FRANZ KAFKA

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish household in which he grew up with feelings of inferiority, guilt, resentment, and confinement. He was the eldest of his parents’ six children; two brothers died in infancy, and he had three sisters. Franz’s domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same. His mother was submissive to her husband, always siding with him in matters concerning Franz. Toward her son she was alternately fawning and neglectful.

Kafka earned his doctorate in law in 1906 but decided against practicing, to the disappointment of his father. Instead, in 1908 he took a position at an insurance agency, which left afternoons and evenings open for writing, and at which he remained until 1922—two years before his death.

Kafka’s literary method follows the logic of dreams and other unconscious processes, and his stories read like allegories without an established point of reference. Kafka’s best-known story, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), in which he translated his experience as family breadwinner into a parable of alienation, transformation, and ultimately death, epitomizes his style. During his early writing life Kafka was introduced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann, and became part of a literary and philosophical circle that included Oskar Baum, Martin Buber, and Felix Weltsch.

Kafka had significant relationships with several women during his brief life, notably Felice Bauer, to whom he became engaged in 1914 and 1917; Julie Wohryzek; Milena Jesenská-Pollack, his Czech translator, with whom he became involved in 1920; and Dora Diamant, a young Polish woman he met a year before his death. Kafka’s sporadic literary career was in part fueled by these relationships, which varied in degree of dysfunction, and in which he vacillated emotionally, paralleling his mother’s behavior toward him as a boy.

Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, Kafka saw the publication of a limited number of his works during his lifetime, including “The Judgment” (1913), “The Stoker” (1913), for which he received the Fontane Prize in 1915, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), “A Country Doctor” (1919), and “In the Penal Colony” (1919). In 1924 Kafka asked his confidant Max Brod to burn his remaining unpublished manuscripts. Instead, Brod dedicated the rest of his life to the full publication of Kafka’s works. Among these are the novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, near Vienna.