Franz Kafka

• 1. Introduction

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  Franz Kafka asked a friend to burn everything he had ever written. The friend was Max Brod, his literary executor, and the instruction was explicit: every diary, manuscript, letter, and sketch was to be burned unread. Brod refused. He told Kafka outright, "I shall not carry out your wishes," and he published the novels and collected works between 1925 and 1935. Almost nothing of what made Kafka famous existed in print while he was alive. He died in 1924, aged 40, virtually unknown, of tuberculosis. The story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and a handful of stories in literary magazines, had drawn little attention. So how did a German-language Jewish writer from Prague, who finished none of his full-length novels, become a major figure of 20th-century literature? Why did his name turn into an adjective, Kafkaesque, used for situations of bizarre, incomprehensible, bureaucratic dread? And what did he leave behind that survived the flames he wanted lit?

• 2. The Father's Shadow

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  Hermann Kafka came to Prague in the 1870s and opened a store selling haberdashery and ladies' accessories, employing up to 15 people. His business logo was a jackdaw, kavka in Czech, the bird that shares the family name. To his eldest son he was, in Kafka's own words, "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance." The Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold described Hermann more bluntly as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman."

  Kafka's Brief an den Vater, his Letter to His Father, ran to more than 100 pages. In it he complained of being profoundly affected by his father's authoritarian and demanding character. His mother Julie was quiet and shy by contrast, the daughter of a cloth-maker in Humpolec in eastern Bohemia. On business days both parents were absent. Julie worked as many as 12 hours a day helping manage the family store, so the children were reared largely by governesses and servants. Kafka's childhood was, as a result, somewhat lonely, and his room was often cold.

  Franz was the eldest of six children. His two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before he was seven. His three sisters were Gabriele, called Elli, Valerie, called Valli, and Ottilie, called Ottla, who was his favourite. All three were murdered in the Holocaust of the Second World War. Valli was deported to the Łódź Ghetto in occupied Poland in 1942, and that is the last documentation of her. A memorial plaque now commemorates the three sisters at the family grave in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

• 3. The Bread Job

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  On the 18th of June 1906, Kafka was awarded the degree of Doctor of Law, then performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. He had begun at the university studying chemistry, switched to law after two weeks, and chosen it less for passion than for the range of careers it opened, which pleased his father. The longer course also gave him time for classes in German studies and art history.

  His first salaried post, at the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali from the 1st of November 1907, ran from eight in the morning until six at night. He found the schedule made it extremely difficult to concentrate on writing, and he resigned on the 15th of July 1908. Two weeks later he joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. The work meant assessing compensation for industrial injuries. Lost fingers and limbs were commonplace in factories whose lathes, drills, and rotary saws were rarely fitted with safety guards.

  Kafka's father called the job a Brotberuf, literally a bread job, done only to pay the bills, and Kafka often claimed to despise it. Yet he was rapidly promoted, handled appeals and claims, and compiled the institute's annual report for several years, work his superiors received well. He usually got off at two in the afternoon, leaving time for the writing he considered his only true calling. "I am nothing but literature," he wrote in his diary, "and can and want to be nothing else."

• 4. Letters And Engagements

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  On the 13th of August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer at Brod's home, a relative of Brod's who worked in Berlin representing a dictaphone company. His diary records a cold first appraisal: "Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly... by the time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion." Shortly after meeting her he wrote "Das Urteil," The Judgment, in a single night, and entered a productive stretch on The Man Who Disappeared and The Metamorphosis.

  Kafka and Bauer communicated mostly through letters over five years, met occasionally, and were engaged twice. His letters to her survive and were published as Briefe an Felice; her letters did not. He never married. Around 1920 he became engaged a third time, to Julie Wohryzek, a hotel chambermaid, but his father objected to her Zionist beliefs and the wedding never took place. During this period he began the draft of his Letter to His Father.

  In 1920 Kafka began an intense relationship with Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist who was non-Jewish and married, though her marriage was a "sham." His letters to her appeared as Briefe an Milena. On a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea, he met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family. He moved briefly to Berlin to live with her, hoping to escape his family and concentrate on writing. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual desire and a fear of "sexual failure," a private anguish that shadowed every one of these attachments.

• 5. A Quiet, Humorous Man

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  Kafka had a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically repulsive. Those who actually met him reported the opposite: a quiet, cool demeanor, obvious intelligence, a dry sense of humour, and a boyishly handsome if austere appearance. Brod thought him one of the most entertaining people he had ever met, a passionate reciter able to phrase his speech as though it were music.

