Biography
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language novelists and short story writers of the 20th century, whose unique body of writing — most of it published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed — has become iconic in Western literature.
He is best known for the creation of Gregor Samsa in Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), published in 1915, and Joseph K. in Der Prozess (The Trial), published in 1925, which explore the idea of the individual’s alienation from his surroundings, his society, and from himself. The adjective “kafkaesque” has entered the language to express the absurd, surreal, and terrifying world that Kafka’s work created.
Life
Kafka was born into a middle-class, Czech-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom that was then part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931) — described as a “huge, selfish, overbearing businessman” (Corngold 1972) and by Kafka himself as “a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature …” [1] — was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a butcher, and came to Prague from Osek, a Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men’s and women’s fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka’s mother, Julie (1856—1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Podebrady, and was better educated than her husband.
Kafka had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, each of whom died before reaching the age of two (before Kafka was six), and three younger sisters, Gabriele (“Elli”) (1889–1941), Valerie (“Valli”) (1890–1942), and Ottilie (“Ottla”) (1892–1943), all of whom were sent with their families to the Łódź ghetto and who died there or in concentration camps. Ottla is believed to have been sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then to the death camp at Auschwitz.
On business days, both parents were absent from the home. His mother helped to manage her husband’s business and worked in it as many as 12 hours a day. The children were largely reared by a succession of governesses and servants.
Kafka learned Czech as his first language, but German was the language of the elite at the time, and so Hermann sent his son to German-language schools. (Later, Kafka also acquired some knowledge of French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Flaubert.)
From 1889 to 1893, he attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys’ elementary school at the Fleischmarkt (meat market), the street now known as Masná Street in Prague. His Jewish education was limited to his Bar Mitzvah celebration at 13 and going to the synagogue four times a year with his father. [2] After elementary school, he was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, an academic secondary school with eight grade levels, where German was also the language of instruction, at Staroměstské náměstí, within the Kinsky Palace in the Old Town. He completed his Matura exams in 1901.
Admitted to the Charles University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law, which offered a range of career possibilities, pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history.
Kakfa obtained the degree of Doctor of Law in 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. For nearly a year he worked for Assicurazioni Generali, an aggressive Italian insurance company, then, with the help of a friend, found more congenial employment with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He often referred to his job as insurance officer as a “Brotberuf,” literally “bread job,” a job done only to pay the bills.
In 1917, he began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla.
While at school he took an active role in organizing literary and social events, doing much to promote and organize performances for the Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor. [citation needed]
Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father. In the early 1920s he developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. In 1923, he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family’s influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka’s interest in the Talmud. [citation needed]
While it is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life, he suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk (the latter possibly the cause of his tuberculosis). [citation needed]
However, Kafka’s tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, then went to a sanatorium near Vienna for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924, apparently from starvation. (The condition of Kafka’s throat made it too painful to eat, and since intravenous therapy had not been developed, there was no way to feed him (a fate resembling that of Gregor in the Metamorphosis and the main character of A Hunger Artist). His body was ultimately brought back to Prague where he was interred on June 11, 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov.
Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small part of his work, and consequently his writing attracted little attention until after his death. Prior to his death, he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his manuscripts. His lover, Dora Diamant, partially executed his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers. Brod overrode Kafka’s instructions and instead oversaw the publication of most of his work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard.
All his published works, except several Czech letters to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.
Critical interpretation
There have been many critics who have tried to make sense of Kafka’s works by interpreting them through certain schools of literary criticism—as modernist, magical realist, and so on.
The apparent hopelessness and the absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism. Others have tried to locate Marxist influence in his satirization of bureaucracy in pieces such as In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle, whereas others point to anarchism as an inspiration for Kafka’s anti-bureaucratic viewpoint. Still others have interpreted his works through the lens of Judaism —Borges made a few perceptive remarks in this regard; through Freudianism (because of his familial struggles); or as allegories of a metaphysical quest for God (Thomas Mann was a proponent of this theory).
Themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, and this emphasis—notably in the work of Marthe Robert—partly inspired the counter-criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who argued that there was much more to Kafka than the stereotype of a lonely figure writing out of anguish, and that his work was more deliberate, subversive, and yet “joyful” than it appears to be.
Biographers have said that it was common for Kafka to read chapters of the books he was working on to his closest friends, and those readings usually concentrated themselves on the constant, but many times ignored, humorous side of his prose. Milan Kundera refers to the essentially surrealist humour of Kafka as a main predecessor of later artists such as Federico Fellini, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie. For Márquez it was as he said the reading of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis that showed him “that it was possible to write in a different way”.
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