Worlds In-Between: Multiple Realities in My Life and Psychoanalytic Thinking

Language and Selbstdarstellung

Although I have not lived in a German-speaking area since I was thirteen years old—the age I was sent to boarding school in France—I think it is appropriate to describe the following reflections with a German word: “Selbstdarstellung,” or self-representation. Geographically, Linz, Austria, remained my home, and Austria remained where I spent practically all my school vacations, until the country was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. Psychologically, the German language played and still plays a singular role in my inner life, a role that is, at the outset, important to highlight—more important than explaining, for instance, that my father and his brother inherited from their grandfather a business that went by the name of LUSKA (LUdwig und Sigmund KAfka), K. & K. (Purveyor to the Imperial and Royal Court), and that the company specialized in brandies, canned foods, vinegar, mustard, and pickles. But it is also true to say that the German language did not develop in me. It got stuck. As a result, I do not quite take for granted the meaning of German words, and I must attune my listening carefully. Such microscopic dissection of words occurs far less frequently to those who speak, and have always spoken, German as a matter of routine. A Selbstdarstellung—which differs from the story of a life, or from an autobiography proper—describes this peculiar situation: the author occupies a place away from one’s self, over there, a place from which one looks back at oneself. The meaning of self-representation, in this case, corresponds to the distance from language itself. One becomes an observer.

And now as soon as I think it and mouth it, this word “observer”—Beobachter—falls apart. I remain fully aware of this fact, and this pronounced awareness shows me how much my life and my self-representation are linked to Nazi history. For when I think of the word Beobachter, I immediately think also of the Völkischer Beobachter, or People’s Observer, the name of the major Nazi daily that frequently had horrible caricatures of Jews on the front page.

As I grew up and attended school, language then broke down, became stuck, but so did another part of my life. My father died from a heart attack when I was six years old. For many years, I had dreams in which his all-white figure came from the bathroom to the bedroom. In the first of my two analyses with Edoardo Weiss in Chicago (1946–1949 and 1953–1954) unfinished mourning became a prominent theme, and later, when I participated in a central European psychoanalytic conference in Bad Ischl, where the dialect is similar to the one in Linz, my father, about whom I had not dreamt for many years, reappeared in my dreams almost nightly. He spoke to me in the only language, with the only intonation, that he had used with me. Maybe these two aspects of the emigrant’s fate deserve more consideration in the literature: deracination contributes to unfinished mourning. In my life, these two elements—Nazi history with all its direct and indirect effects and the early death of my father—conjoined to resurface in me again and again.

Memory and Nachträglichkeit

My mother was born in St. Gallen in Switzerland. Her father came from Lengnau, one of the two Swiss communities in which Jews had been allowed to live for hundreds of years. She was twice married to Austrians, and twice widowed, the first time when she was twenty-three and the mother of a daughter barely two years old. About five or six years later, she married my father, Egon Kafka. Eight years after their marriage, he rushed home from a business trip to arrive before Yom Kippur and after the festive evening meal on the way to the synagogue he suffered a fatal heart attack. Later I was told that my nine-years-older half-sister and I had been sent ahead so as not to arrive late to...