  Brod singled out two traits, "absolute truthfulness" and "precise conscientiousness," noting that Kafka explored inconspicuous details until strange but absolutely true things surfaced. Kafka considered writing a "form of prayer," was highly sensitive to noise, and preferred absolute quiet to work. He was a vegetarian who did not drink alcohol. Though indifferent to exercise as a child, he became an accomplished rider, swimmer, and rower, and planned long weekend hikes for his friends.

  His humour is easy to miss in prose so bleak. The translator Mark Harman noted that when Kafka read his work aloud, "he evidently brought covert humor to the surface even when his writing was at its bleakest." Brod recalled that friends "laughed quite immoderately" at the first chapter of The Trial despite its "fearful earnestness," and that Kafka himself sometimes laughed so hard "he couldn't read any further." Milan Kundera saw this humour as an inversion of Dostoevsky: where Dostoevsky punishes characters for a crime, Kafka punishes a man who has committed none.

• 6. Worlds Of Bureaucracy

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  In 1914 Kafka began Der Process, The Trial, the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. He finished the final chapter but not the novel. The Nobel laureate Elias Canetti believed Felice Bauer was central to its plot, and titled his own study Kafka's Other Trial in recognition of the link between the letters and the book.

  Das Schloss, The Castle, which Kafka was planning by the 11th of June 1914 but did not start writing until the 27th of January 1922, follows a land surveyor named K. who struggles for unknown reasons to reach the authorities of a castle that govern a village. Kafka intended the castle's authorities to notify K. on his deathbed that his legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet that he would be permitted to live and work there. The novel turns on alienation, bureaucracy, and the futile pursuit of an unattainable goal.

  His first novel, begun in 1912 and left unfinished, he called Der Verschollene, The Man Who Disappeared; Brod published it as Amerika. It was more humorous and realistic than most of his work, the only one for which Kafka considered an optimistic ending. James Hawes argues that the legal proceedings in The Trial, however nightmarish, rest on accurate descriptions of German and Austrian criminal procedure of the time, which were inquisitorial rather than adversarial. As a trained lawyer, Kafka was keenly aware of the legal debates of his day.

• 7. The Metamorphosis And Its Creatures

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  Die Verwandlung, The Metamorphosis, opens with a travelling salesman waking to find himself transformed into an ungeheures Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin. Written in 1912 and published in Leipzig in 1915, it is regarded as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century. The word Ungeziefer resists clean translation. In Middle German it meant "an animal unclean for sacrifice"; in today's German it means "vermin"; Kafka named no specific creature, wanting only to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation. Gabriel García Márquez said reading it showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way."

  Animals run through Kafka's work, what Jacques Derrida called "zoopoetics." Joachim Seyppel counted "countless references to animals, human-animal comparisons, allusions to animal life, fables, and animal motifs," noting that hardly any story lacks one. From his earliest correspondence Kafka used animal figures for psychological insight, his favourite being the mole. In stories such as "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk," his last, animals occupy leading roles as narrators and central characters.

  Kafka also drew and sketched extensively, his interest in art growing from 1901 to 1906. He was, Brod said, even more hostile to his drawings than to his writing, and asked in his testament for them to be destroyed too. Brod rescued what he could from the wastebasket; until May 2021 only about 40 drawings were known. In 2022, Yale University Press published Franz Kafka: The Drawings, bringing about 150 sketches to light.

• 8. Survival Of The Papers

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  On the 3rd of June 1924, Kafka died at Hugo Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling, just outside Vienna. The cause seemed to be starvation: laryngeal tuberculosis had made eating too painful, and parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed. He was editing "A Hunger Artist" on his deathbed, a story about a man who starves himself, which he had begun before his throat closed to the point that he could take no nourishment. He was buried on the 11th of June 1924 in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov.

  Brod ignored the order to burn the work, and as he published it Kafka's reputation grew. He found the notebooks hard to arrange, since Kafka often began writing in the middle of a book or worked backwards from the end. Brod rearranged chapters, copy-edited, and changed punctuation, and finished many incomplete works for publication. Dora Diamant also defied Kafka's wishes, secretly keeping 20 notebooks and 35 letters, which the Gestapo confiscated in 1933; scholars still search for them.

  The fight over the rest of the papers outlasted everyone involved. When Brod died in 1968 he left Kafka's unpublished papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who in 1988 sold the original manuscript of Der Process for two million US dollars. A court battle began in 2008 between her daughters and the National Library of Israel, which argued the papers were "cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people." In October 2012 a Tel Aviv court ruled them the library's property, and in December 2016 the Israeli Supreme Court upheld it. Brod once predicted the 20th century would one day be known as the "century of Kafka."