Franz Kafka - "Homecoming" - 1920

📚 Franz Kafka - "Homecoming" (1920) 🏠🕰️

In Homecoming, Franz Kafka captures the profound tension of returning to a place that is both familiar and alien. A young man steps into his father’s farmyard after a long absence, only to find himself gripped by uncertainty and estrangement. 🚪🌌 The desolate surroundings—a broken farmyard, a fluttering torn cloth, and the looming kitchen door—become a stage for his inner turmoil.Through vivid and symbolic imagery, Kafka explores themes of alienation, belonging, and the haunting distance between past and present. 🕊️❄️ His protagonist stands at the threshold of the known and unknown, embodying the fragile human struggle to reconcile memory and identity. A poignant reflection on the barriers between home and self. 🌫️✨

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Franz Kafka Homecoming, published in nineteen twenty. I have returned.
I have crossed the hallway and look around. It is
my father's old homestead. The puddle in the center, old
useless equipment tangled together, blocks the way to the attic stairs.

(00:23):
The cat crouches on the railing. A torn cloth, once
wrapped around a pole in play, flutters in the wind.
I have arrived. Who will welcome me? Who waits behind
the kitchen door? Smoke rises from the chimney, The coffee
for supper is being brewed. Do you feel a secret

(00:44):
comfort here? Do you feel at home? I do not know.
I am very uncertain. It is my father's house. But
everything stands coldly, piece by piece, as if each were
preoccupied with its own matters, some of which I have forgotten,
others I never knew. What use can I be to them?

(01:06):
What am I to them? Even though I am the
son of the father, the old farmer, And I do
not dare knock on the kitchen door. I only listen
from a distance, standing far enough away that I cannot
be caught eavesdropping. And because I listen from afar, I
hear nothing, only a faint ticking of a clock reaches me,
or perhaps I only imagine hearing it echoing from my

(01:28):
childhood days. What else happens in the kitchen is the
secret of those sitting there, a secret they keep from me.
The longer one hesitates before the door, the more alien
one becomes. What if someone opened the door now and
asked me something? Would I not then become like one
who also wishes to guard his own secret.