The son writes to his father: «Your opinion was right, everyone else was crazy»

Is it a sensation or not? Yes, but one of the quieter ones. Franz Kafka's famous "Letter to the Father" has been in the German Literature Archive in Marbach since 1984. On permanent loan from the owner Thomas Ganske. This Sunday there was something to celebrate in Marbach: the manuscript is becoming the property of the archive. A considerable number of public and private donors have made it possible to purchase a text that, like no other, intertwines the personal with the political. It looks into the abyss of humanity and develops from it a phenomenology of power that has lost none of its validity over the last hundred years.

At the start of the Marbach festivities, the display case containing Kafka's manuscript is still covered with a grey cloth. Archive director Sandra Richter will proudly remove it later. She also says something about the power of the iconic letter and its importance "in difficult times". On the day of the German federal election, but also in view of the global situation, Kafka's key text about the manifestations of authoritarianism takes on additional symbolic power.

In 1919, Franz Kafka told his own father what he thought on 103 pages of manuscript. In clear and legible handwriting, the son wrote a report in Schelesen, north of Prague, which goes back to his childhood but has a current reason.

Kafka's most recent "marriage attempt" at the time, the initiation of a marriage with the Jewish merchant's daughter Julie Wohryzek, failed. Not least because of his father. Hermann Kafka's wild attacks on his fiancée destroyed a project from which the 36-year-old writer had expected nothing less than the final emancipation from his father's tyranny. A tyranny, however, that functioned like a perpetual motion machine and developed hellish energies in the process.

Franz Kafka is a willing victim of an often perhaps even involuntary perpetrator. He knows this and reflects this situation in the letter. The writer described the epistle to his friend Milena Jesenská as a "lawyer's letter". As in a courtroom, the case of the father-son relationship is brought up, arguments are weighed against each other. Kafka writes strategically. Not like someone who only has to convince his own father. The persuasive work carried out with language goes far beyond the description of a generational debacle; it becomes a great essay.

Kafka biographer Reiner Stach has described the "Letter to the Father" as the "basic text of literary modernism," and this document is certainly that. A private document and sophisticated art. A deep look into psychological and political relationships. The prototypical ruler that the writer portrays here has his predecessors and successors. And Kafka's analysis is frighteningly current, and not just because the latter are currently in charge worldwide.

"Your opinion was right, every other was crazy, over the top, crazy, not normal. And your self-confidence was so great that you didn't have to be consistent and yet you never stopped being right," the letter says. And later: "For me, you had the enigmatic quality that all tyrants have, whose right is based on their person, not on their thinking."

In his letter, Franz Kafka strings together symbolic images of abused power, recalls personal injuries and shows the culmination of terror in language itself. "I'll tear you apart like a fish!" was a threat from Hermann Kafka in which the alleged worthlessness of his son was countered with a violent fantasy that was appropriate for the family lunch.

At the Marbach celebrations on Sunday, the Israeli writer Zeruya Shalev gave a guest lecture and recalled her first experiences with Kafka's texts. The universality of this work was cleverly described. She was still a child when she heard "The Metamorphosis" for the first time. Her father also read "Before the Law" aloud.

For her as a child, the helplessness of the characters was seamlessly connected to her own childish feelings of helplessness, but Franz Kafka's fear, writing as an adult, was twofold: people will never escape helplessness in their entire lives. Anyone who reads Kafka learns to deal with this conclusion.

The "Letter to Father" was published for the first time in 1952. Even then, the question was asked as to who it was actually addressed to. Would the general store owner Hermann Kafka have been able to understand it in all its breadth? And what if? This work is much more than a private message and is great literature. The document was passed around within the family for several years. The mother must have turned pale when she saw the thick envelope; it never reached the true addressee.

The fact that the most famous letter in the world has found its possibly final delivery location in the German Literature Archive in Marbach is indeed a celebratory event.