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Franz Kafka |
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It is a rare writer who produces a body of work so coherently integrated and so thoroughly imbued with his own unique perspective that his name becomes an adjectival shorthand. To millions who have read the brooding, unsettling, but at times absurdly hilarious stories and prose poems of Franz Kafka, and to millions more who have never read a word of his, the term "Kafkaesque" immediately brings to mind the image of the small, anonymous individual trapped in an existential nightmare from which there is no escape and no awakening. Out of his extreme sensitivity and the ambiguities and contradictions of his own life, out of his sense that the nature of reality was such that merely to describe its surfaces would no longer suffice as a way of coming to terms with its essence, Kafka fashioned fables in whose reflection the modern world recognized its own image, works that have become indispensable to the twentieth century's definition of itself.
Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883. He was the first surviving child, after the deaths of two infant sons, of Hermann Kafka, a tradesman whose father was a butcher in a Jewish village in South Bohemia, and Julie (Löwy) Kafka, the daughter of a Prague brewer. All three of Kafka's younger sisters, as well as Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator and one of his lovers, would, long after his own death, die in Nazi concentration camps. At the time of his birth, Prague, with 160,000 people, was the third-largest city, after Vienna and Budapest, of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph, for whom Kafka was named. The German upperclass, which constituted only five percent of the city's inhabitants, dominated the city and its much larger indigenous Czech population. (With the dissolution of the empire at the end of the First World War, a Czechoslovak republic would be declared. Following four and a half decades of Soviet domination after the Second World War, the country would split into the separate nations of Slovakia and the Czech Republic.) The small Jewish component, highly represented in the city's universities and business world, was the target of hostility from both groups. As Frederick Karl says of Kafka, "The uncertainty he felt whenever he contemplated reality was matched by the uncertainty of the Jew in an enemy setting, among Germans, whose language he spoke, and among Czechs, whose nationalism had no role for the Jew to play. But as a Westernized Jew, Kafka had to deal with more than anti-Semitic Germans and anti-German, anti-Semitic Czech nationalists.... The question of assimilation--or, rather, the question of whether assimilation was even possible, given the prohibitions of the host countries in which Jews resided--created in itself an ambiguous kind of reality, often more hallucinatory than realistic."
As described by his son, Hermann Kafka was a large, domineering man whose attitude toward the strange young man he had fathered came near to contempt. As his haberdashery prospered, the family moved several times into more luxurious quarters, where they were served by maids, a cook, and a governess. A shy and sensitive child, Kafka received a basic primary and secondary education--no art, music, or modern languages. He was for the most part an average student, although he always did quite poorly in mathematics. After his graduation in 1901, he entered the German Karl Ferdinand University in Prague, intending at first to study German literature, but then transferred to law, on the assumption that it offered better career prospects. He completed his law studies in eight terms, the shortest time in which it could be done, and earned his doctorate in jurisprudence in 1906. While at the university, Kafka joined a German students' reading and debating group, in which he met Max Brod, who would become his best friend, his biographer, and his de facto literary executor--although Brod famously failed to execute Kafka's dying wish that all his unpublished manuscripts be burned, and in so doing earned the gratitude of generations of readers.
After his graduation, Kafka underwent the obligatory year of law internship, and then became an insurance clerk, first in 1907 in the Prague office of an Italian company called Assicurazioni Generali, and then in 1908--the year of his first publication, of some short prose sketches in a magazine called Hyperion--for the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia. This was a highly desirable, semigovernmental position, which he would hold until his worsening health forced him to take permanent leave in 1921. His principal duties came to involve travel to sites of industrial accidents, assessment of workers' injuries, and determination of what, if any, compensation they should receive. As a claims adjustor, he tended to favor the workers over their companies. In the evenings he would often take a long walk with Brod or another friend, attend the theater or a political lecture, and then go home--he continued to live with his family for most of his life--and write until two or three in the morning. Despite ill health that included headaches, stomach problems, and various psychosomatic ailments, he also enjoyed sports and physical exercise.
