tree ends badly and the diagram does not soften it. Elli and Valli were deported with their families to the Łódź ghetto in 1941 and murdered at Chełmno. In 1940 Ottla divorced Josef David so that he and their daughters would not share her legal status; she was sent to Theresienstadt in 1942, worked in a children's home there, then volunteered to accompany a transport of Polish-Jewish children to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in October 1943. Julie Wohryzek was killed at Auschwitz; Milena died at Ravensbrück. Of the next generation, Valli's daughter Marianne survived, settled in London and administered the literary estate at the Bodleian — which is a large part of why any of these letters can be read at all.
Open & edit this family tree →