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Franz Kafka Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]— died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis)—express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in 20th-century Europe and North America.
LIFE Franz Kafka, the son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, a merchant, was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers died in infancy, he became the eldest child and remained, for the rest of his life, conscious of his role as elder brother; Ottla, the youngest of his three sisters, became the family member closest to him. Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother. Subservient to her overwhelming ill-tempered husband and his exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of their son’s unprofitable and, they feared, unhealthy dedication to the literary “recording of [his]…dreamlike inner life.”
Kafka and his father The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed his work as well as his existence. The figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations. In his imagination this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch who worshipped nothing but material success and social advancement belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant. In Kafka’s most important attempt at autobiography, Brief an den Vater (written 1919; Letter to Father), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to
live, to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood, as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. He felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka’s story Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in Das Schloss [1926; The Castle]). Yet the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship with his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings—the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in—and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.
The son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community, Kafka was German both in language and culture. He was a timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected and liked by his teachers. Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical languages. Kafka’s opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of Czech anarchists (before World War I), and in his later years he showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.
Kafka’s double life Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod. This minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s friends, and eventually, as Kafka’s literary executor, he emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential biographer. The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.
In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture, and his deeper personal relationships were neurotically disturbed. The conflicting inclinations of his complex and ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully disturbed his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before their final rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesenskå Pollak was also thwarted. His health was poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums. In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. During a vacation on the Baltic coast later that year, he met Dora Dymant (Diamant), a young Jewish socialist. The couple lived in Berlin until Kafka’s health significantly worsened during the spring of 1924. After a brief final stay in Prague, where Dymant joined him, he died of tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna.
WORKS Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers, Kafka reluctantly published a few of his writings during his lifetime. These publications include two sections (1909) from Beschreibung eines Kampfes (1936; Description of a Struggle) and Betrachtung (1913; Meditation), a collection of short prose pieces. They also include other works representative of Kafka’s maturity as an artist: The Judgment, written in 1912 and published a year later; two other long stories, The Metamorphosis (published in 1915) and In der Strafkolonie (1919; In the Penal Colony); and a collection of short prose, Ein Landarzt (1919; A Country Doctor). Ein Hungerkünstler (1924; A Hunger Artist), four stories exhibiting the concision and lucidity characteristic of Kafka’s late style, had been prepared by the author but did not appear until after his death.
In fact, misgivings about his work caused Kafka before his death to request that all of his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed; Brod, as his literary executor, disregarded his instructions and published the novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika in 1925, 1926, and 1927, respectively, and a collection of shorter pieces, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (The Great Wall of China), in 1931. Such early works by Kafka as Description of a Struggle (begun about 1904) and Meditation, though their style is more concretely imaged and their structure more incoherent than that of the later works, are already original in a characteristic way. The characters in these works fail to establish communication with others, they follow a hidden logic that flouts normal everyday logic, and their world erupts in grotesque incidents and violence. Each character is only an anguished voice, vainly questing for information and understanding of the world and for a way to believe in his own identity and purpose.
Many of Kafka’s fables contain an inscrutable, baffling mixture of the normal and the fantastic, though occasionally the strangeness may be understood as the outcome of a literary or verbal device, as when the delusions of a pathological state are given the status of reality or when the metaphor of a common figure of speech is taken literally. Thus, in The Judgment a son unquestioningly commits suicide at the behest of his aged father. In The Metamorphosis the son, Gregor Samsa, wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous and repulsive insect; he slowly dies, not only because of his family’s shame and its neglect of him but because of his own guilty despair. Many of the tales are even more unfathomable. In the Penal Colony presents an officer who demonstrates his devotion to duty by submitting himself to the appalling (and clinically described) mutilations of his own instrument of torture. This theme, the ambiguity of a task’s value and the horror of devotion to it—one of Kafka’s constant preoccupations—appears again in A Hunger Artist. The fable Vor dem Gesetz (1914; Before the Law, later incorporated into The Trial) presents both the inaccessibility of meaning (the “law”) and humankind’s tenacious longing for it. A group of fables written in 1923–24, the last year of Kafka’s life, all centre on the individual’s vain but undaunted struggle for understanding and security.
