Literature · Novelists

Franz Kafka

1883–1924 · Bohemian (Austro-Hungarian, later Czechoslovak); wrote in German

Modernism

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague whose stories of isolated individuals trapped in absurd, bureaucratic nightmares gave the language the word "Kafkaesque". Little of his work appeared in his lifetime; he asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but Brod instead published The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. He worked for a workers' accident insurance institute and died of tuberculosis a month before his 41st birthday.

How to spot them

▸Gregor Samsa wakes transformed into a monstrous insect (The Metamorphosis)
▸Josef K. arrested for an unnamed crime (The Trial); the land surveyor K. (The Castle)
▸Max Brod disobeyed his instruction to burn his unpublished work
▸Prague; the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia
▸Letter to His Father; Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská, Dora Diamant

Key works

The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) (1915)

Travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself turned into a monstrous vermin

The Judgment (Das Urteil) (1913)

Story written in a single night in September 1912, in which a father condemns his son to death by drowning

In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie) (1919)

An officer demonstrates a machine that inscribes a prisoner's sentence on his body

A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler) (1922 (story); 1924 (collection))

A professional faster whose art the public no longer values

The Trial (Der Process) (1925 (posthumous))

Bank clerk Josef K. is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible court without learning his crime; contains the parable 'Before the Law'

The Castle (Das Schloss) (1926 (posthumous))

The land surveyor K. struggles in vain to gain access to the authorities of a mysterious castle

Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared / Der Verschollene) (1927 (posthumous))

Young emigrant Karl Rossmann's picaresque adventures in America

Letter to His Father (Brief an den Vater) (written 1919)

Long, never-delivered letter analysing his fear of his domineering father Hermann

Key ideas

'Kafkaesque' describes nightmarishly illogical, oppressive situations, especially bureaucratic ones
Themes of guilt, alienation, powerlessness before authority and the impossibility of reaching the law or the castle
His deadpan narration treats absurd events as ordinary

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, to a German-speaking Jewish family
•Took a doctorate in law at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in 1906
•Worked from 1908 at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia
•Twice engaged to Felice Bauer; later loved the Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská and lived with Dora Diamant
•Died of tuberculosis at a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, on 3 June 1924; buried in the New Jewish Cemetery, Prague
•Max Brod's papers, including Kafka manuscripts, went to the National Library of Israel after a long legal battle decided by Israel's Supreme Court in 2016
•The Metamorphosis opens with Gregor Samsa 'transformed into a monstrous vermin' (ungeheueres Ungeziefer)
•The Czech Franz Kafka Prize has been awarded since 2001

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Sources

Reiner Stach — Kafka (three-volume biography)
Ritchie Robertson — Franz Kafka: A Very Short Introduction