Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, 

Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech
Republic]—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), German-language writer
of visionary fiction whose works express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in
20th-century Europe and North America.
Life

Franz Kafka, the son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, a merchant, was born into a prosperous
middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers died in infancy, he became the eldest child and
remained, for the rest of his life, conscious of his role as elder brother; Ottla, the youngest of his
three sisters, became the family member closest to him. He was not, however, particularly close
to his mother. The eldest child of a terrifyingly, psychologically abusive father and a mother who
was too weak and in all of her husband to protect her boy as she should have done. Kafka grew
up timid, bookish, meek and full of self-hatred. He wanted to become a writer but it was out of
the question in his father's eyes, so one of the greatest German literary geniuses since Goethe
was forced to spend his brief life on Earth working in a series of jobs utterly beneath him: in a
lawyer office and then an insurance company. Kafka was German both in language and culture.
He was a timid, guilt-ridden, and obedient child who did well in elementary school and in the
Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, an exacting high school for the academic elite. He was respected
and liked by his teachers. Inwardly, however, he rebelled against the authoritarian institution and
the dehumanized humanistic curriculum, with its emphasis on rote learning and classical
languages. Kafka’s opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he
declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified
sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of Czech anarchists (before World War I),
and in his later years he showed marked interest and sympathy for a socialized Zionism. Even
then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the
German community in Prague, but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own
Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations, but his
identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation
and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.

Kafka’s double life

Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German Jewish intellectuals and literati in
Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod. This minor literary artist became the
most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s friends, and eventually, as Kafka’s literary executor, he
emerged as the promoter, saviour, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential
biographer. The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of
Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an
insurance company. The long hours of work did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing.
In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute
for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to
take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years
before he died. In his job he was considered tireless and ambitious; he soon became the right
hand of his boss, and he was esteemed and liked by all who worked with him.
In fact, generally speaking, Kafka was a charming, intelligent, and humorous individual, but he
found his routine office job and the exhausting double life into which it forced him (for his
nights were frequently consumed in writing) to be excruciating torture, and his deeper personal
relationships were neurotically disturbed. The conflicting inclinations of his complex and
ambivalent personality found expression in his sexual relationships. Inhibition painfully
disturbed his relations with Felice Bauer, to whom he was twice engaged before their final
rupture in 1917. Later his love for Milena Jesenská Pollak was also thwarted. His health was
poor and office work exhausted him. In 1917 he was diagnosed as having tuberculosis, and from
then onward he spent frequent periods in sanatoriums.
In 1923 Kafka went to Berlin to devote himself to writing. During a vacation on the Baltic coast
later that year, he met Dora Dymant (Diamant), a young Jewish socialist. The couple lived in
Berlin until Kafka’s health significantly worsened during the spring of 1924. After a brief final
stay in Prague, where Dymant joined him, he died of tuberculosis in a clinic near Vienna.

Works

Kafka's world isn't pleasant. It feels in many ways like a nightmare and yet it's a place where
many of us will, even if only for a time, in the dark periods of our lives, end up. We are in the
world defined by Kafka when we feel powerless in front of authority, judges, aristocrats,
industrialists, politicians and most of all: fathers. When we feel that our destiny is out of our
control, when we are bullied, humiliated and mocked by society and especially by our own
families. We are in Kafka's orbit when we're ashamed of us and feel that the best thing for us
might be to be killed or squashed without mercy as if we were an inconvenient and rather
disgusting bed bug.

