Kafka

Kafka the common short form and surname of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), a German-language writer born in Prague to a Jewish family, whose novels and stories became among the most influential works of modern literature. His name has passed into common speech as an adjective, Kafkaesque, describing situations of obscure, impersonal and inescapable authority.

Name and Life

The term Kafka usually refers to Franz Kafka, born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 3 July 1883. He was the son of a prosperous Jewish merchant and grew up speaking German in a predominantly Czech city, belonging fully to none of the communities around him. This sense of division pervades his writing.

He studied law at the German University in Prague, took a doctorate, and worked for most of his life for an insurance institute, where he dealt with industrial accidents and workers' compensation. This bureaucratic employment gave him an intimate knowledge of offices, files and official procedure that he used to extraordinary effect in his fiction.

He was devoted to literature and wrote mostly at night, but published only a small part of his work in his lifetime, including the stories The Metamorphosis, The Judgment and In the Penal Colony. He suffered from tuberculosis and from a difficult relationship with his father, and he died in a sanatorium near Vienna on 3 June 1924, aged forty.

Major Works

The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, opens with one of the most famous sentences in modern literature: a travelling salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. The story follows the gradual exclusion of the transformed man from his family and his eventual death, and it has been read as an image of alienation, guilt and the burden of being different.

His three novels, all left unfinished and published after his death, are The Trial, The Castle and Amerika. The Trial follows a bank clerk named Josef K., accused of an unspecified crime and destroyed by a vast and opaque court; The Castle tells of a land surveyor, known only as K., who can never gain admission to the castle that governs the village; Amerika follows a young man through an invented and dreamlike New World.

Among his stories, The Judgment describes a son condemned by his father; In the Penal Colony presents an elaborate machine of torture; A Hunger Artist tells of a performer who starves himself for an indifferent public; and A Country Doctor and The Burrow are short, haunting fables of anxiety, duty and pursuit.

Themes and Method

Kafka's world is one of bureaucracy without purpose, of laws that are never shown and never satisfied, of rooms and corridors that lead nowhere. His characters are typically ordinary men caught in processes they cannot understand and cannot escape. The horror is not violent but procedural, and it comes from the sense that meaning is perpetually deferred.

He wrote in a precise, lucid German prose, apparently calm and matter of fact, which makes the fantastic content all the more disturbing. He rarely explains or comments and leaves his stories without clear resolution, so that readers must supply their own interpretation. This openness to many readings is part of his enduring power.

His recurring themes include guilt and judgement, the conflict of father and son, the isolation of the individual, the failure of communication, and the ambivalence of faith and authority. His Jewish background, the antisemitism around him, his uneasy position in Prague society and his troubled love affairs all feed into the parables of estrangement and accusation that shape his work.

Publication and Posthumous Fame

Kafka published little during his lifetime and instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death, along with his diaries and letters. Brod refused, and instead edited and issued the novels and other writings, a decision that rescued one of the central bodies of modern literature and made Kafka famous after he could no longer be troubled by it.

The three novels appeared in the 1920s, and further collections of stories and of his aphorisms, diaries and letters followed over the coming decades. Editions and translations multiplied, and by the mid-twentieth century his work had been absorbed into the general culture of the educated world, taught in schools and studied by critics of every persuasion.

His manuscripts passed through several hands and became the subject of legal disputes in the twenty-first century, eventually entering a national library. His life, his unhappy romance with Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenska, and his relations with his family have themselves become subjects of biography and of film.

Influence and Legacy

Kafka has influenced an extraordinary range of writers, among them the novelists of totalitarianism and of the absurd. The word Kafkaesque, meaning grotesque, nightmarish or bafflingly bureaucratic, has entered English and many other languages, and it testifies to how far one writer's imagination has shaped ordinary vocabulary for describing modern institutions.

His themes of alienation, guilt and impersonal power have proved adaptable to many readings, existentialist, religious, psychoanalytic and political, and his parables have been interpreted as allegories of the modern state, of divine judgment or of the human condition itself. Critics disagree about what his stories mean, but few doubt their importance.

He is now counted among the greatest writers of the twentieth century, and his slim output exercises an influence out of all proportion to its size. His birthplace Prague claims him, German literature claims him, and Jewish letters claim him, while his readers around the world return again and again to his unsettling, lucid dreams of the human predicament.

See also

• The Metamorphosis
• The Trial
• The Castle
• Kafkaesque