SOURCE: “‘The Judgment,’ ‘Letter to His Father,’ and the Bourgeois Family,” in Reading Kafka: Prague, Politics, and the Fin de Siècle, edited by Mark Anderson, Schocken Books, 1989, pp. 215–28.

In the following essay, Neumann investigates Kafka's upbringing and defining themes as found in his “Letter to His Father” and “The Judgment.”

Kafka's experience of his own identity in writing “The Judgment” exemplifies a contradiction that, as the French philosopher Jacques Derrida has shown, has formed an explicit part of European culture and its essential discursivity at least since Rousseau—the contradiction between writing as a liberating act that expresses the individual's particular identity (Eigentümlichkeit) and writing as a form of enslavement to the disciplinary norms of a society in which even a schoolboy learns to measure his identity in terms of the ability to write correctly. Traces of Kafka's traumatic experiences with the bourgeois educational system can...