Many of the motifs in the short fables recur in the novels. In the unfinished Amerika, for example, the boy Karl Rossmann has been sent by his family to America. There he seeks shelter with a number of father figures. His innocence and simplicity are everywhere exploited, and a last chapter describes his admission to a dreamworld, the “nature-theatre of Oklahoma”; Kafka made a note that Rossmann was ultimately to perish. In The Trial, Joseph K., an able and conscientious bank official and a bachelor, is awakened by bailiffs, who arrest him. The investigation in the magistrate’s court turns into a squalid farce, the charge against him is never defined, and from this point the courts take no further initiative. But Joseph K. consumes himself in a search for inaccessible courts and for an acquittal from his unknown offense. He appeals to intermediaries whose advice and explanations produce new bewilderment; he adopts absurd stratagems; squalor, darkness, and lewdness attend his search. Resting in a cathedral, he is told by a priest that his protestations of innocence are themselves a sign of guilt and that the justice he is forced to seek must forever be barred to him. A last chapter describes his execution as, still looking around desperately for help, he protests to the last. This is Kafka’s blackest work: evil is everywhere, acquittal or redemption is inaccessible, and frenzied effort only indicates an individual’s real impotence.
In The Castle, one of Kafka’s last works and also unfinished, the setting is a village dominated by a castle. Time seems to have stopped in this wintry landscape, and nearly all the scenes occur in the dark. K. arrives at the village claiming to be a land surveyor appointed by the castle authorities. His claim is rejected by the village officials, and the novel recounts K.’s efforts to gain recognition from an authority that is as elusive as Joseph K.’s courts. But K. is not a victim: he is an aggressor, challenging both the petty, arrogant officials and the villagers who accept their authority. All of his stratagems fail. Like Joseph K., he makes love to a servant, the barmaid Frieda, but she leaves him when she discovers that he is simply using her. Brod observes that Kafka intended that K. should die exhausted by his efforts but that on his deathbed he was to receive a permit to stay. There are new elements in this novel. It is tragic, not desolate. While the majority of Kafka’s characters are mere functions, Frieda is a resolute person, calm and matter-of-fact. K. gains through her personality some insight into a possible solution of his quest, and, when he speaks of her with affection, he seems himself to be breaking through his sense of isolation.
Kafka’s stories and novels have provoked a wealth of interpretations. Brod and Kafka’s first English translators, Edwin Muir and his wife, Willa, viewed the novels as allegories of divine grace. Existentialists have seen Kafka’s environment of guilt and despair as the ground upon which to construct an authentic existence. Some have seen his neurotic involvement with his father as the heart of his work. Others have emphasized the social criticism, the inhumanity of the powerful and their agents, the violence and barbarity that lurk beneath normal routine. Some have found an imaginative anticipation of totalitarianism in the random and faceless bureaucratic terror of The Trial. The Surrealists delighted in the persistent intrusions of the absurd. There is evidence in both the works and the diaries for each of these interpretations, but Kafka’s work as a whole transcends them all. One critic may have put it most accurately when he wrote of the works as “open parables” whose final meanings can never be rounded off.
But Kafka’s oeuvre is also limited. Each of his works bears the marks of a man suffering in spirit and body, searching desperately, but always inwardly, for meaning, security, self-worth, and a sense of purpose. Kafka himself looked upon his writing and the creative act it signified as a means of “redemption,” as a “form of prayer” through which he might be reconciled to the world or might transcend his negative experience of it. The lucidly described but inexplicable darkness of his works reveal Kafka’s own frustrated personal struggles, but through his powerless characters and the strange incidents that befall them the author achieved a compelling symbolism that more broadly signifies the anxiety and alienation of the 20th-century world itself.
At the time of his death, Kafka was appreciated only by a small literary coterie. His name and work would not have survived if Brod had honoured Kafka’s testament—two notes requiring his friend to destroy all unpublished manuscripts and to refrain from republishing the works that had already appeared in print. Brod took the opposite course, and thus the name and work of Kafka gained worldwide posthumous fame. This development took place first in France and the Englishspeaking countries during the regime of Adolf Hitler, at the very time when Kafka’s three sisters were deported and killed in concentration camps. After 1945 Kafka was rediscovered in Germany and Austria and began to greatly influence German literature. By the 1960s this influence became global and extended even to the intellectual, literary, and political life of Kafka’s place of birth, what had become communist Czechoslovakia.
