Franz Kafka is a master of existentialism and modern literature, a writer who powerfully captures the anxieties and absurdities of human existence. His works explore the human condition and social alienation.
Franz Kafka was born in Prague, the eldest of six children to a Jewish merchant father and a mother from a wealthy family, but two of his younger brothers died early and he grew up with three younger sisters (Eli, Vali, and Otla). Her father, Hermann Kafka, was a self-made merchant and wholesale textile dealer. All of the men on his side of the family were stoutly built, and Kafka was always dwarfed by his father’s massive frame with broad shoulders. His mother, Julie Löwy, was a gentle, sensitive, and intelligent woman, and it was from her that Kafka inherited his intelligence and literary talent.
As a child, Kafka was raised alone by a maid and a tutor, as his sisters were too far apart in age, his father was overly strict, and his mother was too busy raising young children and supporting her husband to care for him. He was never loved by his mother, who was most like him in personality, never experienced the warmth of home, and was always lonely from a young age. Moreover, he was born congenitally weak and sickly, suffered from lung disease from a young age, and was always plagued by insomnia.
Franz Kafka’s complexes about his father, his Jewish origins in Prague, his upbringing in a German-speaking Jewish community, and his physical infirmity all contributed to his solitary nature and greatly influenced his ideas and works.
Wanting his son to succeed socially, his father sent Kafka to the German-speaking Royal High School for the Humanities in 1893 (at the age of 10). At the time, only the top 10 percent of people in Prague spoke German. His classmates included many future celebrities, but he was close to only one, Oskar Pollock. In 1901 (at the age of 18), he entered the University of Prague, initially majoring in philosophy and later switching to the promising field of law. However, he was uninterested and took courses in art history and German literature, planning to study German literature in earnest at the University of Munich. However, he was unable to get his father’s support and had to give up. In 1904 (at the age of 21), he wrote his first work, Beschreibung eines Kampfes.
As a young man, Kafka was not the bizarre, morbid, defeatist, paranoid, and paranoid state of mind that his works and journals suggest; on the contrary, he was extremely polite, cautious, and wholesome. It was at a reading and lecture group of German university students that he met Max Brod (the Austrian-Israeli writer and critic who wrote The Kafka Biography), who would later make a decisive contribution to Kafka’s literary life.
In 1906, at the age of 23, Kafka earned a doctorate in law and practiced for a year as a court clerk, and in October 1907, at the age of 24, he joined a general insurance company in Prague, an unusual move for a Jew, but the heavy labor left him no time for creativity, so the following year he was transferred to the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Bureau. Here he experienced a ruthless bureaucratic organization and harsh working conditions, which he used as a basis for his works, which depict the realities of bureaucratic organizations.
While working at the Insurance Bureau and writing at night, Kafka compiled his first book, Contemplation, with 17 short stories in August 1912 (at the age of 29) and published it in December. In August of that year, Kafka met Felice Bauer from Berlin at Max Brot’s house and fell in love with her at first sight. His love for her had a great influence on his creative work, and in September he wrote The Judgment (published in 1916) and began writing Amerika. In December, he finished The Metamorphosis (published in 1915), which is one of the works in which Kafka’s literary world is clearly revealed.
His love affair with Felice Bauer was not always smooth sailing, but suddenly the relationship progressed and they became engaged in June 1914 (at the age of 31). However, they broke up in July, which Kafka viewed as both saving and terrifying. In despair, Bauer tried to break off the relationship, but Kafka insisted that he could not live without her. Kafka was engaged and divorced three more times and never married for the rest of his life. That year he completed In the Penal Colony (published in 1919), began writing The Trial (published in 1925), and completed the final chapters of Amerika.
In 1915 (age 32), Kafka met and began dating Felice Bauer again and continued to work on The Trial while suffering from severe headaches and insomnia. During this time, he read the Bible, as well as works by Dostoevsky, Pascal, and Kierkegaard. In 1916 (age 33), he finished A Country Doctor.
In July 1917 (age 34), Kafka became engaged again to Felice Bauer. Diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis in September, he traveled to the home of his youngest sister Otla, who ran a farm in Zürau, northwestern Czech Republic, where he remained until April of the following year. It was during his convalescence that he and Bauer divorced for the second time. Living an idyllic life in secluded Zürau under his sister’s intense nursing care, Kafka’s illness seemed to improve, but then deteriorated again.
In November 1918 (age 35), while convalescing in Schelesen, he met Yulie Boricek, an innkeeper’s daughter, and the following year they became engaged, much to his father’s disapproval because of Yulie’s low status. It was in Schlesen that he wrote most of his Letters to his Father, in which he sought to clarify his thoughts on his father and his desire for independence.
In 1920 (age 37) she returned to Prague and worked again at the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Bureau, where she met Gustav Janouch, the son of a colleague. Gustav Janouch would later publish Conversations with Kafka (1951), a record of their conversations over the next four years until Kafka’s death. In April of that year, Kafka was convalescing in Merano, Tyrol, on the border of Italy and Austria, where he met Milena Jezenska, a passionate and intelligent woman critic who translated Kafka’s works into Czech. Milena, who came from a prestigious Czech family of Slavic descent, was married and twelve years younger than Kafka, but the two fell in love in spirit and wrote letters to each other. Letters to Milena (published in 1939), a collection of their correspondence, has become an important source for Kafka studies along with Conversations with Kafka. For Kafka, who was suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis, his love for Milena was the last spark of his life. Their love affair lasted for two years but was never consummated. But it was Milena who understood him better than anyone else in his life.
