A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Date and Place of birth: |
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Life and Works: Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), Austrian (Czech) Jewish novelist and short-story writer, whose disturbing, symbolic fiction, written in German, prefigured the oppression and despair of the late 20th century. Virtually unknown during his lifetime, the works of Kafka have since been recognized as symbolizing modern man's anxiety-ridden and grotesque alienation in an unintelligible, hostile, or indifferent world. He is considered one of the most significant figures in modern world literature; the term Kafkaesque has, in fact, come to be applied commonly to grotesque, anxiety-producing social conditions or their treatment in literature. Kafka was born into a Jewish middle-class family in Prague, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic but then part of Austria), on July 3, 1883. He was the eldest child of Hermann Kafka and his wife, Julie Lowy. His parents were German-Jewish and German speaking, although they encouraged Kafka to speak Czech as well. His father was a well-to-do shopkeeper and dealer in fancy goods. At the time of Kafka's birth, Jews had only recently been allowed to live in the city of Prague. Hermann Kafka was a domestic tyrant, who directed his anger against his son. Kafka also had three sisters, all of whom perished in Nazi camps. Often Kafka's stories dealt with the struggle between father and son, or a scorned individuals pleading innocence in front of remote figures of authority. In Letter to His Father (1919) Kafka admitted: "My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast. It was an intentionally long-drawn-out leave-taking from you." Kafka felt isolated from his family. He saw little of his mother as she worked in the shop, leaving him with a nurse almost as soon as he was born. He found his father full of self-confidence, intolerant and hostile. He became frightened by his failure to please his father. Nevertheless, Kafka lived with his family most of his life, never marrying although engaged twice. His uneasy relationship with Felice Bauer, a young German woman whom he courted between 1912 and 1917, is revealed in the series Letters to Felice (1967). As a child, Kafka had no sense of Jewishness, rarely going to synagogue, although he did have his Barmitzvah in 1896. 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. From here, he went on to study at the Deutsche Universitat in Prague, changing from chemistry to law after a fortnight. 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; attended meetings of the Czech Anarchists (before World War I); and, in his later years, 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. On obtaining his doctorate in law in 1906, Kafka began work. After spending a short time as a legal apprentice, he went to work for an insurance company. When the long hours of work prevented him from writing, he took a less demanding job with another insurance business and remained there until forced to retire in 1922 because of ill health. During these years Kafka became a member of a circle of intellectuals, which included Franz Werfel, Oskar Baum and Max Brod, whom Kafka met in 1902. About 1904 Kafka began writing, making reports on industrial accidents and health hazard in the office by day and writing stories by night. His profession marked the formal, legalistic language of his stories which avoided all sentimentality and moral interpretations - all conclusions are left to the reader. In 1908 Brod got eight of Kafka's prose poems published in Hyperion. Kafka met Felice Bauer at Brod's in 1912, and their courtship was largely undertaken by letter. He wrote to her a great deal, although he said that she did not understand him. He was haunted by the desire to be married, but felt that he might be so happy that he would have nothing left to write about. In spite of these fears, his meeting with Felice stimulated his writing output. In 1914, he became engaged to Felice, but broke it off the following month. He began writing The Trial a few days after he had broken off the engagement. He found it difficult to make up his mind about anything. He wrote, "I am familiar with indecision, there's nothing I know so well, but whenever something summons me, I fall flat, worn out by half-hearted inclinations and hesitations over a thousand earlier trivialities." World War I stopped Kafka's productivity as a novelist and short story writer, but he continued to write letters and diaries. In 1914, Kafka was judged unfit for military service. He moved out of his parental home and met Greta Bloch. She was later to claim that she had had a son by him. Whilst he was seeing her, he was still seeing Felice and in 1917 they were engaged again but, by the end of the year, he had broken the engagement. Kafka was diagnosed as having tuberculosis. He went to stay with his sister Otttla at Zurau and in 1919 became engaged to Julie Wohryzek, but broke the engagement after a few months. Kafka spent half his time after 1917 in sanatoriums and health resorts, his tuberculosis of the lungs finally spreading