Franz Kafka: 10 Facts On The Great Novelist Best known for this study of Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka is widely acknowledged as one of the 20th century’s most important writers. Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka came of age at the turn of the 20th century and went on to become one of its leading writers. His work brings together the every day and the incredible, inviting the reader to challenge their ideas about human nature, politics, and society. Sadly, Kafka’s life was, in many ways, just as haunting as his stories. This article unpacks everything you need to know about this great author, his life, and his legacy.
10. Franz Kafka Always Had A Passion For Literature
Kafka read vociferously from a young age, and by the time he got to university, was exploring texts in Greek, French, Yiddish, Czech, and of course his native German. Among his favorite authors were two of history’s greatest writers: Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Little did the young Kafka know that he would go on to join their ranks in the canon of world literature. At university, Kafka initially began studying chemistry, but soon changed to law. It is thought that the switch may have been inspired by the longer course in law, which gave Kafka extra time to take the classes he was really interested in (German studies and art history) and to write.
9. His Famous Study for The Metamorphosis
Kafka’s stories take place in worlds that are both familiar and foreign but what makes Kafka’s stories so profound is that they are grounded in reality. In each narrative, either the characters, the setting, or the situation is anchored in the real world, which allows us to relate to them. But there is always some significant twist that pulls the rug from under our feet. One of his most famous short stories, for instance, is ‘The Metamorphosis’. In it, he tells of a normal salesman who wakes up one morning to find himself inexplicably turned into a giant insect. Everything else in the narrative remains completely ordinary: his family are as shocked as we are, the world goes on as usual, and the salesman himself even retains the cognitive powers of a human. Written in 1912, ‘The Metamorphosis’ is considered one of the most important works of 20th-century fiction, as it encourages us to explore what being human means. Kafka achieves the perfect balance between realism and the fantastical, which forces the reader to reassess our perceptions of the world. Through this tension, he explores themes of isolation, brutality, bravery, and transformation.
8. He Refused To Let His Job Get In The Way Of His Writing
Writing was so important to Kafka that he called it his own ‘form of prayer’, and nothing as trivial as a job was going to stand in the way of his worship. In 1907, he joined an insurance company where he became deeply unhappy. The long hours left him little time to write, and so he resigned from his position after only a year. Instead, Kafka found employment at the state insurance institute, where he finished work at 2 pm, giving him the whole afternoon to focus on writing. It may also have given him some inspiration for some of his more eerie and twisted narratives: his role was to investigate injuries suffered by industrial workers, meaning he came into contact with a lot of lost fingers, severed limbs, and crushed bodies.
7. He Surrounded Himself With Like-Minded People
While studying, Kafka formed a close group of friends, many of whom he met through a literature society that organized talks, readings, and discussions about books and the arts. Several of these friends would also go on to become important writers, including Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum, and Ludwig Winder. Long after their university days, this group would come to be known as ‘The Close Prague Circle’.
As he began his career, Kafka’s social network expanded across the city, and he soon came into contact with its most prominent writers, poets, and actors. Among these were Albert Ehrenstein and Otto Pick, who, like Kafka himself, were both members of Prague’s Jewish community.
6. Kafka’s Language Force The Reader To Contemplate Big Questions
There are many ways to interpret Kafka’s stories: it is up to us to choose what we make of the giant insect in ‘The Metamorphosis,’ the torture device from ‘In The Penal Colony’ or the unspecified crime in ‘The Trial.’ Similarly, Kafka’s very language encourages us to explore a variety of alternatives. The word used to describe the creature in ‘The Metamorphosis,’ for example, is Ungeziefer. Most English translations derive this as ‘insect’ or ‘vermin’, but it literally means ‘a beast unfit for sacrifice’, which carries a range of different connotations. Likewise, the nature of German grammar means that Kafka could use incredibly lengthy sentences with the most important words placed right at the end. The effect is to keep the reader guessing, wondering, and contemplating for as long as possible. These quirks of language are sometimes impossible to translate, but it is worth noting that even at the level of the individual word, Kafka wants to keep his reader in a constant state of curiosity.