In 1922 (at the age of 39), Kafka began writing The Castle (published in 1926), along with A Hunger Artist and Forschungen eines Hundes, as his health deteriorated and he struggled with his unfulfilled love for Milena. In March of that year, Kafka read the first part of The Castle to Max Brot, who insisted that the character of Frida in the novel was based on Milena. The Castle is Kafka’s most famous novel and an unfinished work.
In the summer of 1923 (when he was 40), Kafka stayed with his sister Elie in Muritz on the Baltic coast, where he met Dora Diamant, a nineteen-year-old Jewish girl who worked as a nanny. Dora would be Kafka’s last companion in life, remaining by his side until his death. Kafka tried to marry her, but his father would not allow it. In September of that year, Kafka left Prague for Berlin against all odds. He moved in with Dora in Berlin’s Steglitz neighborhood. It was the fulfillment of a long-held desire: complete independence from the shadow of his patriarchal and tyrannical father. Kafka continued to write, producing Der Bau and Eine Kleine Frau with a sense of happiness he had never felt before.
However, Germany’s defeat in World War I resulted in severe inflation and, because it was winter, Kafka and Dora lived in extreme poverty, without enough food, firewood, or other necessities. Kafka never opened his hand to his father, even though he was terrified of starvation, fearing that their hard-won independence would be lost again. Dora tried to make Kafka as comfortable as possible as she endured the hardships of life, but in March 1924 (at the age of 41), Kafka’s health deteriorated and he was forced to return to Prague. As much as he wanted to get away from Prague, these six months would be the only time in his life that he lived independently.
In April, he entered the Kiering Tuberculosis Sanatorium in the suburbs of Vienna, Austria, with Dora and the doctor Robert Klopstock by his side. By this time, the tuberculosis had spread to his larynx, and Kafka was unable to speak or eat. Kafka had Dora burn everything he had written during this time, except for Der Bau, in front of her.
Clinging to life with a final love for Dora, Kafka died on June 3, just one month shy of his fortieth birthday, in the presence of Dora and Robert Klopstock. His body was buried on June 11 in Prague’s Strasnitz Jewish Cemetery. His sisters were reportedly taken to concentration camps and killed when the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia.
While Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann are two of the best writers of 20th-century German literature, when asked to name the most problematic, Kafka would be the first name on everyone’s lips. Kafka, like James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, had an enormous impact on 20th-century world literature, but little is known about his life. After his death, his close friend Max Brotte published a collection of his works in defiance of his wishes to have all of his works destroyed, causing waves in the literary world.
His works are characterized by a compelling narrative that takes the narrator from the mundane and enigmatic to the bizarre and frighteningly extreme. And his stylistic qualities are characterized by his ability to portray human beings in mysterious situations in a way that makes them seem more realistic. This convincing blend of the mundane and the fantastic, the mysterious and the realistic, is what characterizes Kafka’s literature. Most of Kafka’s works symbolically and eloquently illustrate the problems of the unidentified self and unstable existence by placing very real and ordinary characters in mysterious situations.
When Gregor, an ordinary salesman, wakes up one morning to find his body transformed into a hideous bug, he is horrified to find his family and the people around him in a state of panic, and his livelihood is threatened by the money he has been earning. At first, the family considers the bug a member of the family and cares for him, but as they grow tired of the hardships, they realize that he is just another bug that does not help them, but rather harms them. However, Gregor’s existence becomes even more miserable as, although his body has changed into a worm, he still has a human mind and acts like a human being. As he becomes accustomed to the life of a bug, his sense of humanity fades away, and he dies alone amidst the indifference and coldness of his family.
At first glance, The Metamorphosis seems to be a symbolic representation of Kafka’s own story, and in response to the resemblance between himself and the protagonist, Gregor, Kafka said, “ It is not a cipher; Gregor is not Kafka. The Metamorphosis is not a confession, but rather a disclosure of a secret.” In other words, he is his alter ego, but not the same as himself.
It’s like waking up one morning to find yourself transformed into a bug. Kafka himself said, “ ‘The Metamorphosis’ is a terrifying dream and a terrifying symbol. The dream is the unmasking of reality, and the symbol is what remains behind the mask of reality.”
The Metamorphosis, the story of Gregor Gregor, a sleeping man who wakes up transformed into a bug because he is repressed by the daily routine of reality, eventually becomes useless and dies amidst the indifference and coldness of his family, is the work that most clearly reveals Kafka’s literary world.
When Kafka read The Judgment at a public reading, his brother Otla is said to have said, “That’s a story about our house.” The Judgment is a work about his relationship with his father, a conflict that is full of symbolism about Kafka’s psychology and sense of being. In reality, Kafka spent his entire life oppressed by an authoritarian father who was successful in business and imposing in stature, and his father spent his life criticizing his son for having no interest in the business he had worked so hard to build. In The Judgment, Georg, who is socially successful, rebels against his old father in an attempt to get out of his shadow. However, his father blames his son for his inability to establish an identity and his constant insecurity, awakening in him a sense of moral and spiritual guilt and eventually sentencing him to drowning. Unable to shake off his latent guilt, Georg jumps into the river himself to fulfill his father’s sentence.
“A Country Doctor” unfolds in a confusing mix of reality and unreality. The story of a rural public doctor’s journey on a cold winter’s night symbolizes the wandering of human beings seeking a socially stable life in an unhappy era, driven by the urge to avoid social responsibility and follow their desires.
Written the year before Kafka’s death, Der Bau is the only work he kept after burning everything he had written around that time. Kafka’s Der Bau is a story about an animal that tries to make its home a safer place, but the more it tries, the more it clings to its burrow and becomes anxious and restless. The work depicts the fate of humans, who long for a peaceful and quiet life that is not disturbed by anything, but must pay the price of heavy labor to protect it, and who, as social beings, are constantly under threat from both internal and external sources.