to the larynx. In 1920-21, he was admitted to a sanitorium, and in 1922 retired from his job on grounds of ill health. Kafka met Dora Dymant (or Diamant), a 19 year-old, with whom he fell in love. In 1923, he and Dora went to live in Berlin. This was intended to be the first step on the journey to the Holy Land, but Kafka's tuberculosis was to prove fatal. He died in a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, on June 3, 1924 and was buried in Prague's Straschnitz Jewish cemetery. The themes of Kafka's work are the loneliness, frustration, and oppressive guilt of an individual threatened by anonymous forces beyond his comprehension or control. In philosophy, Kafka is akin to the Danish thinker Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and to 20th-century existentialists. In literary technique, his work has the qualities both of expressionism and of surrealism. Kafka's lucid style, blending reality with fantasy and tinged with ironic humor, contributes to the nightmarish, claustrophobic effect of his work—as in his famous long short story The Metamorphosis (1915; trans. 1937). Kafka was in many ways a solitary figure, isolated in his own mind from any true community of friendship and alienated from his own Jewish heritage. Kafka lived his life in emotional dependence on his parents, whom he both loved and resented. None of his largely unhappy love affairs could wean him from this inner dependence; though he longed to marry, he never did. Sexually, he apparently oscillated between an ascetic aversion to intercourse, which he called "the punishment for being together," and an attraction to prostitutes. Sex in Kafka's writings is frequently connected with dirt or guilt and treated as an attractive abomination. Nevertheless, Kafka led a fairly active social life, including acquaintance with many prominent literary and intellectual figures of his era, such as the writers Franz Werfel and Max Brod. He loved to hike, swim, and row, and during vacations he took carefully planned trips. He wrote primarily at night, the days being preempted by his job. None of Kafka's novels was printed during his lifetime, and it was only with reluctance that he published a fraction of his shorter fiction. This fiction included Meditation (1913; Eng. trans., 1949), a collection of short prose pieces; The Judgment (1913; Eng. trans., 1945), a long short story, written in 1912, which Kafka himself considered his decisive breakthrough (it tells of a rebellious son condemned to suicide by his father); and The Metamorphosis (1915; Eng. trans., 1961), dealing again with the outsider, a son who suffers the literal and symbolic transformation into a huge, repulsive, fatally wounded insect. In the Penal Colony (1919; Eng. trans., 1961) is a parable of a torture machine and its operators and victims--equally applicable to a person's inner sense of law, guilt, and retribution and to the age of World War I. The Country Doctor (1919; Eng. trans., 1946) was another collection of short prose. At the time of his death Kafka was also preparing A Hunger Artist (1924; Eng. trans., 1938), four stories centering on the artist's inability either to negate or come to terms with life in the human community. Contrary to Kafka's wish that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed after his death, his friend and biographer, the Austrian writer Max Brod, published them posthumously and thus established Kafka's reputation. The best known of the posthumous works are three fragmentary novels. The Trial (1925; Eng. trans., 1937) deals with a man persecuted and put to death by the inscrutable agencies of an unfathomable court of law. The Castle (1926; Eng. trans., 1930) describes the relentless but futile efforts of the protagonist to gain recognition from the mysterious authorities ruling (from their castle) the village where he wants to establish himself. Amerika (1927; Eng. trans., 1938), written early in Kafka's career, portrays the inconclusive struggle of a young immigrant to gain a foothold in an alien, incomprehensible country. In all of these works, as indeed in most of Kafka's mature prose, the lucid, concise style forms a striking contrast to the labyrinthine complexities, the anxiety-laden absurdities, and the powerfully oppressive symbols of torment and anomie that are the substance of the writer's vision. Kafka's fiction, somewhat like ink-blot tests, elicits and defeats attempts at conclusive explanation. Practically every school of modern criticism has produced a corpus of interpretations. Kafka's own aphorisms, however, may come the closest to offering a key. The Trial was filmed by Orson Welles in 1962. The quality of Kafka's work began to be recognised after his death, but the rise of the Nazis in 1933 halted this progress. Although his work began to be popular in France in the 1940s, it was not until after 1945 that Germans got to hear of him. When his Collected Works were published in the 1950s, he was recognised as one of the major writers in German of the 20th century. His work was to be tremendously influential on western literature, particularly on Camus and Beckett. |
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