The year 1912 was an important one in Kafka's life and a turning point in his brief literary career. At Max Brod's home, he met Felice Bauer, a young woman to whom over the next five years he would write hundreds of letters, and twice become engaged and twice break the engagement. He broke it first in 1914, out of concern that the relationship was sapping his creativity, and again in 1917, when he discovered that he had contracted tuberculosis, which at that time was an irrevocable death sentence. Also in 1912, he wrote a good deal of Amerika, a novel he had begun the previous year, about the adventures of a naive young stoker in an America concocted out of Kafka's reading and imagination. At the urging of Max Brod, he gathered together a number of his tiny fables and prose poems for a little book called Meditation, which would be published the following year, the first of several small volumes of his work that would appear in his lifetime. On the night of September 22, 1912, he wrote "The Judgment," his first major short story, which describes a tense confrontation between a strong father and his neurotic son. And in the fall of that same remarkable year, he wrote The Metamorphosis, perhaps his masterpiece and, with the novel The Trial, one of the two works most closely associated with his name. From its famous opening sentence, this fantastic (in both senses of the word) tale operates simultaneously on a number of different levels: the amazing power of Kafka's imagination as he convincingly describes the sheer physical reality of being a giant insect, the nightmarish expressionism through which Gregor Samsa's inner fears and fantasies are projected into his external reality, the psychological shrewdness of Kafka's portrayal of Gregor's (and his own) classic passive-aggressive relationship with his family, and the profound pathos of the description of Gregor's last days.
Kafka had another burst of creativity in 1914, when he wrote the final chapter of Amerika. He did not, however, actually finish this novel, or either of his other two: their very incompleteness seems part of the essence of Kafka's art. Also in 1914, he wrote the great short story "In the Penal Colony," and began writing The Trial, in which Joseph K., a quiet and dutiful bank clerk, is arrested and charged with un unnamed crime. His efforts to defend himself are continually frustrated by bureaucratic mazes and implacable authority, and he comes gradually to an acceptance of his own guilt--his guilt for being himself, for being alive, for participating in the human condition. In 1916 and 1917, Kafka wrote "The Great Wall of China" and the stories that he would publish in 1919 in the collection A Country Doctor. Weakened by his tuberculosis, he became ill with influenza in the pandemic that occurred toward the end of the First World War. In 1919, he wrote the long, painful "Letter to His Father," which he did not send. In 1920, having done no creative work for three years, he experienced another period of inspiration that saw the writing of quite a few short pieces. In 1922, the same year in which he published "A Hunger Artist," one of the strangest and most powerful of his short stories, he worked on The Castle, a denser and more abstract novel than its predecessors, in which a protagonist known only as K. tries unsuccessfully to gain entrance to the castle of the title. It is his most extended parable on his most characteristic theme, the peculiar perseverance of human aspiration in the face of failure and negation.
In addition to his literary projects, the last several years of Kafka's life were marked by declining health, extended leaves from his job, and a series of relationships with young women. In 1919, he was once again briefly engaged, this time against the wishes of his family, to Julie Wohryzek. In the following year, he had a love affair with Milena Jesenská. In 1923, Kafka met the last love of his life, a Hasidic Jew from Poland named Dora Diamant, who was not yet twenty years old. Although Kafka had never been traditionally religious, he was, especially in his last years, fascinated by Hasidic rituals and beliefs. In September 1923, he began living with Dora in Berlin. In March 1924, Max Brod brought the seriously deteriorating Kafka back to his parents' home in Prague. In the following month, weighing less than one hundred pounds, he was taken to a sanitarium near Vienna, where he died on June 3, exactly one month short of his forty-first birthday. Eight days later, he was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Prague.
Max Brod's devotion to his friend was shown as vividly after Kafka's death as it had been while he was alive. He edited and published Kafka's manuscripts and wrote the story of his life, and through his efforts saw Kafka's literary reputation grow in a few short years from near total obscurity to international importance. The musings and inventions of this lonely, isolated, neurasthenic figure spoke meaningfully and powerfully to those who were living through "the nightmare years" (in William Shirer's phrase) of the 1930s, and as the decades of the twentieth century accumulated and reality seemed to grow ever more absurd and out of control, his writings, and the unique sensibility that had created them, came to seem more and more central to our perception of ourselves and of our inescapable human condition.
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