The same set of problems returns in an almost obsessive fashion in the Diaries. In a 1911 entry, Franz goes so far as to speak of his "hatred" of Hermann (Kafka), who not only covered him with reproaches but also insulted his friends Max Brod - whom he calls "a crazy hothead" (meschuggener ritoch) and Isaac Löwy - whom he compares to a dog that brings fleas into the house. The confrontation with paternal authority will be a permanent dimension of his identity, as is evidenced by the following late entry on December 2, 1921, which appears to condense in a remarkable way the writer's family "battleground": "This thought lately, that as a little child I had been defeated by my father and because of ambition have never been able to quit the battlefield all these years despite the perpetual defeats I suffer". This conflict is not only psychological and oedipal; it has a larger historical context: on the one hand, the cultural politics of the Austro-Hungarian empire - the Kakania described so well by Musil- that appears to cement into the same authoritarian paternalism all the representatives of power, from the Kaiser himself to the pater familias, passing through the heads of ministeries, prefects, and other directors of establishments; and on the other, a whole generation of young Jewish intellectuals born at the end of the nineteenth century, attracted to a romantic vision of the world, and passionately aspiring to a life dedicated to art, culture, or revolution. They would radically break with the generation of their bourgeois parents, who were merchants, industrialists, or bankers, moderate liberal or assimilated Germans. But in Franz's case the conflict is exacerbated by Hermann's authoritarianism and his hostility to his son's literary activities. For him, there is a clear connection between the "limitless power" of the father, the despotic authority of the "raging patriarch" (Adorno's term), and tyranny as a political system. In the "Letter to My Father" he remarks that both follow the same logic: "You became for me that puzzle which belongs to all tyrants: the law lay in your person and not in your wisdom." And commenting on his father's brutal, unjust, and arbitrary behavior toward the employees of the family business, he writes: "The place upset me - it reminded me of my relationship with you...therefore I belonged essentially to the worker's party." Such are the deeply personal roots of his affinity with the Prague libertarian socialists, and of the anti-authoritarian sensibility of his novels and short stories.
Michael Löwy, Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer