Franz Kafka, the embodiment of anxiety and loneliness. His life was filled with family, love, work, and creative anguish. Follow the life of this master of existentialist literature.
Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Czech Republic, on July 3, 1883, the third son of Hermann Kafka (1852-1931), a merchant, and Julie Löwy (1856-1934), to a Jewish middle-class family. Kavka in Czech means crow. Because his two older brothers died young, Franz Kafka was conscious of his role as the eldest until his death. Of his parents and three sisters, Eli, Valli, and Otla, he was closest to Otla, the youngest. All of Franz Kafka’s family members met a miserable end in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942.
Franz Kafka’s birthplace, Prague, was doubly and triply oppressive at the time: he was a citizen of the Kingdom of Austria-Hungary until the age of thirty-five, and a Czech citizen thereafter. But he was Jewish, Czech, and, at his father’s insistence, educated in German, the language of the Great Powers. German-speaking Prague residents made up only 7.5 percent of the population, but they owned a university, a technical school, a concert hall, five high schools, four unemployment high schools, and a powerful press. However, Franz Kafka’s German vocabulary was not rich, his sentences were lifeless, and the oppression of his family and the times that surrounded him drove him deeply inward. Franz Kafka was ostracized by the Germans who controlled the upper echelons of Prague for being Jewish, and by those same Jews for opposing Zionism. This environment led Franz Kafka to loathe the oppressive structures of society and to dream of an ideal society without oppression. He wrote manifestos in favor of the rights of the working class, read the works of Kropotkin, the founder of anarchism, and became active in socialist circles.
His father was a self-made man, born in poverty in the small town of Wossek in southern Bohemia, who moved to Prague after the Jews were granted pre-residency freedom and worked his way up from a hawker of miscellaneous goods to a fabric wholesaler. Although his father was a self-described “assimilated Jew,” he only grudgingly observed the services and rituals of the Jewish community, so Franz Kafka was German in language and culture. While Franz Kafka felt intimidated throughout his life by his imposing father, he felt a strong connection to his spiritual, intelligent, gifted, and delicate mother’s side of the family. His mother was a quiet, gentle, sensitive, intelligent, and wise woman. But she, like her husband, could hardly understand her son’s obsession with writing, which she saw as unprofitable and possibly damaging to his health. Franz Kafka’s dreamy inner life was kept secret from his parents. He was introverted and congenitally ill. As a result, he was a physically frail boy, darkly shadowed by a sense of guilt, but he was friendly to wholesome things, admired the greatness of nature, and was not inclined toward the grotesque or morbid.
After completing four years of elementary school, his father saw no merchant in him and sent him to a German liberal arts secondary school, where Franz Kafka met some of the most important friends he would make throughout his life. They were Rudolf Illowý, who imparted his socialist knowledge to Franz Kafka; the Zionist Hugo Bergmann; Ewald Felix Přibr am, the son of an insurance company owner who later recommended Franz Kafka to a workers’ compensation insurance company; and Oskar Pollak.
Oskar Pollak, especially the very precocious Oskar Pollak, had a great influence on Franz Kafka’s art and philosophy and served as a bridge between Franz Kafka, who lived in isolation from the outside world, and the world at large. At university, Franz Kafka initially attended lectures on literature and art history, but decided to specialize in law. He had already been writing about literature since high school, when he was still in high school, but he couldn’t abandon the expectations of his parents and family. The works he wrote at this time disappeared along with his diary, which he presumably destroyed.
Franz Kafka was a model student at his German elementary school and at the German Gimnasium, a strictly disciplined school that trained an academic elite, but he was also interested in the Czech language and had a deep appreciation for Czech literature. His teachers appreciated and liked him, but inside he rebelled against the authoritarian system, the mechanical rote learning, and the curriculum that dehumanized the humanities and sciences by emphasizing classical languages.
The figure of the father cast a dark shadow over not only Franz Kafka’s existence but also his work, and in fact, is the most striking character type in his oeuvre. A harsh, down-to-earth, arrogant shopkeeper and patriarch with nothing to worship but material success and social advancement, the father is a member of a family of giants in Franz Kafka’s imagination, a fearsome, admirable, yet repulsive tyrant. We get a glimpse of his Oedipus complex about his father in “Letter to His Father,” written in 1919, though he never actually addressed the letter to his father. In it, Franz Kafka confesses that he fled to literature because he failed in the normal life of marriage and fatherhood, thanks to his overbearing father who instilled in him the idea that he was incompetent. He felt that his father had broken his will to live, and The Judgment is a direct reflection of this conflict with his father. Franz Kafka’s novels, written in concise prose, depict this hopeless struggle against overwhelming forces, unknown forces that either torture and interrogate their victims, as in “The Trial,” or thwart the protagonist’s efforts to be recognized for who he is, as in “The Castle.”
Franz Kafka eventually followed his father’s wishes and entered the Charles Ferdinand University in Prague in 1901 to major in law. However, this was only because his father wanted him to, and he had no intention of becoming a judge or lawyer. During his university years, Franz Kafka was thrilled by the works of Hesse and Flaubert, fascinated by Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger,” and read with interest the works of Thomas Mann in the literary magazine Neue Rundschau. He also enjoyed the works of Carossa, Hebel, Fontane, and Stifter, later admired Balzac, resonated with the unhappy writer Kleist, and in his later years was a devotee of the philosopher Kierkegaard.
As a young man, Franz Kafka declared himself a socialist and an atheist, and expressed overt hostility to the established society. As an adult, he continued to express sympathy, albeit limited, for socialists, attending Czech anarchist meetings before World War I and, in his later years, showing a clear interest in and sympathy for socialized Zionism. However, he was essentially passive and remained politically inactive. As a Jew, he was isolated from Prague’s German community, and as a modern intellectual, he was alienated from his Jewish heritage. He sympathized with Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his assimilation into German culture kept this sympathy suppressed.
This social isolation and lack of a foundation for his life led to Franz Kafka’s personal unhappiness throughout his life. He was a lonely writer, recognized only by a small circle of friends who were neither successful nor well known compared to his Prague peers. Like Kleist, he was not well-received in the literary circles of his time, and he did not try to adapt to the tides of the times. However, he maintained close friendships with some German-Jewish intellectuals and writers in Prague, and Max Brod, whom he met in 1902 while at university, became one of the closest and most concerned of his friends. Brod was a pioneer of Neo-Materialism and Expressionism in the Berlin literary scene from 1906 to 1915, and is credited with spearheading the new styles and revitalizing the Berlin literary scene. In addition to publishing his early poems, essays, and novels in the magazine Die Aktion, he introduced Prague writers such as Oskar Baum, O. Pick, Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel to the Berlin literary scene. Franz Kafka often read his works to him. Max Brot, who eventually encouraged, rescued, and interpreted Franz Kafka’s writings, later emerged as his most influential biographer.
After barely earning his doctorate in law in 1906, Franz Kafka completed a six-month probationary period in the civil and criminal courts, respectively, but gave up on becoming a judge or lawyer and joined a general insurance company in 1907. He left the company in 1908 and joined a quasi-state-run company, the Kingdom of Bohemia Workers’ Compensation Insurance Company in Prague, as a legal advisor, where he stayed until 1917, when he had to take a medical leave of absence due to lung disease, and received a pension for two years after his retirement, but eventually died. Franz Kafka’s main duties here were to write rebuttals to company appeals, write propaganda to promote the work of the workers’ compensation insurance company, appear in court as a lawyer to defend the insurance company, and make supervisory trips to factories in the northern industrial zone of Reichenberg. Franz Kafka worked for the insurance company for so long because it was rewarding to defend workers’ rights and the conditions were good, with a 2:00 p.m. release time. He worked hard at this job, which was difficult for a Jew to get into at the time. Despite the dark image of his work, Franz Kafka was a conscientious, intelligent, and humorous man, whose abilities were recognized by his boss and liked by his co-workers.
Franz Kafka led a strictly disciplined life in order to find time to write. He worked from 8:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., came home, and slept from 3:00 to 7:30. He would then go for an hour-long walk with friends or by himself and have dinner with his family. Then I would start writing around 11 p.m. and stay up until 2 or 3 a.m. or even later. At this time, working conditions in Europe were very harsh. Franz Kafka traveled on official business trips and experienced firsthand the ruthlessness of the bureaucracy, the harsh treatment of workers, and the miserable lives of the workers, which gave him an inside look at the capitalist world. Based on these experiences, he poignantly satirizes the realities of the bureaucratic organization in The Castle and the identity of the trial organization in The Trial. He also participated in protest movements and attended rallies of social revolutionaries. Klaus Wagenbach points out that Franz Kafka was the only writer of his time who sided with the common people.
In August 1912, Franz Kafka began a relationship with Felice Bauer and fell in love with her, which had a great influence on his writing. He completed “The Judgment” in the night of September 22 and the early morning of September 23, and in October of that year, he read “The Stoker,” the first chapter of “Amerika,” to Brot. In November, he completed “Der Onkel” and “Die Verwandlung,” the second chapter of Amerika. He proposed to Bauer in August 1913 and was formally engaged to her in Berlin in the early summer of 1914, but they broke up in July. Marriage was a dilemma for him, both a salvation and a terrifying, impossible task. His love was, as Canetti points out, “another lawsuit,” a process of hesitation and postponement, a trial to justify. By this time Franz Kafka had almost finished writing The Trial and was finishing Amerika, suffering from headaches and insomnia, and devouring the Bible, the works of Strindberg, Dostoevskii, Kropotkin, and Kierkegaard. After his divorce from Bauer, in early November 1913 Franz Kafka began a relationship with her friend and sexual attraction Grete Bloch, with whom he had a son the following year. However, the child died in 1921 at the age of seven, and Bloch was later arrested by the Nazis and reportedly met a tragic end in a concentration camp.
On August 9, 1917, Franz Kafka had a hemorrhage, but refused to see a doctor, claiming it was due to mental reasons, and was eventually advised to enter a tuberculosis sanatorium, but he refused and went to Zürau, where his youngest sister Otla lived. The hemorrhage was a sign of Franz Kafka’s inner fragmentation, and his illness allowed him to justify his mental fragmentation and hesitation once again. “The situation of the village and the peasants in The Castle are based on the climate and geographical environment of Zürau, where he was staying. As a result of this all-consuming therapy, he recovered from his illness and became engaged to Bauer in 1917, shortly before his death, but they broke up again around Christmas that year. Franz Kafka remained in Zürau until the summer of 1918, when he returned to Prague and organized the manuscript of A Country Doctor, which was published the following year along with In the Penal Colony.
After his divorce from Bauer, Franz Kafka moved to Schelesen, north of Prague, in November 1918, where he met Julie Wohryzek and became engaged to her in June 1919. However, Franz Kafka’s father disapproved of the marriage because her father was a shoemaker, so the couple broke up, and she died of pulmonary tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Prague. Franz Kafka wrote “Letter to His Father” in September 1919, in which he tried to assert his independent stance against his father.
In 1920, Franz Kafka fell ill again and took a leave of absence from his job, traveling in April to Meran in Tyrol, where he met Milena Jesenská, who translated his works into Czech. A married woman with a banker husband and from a prestigious Slavic-Czech family, Franz Kafka was passionately in love with her for two years, even proposing to her, only to be rebuffed. While Franz Kafka idealized her as a Greek Helena, she saw him as realistic, objective, and rational. When the Nazi army marched into Prague in 1939, she deliberately wore a Jewish sign on her chest and was taken to a concentration camp, where she died of illness shortly before liberation.
Meanwhile, around March 1920, Franz Kafka made the acquaintance of Gustav Janouch, who would later become famous for his Gespräch mit Kafka. Their relationship has been compared to that of Goethe and Eckermann, and this collection of conversations is an invaluable resource for understanding Franz Kafka’s literature and thought.
In the summer of 1923, while staying in Müritz on the Baltic Sea coast with his sister Elie, Kafka met a Jewish-Polish woman, Dora Dymant (also known as Diamant), who nursed him until his death. Their relationship quickly grew close as he recognized and guided her theatrical talents. She saw Franz Kafka as a man with a Western mind and a Jewish heart, admired him for being twice her age, and cared for him with great devotion. Miraculously surviving the Nazi invasion after Franz Kafka’s death, she moved to Palestrina in 1949, financed by her own taxes from Franz Kafka’s publications, and later to London, England, where she died in 1952. Franz Kafka left Prague with her in July 1923 and lived in Stegritz, a suburb of Berlin, where, although his body was extremely frail and his health was failing, he tasted the happiness of life that he had never known before. He partially continued his creative work, publishing The Burrow and Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk.
In March 1924, however, Franz Kafka became extremely ill and returned to Prague, where he was unable to remain at home and was transferred to a sanatorium in Vienna and then to the Kierling sanatorium near Klosterneuburg. With Dora’s devoted love, he clung to life and followed the doctor’s orders, even though he was unable to speak properly due to laryngeal tuberculosis, but his life was cut short on June 3, 1924, at the age of 41.
As early as the 1920s, literary critics such as Walter Benjamin and Kurt Tucholsky had taken a keen interest in Franz Kafka, but by the time of his death, he had only a small circle of literary friends. Franz Kafka’s will instructed Brot to destroy all of his unpublished manuscripts and to stop reprinting works already in print, but Brot’s refusal to do so led to Franz Kafka’s name and work gaining worldwide fame posthumously. His reputation was particularly popularized in France and English-speaking countries by the existentialist writers Sartre and Camus during Hitler’s occupation. It was not until after 1945 that he was rediscovered in Germany and Austria and began to have a significant influence on German literature, and his value was rediscovered in the Communist bloc, but in his native Czech Republic, he was branded as a decadent bourgeois writer and was banned for a long time, only to be freed after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. In particular, Czech Milan Kundera honored Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka by naming the main characters Thomas and Franz in The Unbearable Lightness of Bein. At the same time, the structure and themes of the work are also heavily influenced by Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and other works.
