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remaining unpublished manuscripts.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.