5. Politics And Religion Played A Significant Role In His Life And Writings The political events of the early 20th century gave Kafka much food for thought. The overthrow of the Tsar and the emergence of communism in Russia was particularly important, especially for an author living in what would become a key area of the Eastern so-
cialist bloc. Even though it is widely agreed that this political situation had an impact on Kafka’s work, scholars still argue fiercely about exactly what that impact was. Some say that his stories make a mockery of western capitalism, while others see them as an attack on uncompromising socialist ideology. Once again, the meaning of Kafka’s work is up for debate. His experience in Prague as a Germanspeaking Jew meant that Kafka was exposed to a range of cultures from an early age. Even though he was a selfprofessed atheist, his Jewish heritage led him to explore a number of Yiddish writers. In particular, his incomplete first novel, which was later published under the title ‘Amerika’, was inspired by Yiddish theatre and explored the meaning of family, heritage, and social acceptance.
4. His Life Was Sadly Plagued By Illness During the First World War, Kafka valiantly attempted to join the army but was prohibited by a series of ongoing medical problems. The most severe was the tuberculosis with which he had been diagnosed in 1917. This eventually got so bad that his workplace put him on an early pension, and Kafka spent most of his remaining years in various medical and therapeutic facilities.
Despite his suffering, Kafka continued to write, producing numerous short stories from his sister’s farm, where he lived under her care. When his condition worsened, however, he was moved to a professional sanatorium near Vienna, where he met a sorry end. The grim cause of Kafka’s death in June 1924 is thought to have been starvation. His illness made it too painful to swallow, and at that time there was no other way to supply his body with the essential nutrients. Kafka’s final story, written on his deathbed, is entitled ‘A Hunger Artist’; it focuses on a performer who attracts crowds with his ability not to eat for days on end.
3. He Also Suffered From Mental Disturbances
Along with his physical illnesses, Kafka is also thought to have suffered from a wide range of mental health problems. Later analysts have speculated that he may have had a borderline personality disorder, psychophysiological insomnia, eating disorders, and even schizophrenia. The evidence for these conditions is found in his writing style, personal accounts, and anecdotes supplied by his nearest and dearest. In his personal writings, Kafka admits that he considered suicide during the early 20th century, and his stories show a great preoccupation with death.
Furthermore, Kafka burned the vast majority of his own work, and on his deathbed, he demanded that his friend and editor Max Brod destroy all his remaining writing: ‘Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, is to be burned unread’. Although Brod did not respect Kafka’s dying wish, his instructions convey a deep-seated and tragic sense of worthlessness.
2. Although Unknown During Life, His Reputation Soared After His Death Although admired within his friendship group as a fine writer and an interesting character, Kafka’s work was hardly acknowledged during his lifetime. This was probably because 90% of it was burned and little of the rest published. After his death, however, the world began to appreciate Kafka and his fame accelerated in the latter half of the 20th century. His stories have been published throughout the world and translated (with difficulty) into over 40 languages. So prominent is Kafka’s legacy that the eponymous adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ is commonly used to describe surreal, uncanny situations or events, which mirror his bizarre narratives. He is particularly celebrated in his native city of Prague, which boasts two monuments celebrating the author, as well as the Kafka Museum, established in 2005 and dedicated to his life and works. In addition, the city awards the Franz Kafka Prize every year, the recipient of which wins $10,000 and a significant reputation boost.
1. Franz Kafka Is Perhaps The Most Influential Writer Of The 20th Century Despite his short life, Kafka left one of literature’s most powerful legacies. Many of the 20th century’s most notable writers from across the world are indebted to his haunting stories, including Nabokov, Márquez, Borges, Camus and Satre. His old friend, Max Brod, claimed that the era will eventually come to be known as ‘the century of Kafka’. Interestingly, despite his importance, Kafka is not one of those writers quoted ubiquitously. In fact, it is quite rare to find a single line referenced. Instead, it is his ideas and style that continue to inspire. Later writers and artists have taken note of Kafka’s existential curiosity and unique perspective, channeling it into their own work so that the audience is made to question their assumptions and consider different interpretations. In this way, Kafka has forced generations of readers to reassess their opinions and offered a new way of approaching the world through literature.