Kafka, Franz (1883–1924)

Franz Kafka, among the most highly acclaimed writers of the 20th century, was a Jewish [Page 737]Czechoslovakian who wrote allegorical stories in the German language. As literary critics have pointed out, Kafka's meticulously constructed tales seem to defy categorization, containing elements of the comédie and satirical as well as the tragic. He has been described as a realist, an absurdist, a Marxist, a sociologist, an existentialist, and a comédie theologian. Now widely considered the paradigmatic artist of his time, Kafka developed a personal idiom of expression that imposed a unique literary order on the disorder of the emerging modern world and gave universal form to his own personal nightmares and obsessions. Many later writers have acknowledged Kafka's influence, including Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Salman Rushdie.

A striking aspect of Kafka's work is in its uncanny foreshadowing of the nightmare of bureaucratic control and mechanized murder that, more than a decade after Kafka's premature death from tuberculosis, would take shape as the Holocaust. In his novels The Trial and The Castle, both published posthumously, the central characters undergo persecution by petty officials: Joseph K. is anonymously accused of a crime whose nature remains unspecified; his attempts to clear himself only draw him deeper and deeper into a labyrinthine legal system that ultimately issues a death sentence carried out in an impersonal and humiliating manner. The protagonist of The Castle, who is identified only by the initial “K.,” is repeatedly thwarted by a succession of bureaucrats and office holders in his efforts to gain access to the forbidding, enigmatic structure and ultimate source of power that dominates the town where the story is set.

A sense of oppression and anxiety characterizes much of Kafka's literary output. In the novella The Metamorphosis, which was published during Kafka's lifetime and received considerable acclaim, the main character, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman and the primary breadwinner for his mother, father, and sister, awakens one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect. His efforts to confront the reality of this existential nightmare are described in such a way as to convey the dark humor as well as the horror of his situation.

Other acclaimed stories include “ The Judgment,” “In the Penal Colony,” “A Country Doctor,” and “A Hunger Artist,” as well as the unfinished novel Amerika, the first chapter of which is the acclaimed story “The Stoker.”

Kafka was born in the cosmopolitan city of Prague, Bohemia, which is now part of the Czech Republic. His father Hermann, a businessman, was physically imposing, overbearing, unsympathetic, and intimidating, and their relationship, always difficult, grew more strained as the years passed. The primordial theme of father-son conflict would emerge in Kafka's writing again and again in the form of confrontations with remote and sometimes hostile authority figures. Kafka refused to work in the family business, intent instead on a university education. After several years of changing majors at Ferdinand-Karls University in Prague, he went on to earn a doctoral degree in law.

As a student Kafka made acquaintances with other intellectuals and aspiring artists. He befriended Max Brod, a lifelong friend and confidant, to whom he would later entrust his literary estate. Throughout Kafka's life, he would continually battle bouts of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion and would seek rest and treatment at sanatoriums. His first sanatorium stay occurred before he finished his law degree in 1905. In 1906, just after graduation, the pressures of family, professional, and scholarly pursuits overcame him, and again he sought the refuge of the sanatorium.

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