One of the major keys to understanding Kafka is to fathom the nature of his relationship with his
father. Kafka never wrote directly about this man in any of his works but the psychology of the
novels is directly related to the dynamics he endured as the very unfortunate son of Hermann
Kafka In November 1919, at the age of 36, five years before his death, Kafka wrote a forty-seven
page letter to Hermann in which he tried to explain how his childhood had deformed him. Like
many victims of abuse, Kafka never stopped hoping for some kind of forgiveness from the
person who had so wronged him.
"Dearest father", went the letter. "You asked me recently why I maintain that I'm so afraid of
you. As usual I was unable to think of any answer to your question partly for the very reason that
I am afraid of you and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean
going into far more details than I could ever keep in mind while talking". The grown Kafka
abased himself before this father. "What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little
friendliness but I wasn't fit for that. What was always incomprehensible to me was your total
lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and
judgments. It was as though you had no notion of your power". Kafka complained of one
particularly traumatic incident when as a young boy he called out for a glass of water and his
irritable father pulled the boy out of his bed, carried him out onto the balcony and left him there
to freeze in nothing but his nightshirt. Kafka writes: "I was quite obedient after that period but it
did me so much incalculable inner harm. Even years afterwards I suffered from the tormenting
fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, would come almost for no reason at
all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony and that meant I was a
mere nothing for him". Boys need their father's permission to become men and Hermann Kafka
didn't give Franz a chance. "At a very early stage you forbade me to speak. Your threat: "not a
word of contradiction" and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since".
Kafka finished the letter, gave it to his mother Julie to pass to Hermann but, typical of her
weakness and cowardice, she didn't. She held onto it for a few days, then returned it to Franz and
advised that it would be better if her busy, hard-working husband never had to read such a thing.
The poor son lacked the courage ever to try again.
Kafka published very little in his lifetime: just three collections of short stories including his
best-known work, The Metamorphosis, and he was entirely obscured and unnoticed. His gigantic
posthumous reputation is based on three novels: The Trial, The Castle and America, which were
all unfinished because Kafka was so dissatisfied with them. He gave orders that they be
destroyed after his death. Fortunately for Humanity, these were disobeyed.

In The Judgment, Kafka's great short story, written in 1912; a young businessman, Georg, is
engaged to be married and lives in a flat with his widowed father. He's about to get away from
home, the father is old and frail. Georg tucks him up in bed but then the father mysteriously
regains his strength, springs upright, towers over Georg and denounces him for betraying
everyone. His friends, his father and the memory of his mother. Georg can make only feeble
protests. Eventually the father condemns Georg to death by drowning and Georg obediently
rushes out and plunges into the nearby river. After passing sentence, the father cries out: "You
were an innocent child, really, but at heart you were a diabolical human being".

The idea of horrific, arbitrary judgment was to be a constant in Kafka's fiction: it reappears in the
unfinished novel The Trial, written two years later. But now Kafka had developed it away from a
father to a vast legal apparatus with judges, lawyers, guards and extensive bureaucratic
procedures. When Joseph K is arrested on the morning of his 30th birthday, he isn't told what he
is charged with. He barely makes any attempt to find out. He feel so guilty inside, he just knows
that he deserves punishment. He does try to declare in court that he's innocent, still without
knowing what the charge is and hires a lawyer but the court gradually grinds him down. He
becomes unable to think of anything. Words fail him, he can no longer do his job properly and is
defeated in the game of office politics.

Between The Judgment and The Trial, Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis, a short story in which a
traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning transformed into an insect akin to a
beetle or a bed bug. It's a story of self-disgust, about the treachery of family and, like The Trial,
about terrifying arbitrary power. When Gregor crawls across the floor, he is in danger of being
stamped on by his own father. Gregor's family find they manage quite well without him. They
can fine him to his room and chuck rubbish at him. The family hold a council and decide that the
insect in the bedroom can't really be Gregor. They start to refer to the insect as "it" instead of
"him". They decide that somehow the insect has to go. Gregor, listening, agrees and dies quietly.
After Gregor's death, the family are slightly ashamed of their behavior, but only slightly.
In 1924 He wrote a short story, his last, called The Hunger Artist. It tells the story of a public
performer who makes his living undertaking fasts for the pleasure of the public. One time he
manages to fast for forty days but gradually the hunger artist's audience gets bored of his work.
However hard he fasts, they're no longer impressed. He gets put in a dirty old cage and weakens
terribly. Before he dies he asks for forgiveness and confesses that he should never have been
admired since the reason he fasted was simply that he couldn't find any food he enjoyed. Shortly
after he dies, he's replaced in his cage by a panther, an animal full of vigor whom the crowd love
and who has a voracious appetite.

A few days after finishing The Hunger Artist, Kafka died and was buried in the Jewish cemetery
in Prague. Within a few years of his death, his reputation began. By the Second World War, he
was recognized as one of the greatest writers of The Age. Notwithstanding, all his close family
were gassed by the Germans in the Holocaust. He is a monument in German literary history and
at the same time he is a sad, ashamed, terrified part of us all. Kafka once wrote that the task of
literature is to reconnect us with feelings that might otherwise be unbearable to study but which
desperately need our attention. "A book must", he wrote, "be the axe for the frozen sea within
us". His books were among the most touching, frightening and accurate axes ever written.