CHILDHOOD AND CHILDREN form a theme in Kafka's work whose importance has largely been overlooked. Kafka reflected continually on his own upbringing and on how poorly it had equipped him for adult life. He himself had strong views about how children should be reared, and he formulated them in a series of letters to his sister Elli when she was contemplating sending her son Felix to a progressive school.

Kafka's experience and his reflections on it can be better understood if placed in a historical context. Since at least the eighteenth century, there has been an ongoing controversy about how childhood should be conceptualized and, accordingly, about how children should be brought up. At one extreme, the child was an asocial being who could only be socialized through discipline which would suppress its refractory nature. At the other, the child's natural impulses were essentially good, and should be encouraged to develop in ways that, rather than just enabling the individual to slot into a predetermined social system, might allow childlike impulses to change society for the better.

In Kafka's literary work, there are of course many children and young people who embody an implicit critique of adult society and its values. But childhood also shapes Kafka's work in a more abstract way, which this essay is intended to explore. One of the master narratives that underlie Kafka's fiction is the story of growth from childhood to adulthood.