Novelist, born in Prague, Czech Republic, of German Jewish parents. He studied law, became an official in an insurance company (190723), moved to Berlin, but soon after succumbed to tuberculosis. His short stories and essays, such as Die Verwandlung (1915, The Metamorphosis), appeared in his lifetime, but his three unfinished novels were published posthumously (against his wishes) by his friend Max Brod: Der Prozess (1925, The Trial), Das Schloss (1926, The Castle), and Amerika (1927). He has influenced many authors with his vision of society (often called Kafkaesque) as a pointless, schizophrenically rational organization, with tortuous bureaucratic and totalitarian procedures, psychological labyrinths, and masochistic fantasies, into which the bewildered individual has strayed.
Franz Kafka|
Photograph of Franz Kafka taken in 1917 |
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| Born: |
July 3, 1883 Prague, Austria-Hungary (today in the Czech Republic) |
|---|---|
| Died: |
June 3, 1924 Vienna, Austria |
| Occupation(s): | insurance officer, factory manager, novelist, short story writer |
| Nationality: | Ashkenazi Jewish-Bohemian (Austria-Hungary) |
| Genre(s): | novel, short story |
| Literary movement: | modernism, existentialism, Surrealism, precursor to magical realism |
| Influences: | Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens, Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Influenced: | Albert Camus, Federico Fellini, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami |
Franz Kafka (IPA: [ˈfranʦ ˈkafka]) (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 — much of it incomplete, and published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed — has become considered amongst the most influential in Western literature.
His most famous pieces of writing include his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and his unfinished novel Das Schloß (The Castle). The adjective "kafkaesque" has come into common use to denote mundane yet absurd and surreal circumstances of the kind commonly found in Kafka's work.
Life
Family
Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom that was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was 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 ..." Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father. Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a butcher, and came to Prague from Osek, a Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia.
Kafka had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of fifteen months and six months, respectively, before Kafka was six, and three younger sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943).
Kafka's sisters were sent with their families to the Łódź ghetto and died there or in concentration camps.
Education
Kafka learned German as his first language, but he was also almost fluent in Czech.
Admitted to the Charles University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. This offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts. (He was also given the task of compiling and composing the annual report and was reportedly quite proud of the results, sending copies to friends and family.) In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work.
In 1911, Karl Hermann, spouse of his sister Elli, proposed Kafka collaborate in the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann and Co. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business.
Later years
In 1912, at the home of his lifelong friend Max Brod, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company.
In 1917, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud .
It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life.
Literary work
Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small part of his work, and never finished any of his novels (with the possible exception of The Metamorphosis, which some consider to be a short novel). 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 of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.
Critical interpretation
Many critics have tried to make sense of Kafka's works by interpreting them through certain schools of literary criticism such as modernism, magical realism, and so on . Others have tried to locate a 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.
Themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, and the emphasis on this quality, 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 more "joyful" than it appears to be.
Furthermore, an isolated reading of Kafka's work — focusing on the futility of his characters' struggling without the influence of any studies on Kafka's life — reveals the humor of Kafka. Kafka's work, in this sense, is not a written reflection of any of his own struggles, but a reflection of how people invent struggles.
Biographers have said that it was common for Kafka to read chapters of the books he was working on to his closest friends, and that those readings usually concentrated on the humorous side of his prose. 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".
Writings and translations
Readers of Kafka should pay particular attention to the dates of the publications (whether German or translated) of his writing when choosing an edition to read.
Kafka died before preparing (in some cases even finishing) some of his writings for publication. Therefore, the novels The Castle (which stopped mid-sentence and had ambiguity on content), The Trial (chapters were unnumbered and some were incomplete) and Amerika (Kafka's original title was The Man who Disappeared) were all prepared for publishing by Max Brod.
According to the publisher's note for The Castle (Schocken Books, 1998), Malcolm Pasley was able to get most of the Kafka's original handwritten work into the Oxford Bodleian Library in 1961. The German critical text of these, and Kafka's other works, may be found online at The Kafka Project . These editions were widely published and spurred the late-1940's surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States.
After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published -- The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004).
Kafka in media
For a full list of films The IMDb filmography
The Trial: Orson Welles, writer, producer, and director of Citizen Kane, wrote and directed this adaptation of the novel The Trial in 1962, starring Anthony Perkins. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, the movie mixes his life and fiction providing a semi-biographical presentation of Kafka's life and works. The story concerns Kafka investigating the disappearance of one of his work colleagues. The plot takes Kafka through many of the writer's own works, most notably The Castle and The Trial. Franz Kafka's 'It's a Wonderful Life' (1993) is a short Oscar winning film written and directed by Peter Capaldi and starring Richard E. Metamorphosis (1987) at the Internet Movie Database Die Verwandlung (1975) at the Internet Movie Database Förvandlingen (1976/I) at the Internet Movie Database Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis (1993) by Carlos Atanes, at YouTube. Das Schloß (1997) at the Internet Movie Database by Michael Haneke Prevrashcheniye (2002) at the Internet Movie Database Menschenkörper (2004) at the Internet Movie DatabaseBibliography
Short stories
Description of a Struggle (Beschreibung eines Kampfes, 1904-1905) Wedding Preparations in the Country (Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande, 1907-1908) The Judgment (Das Urteil - September 22-23, 1912) The Stoker In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie, October 1914) The Village Schoolmaster (The Giant Mole) (Der Dorfschullehrer or Der Riesenmaulwurf, 1914-1915) Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor (Blumfeld, ein älterer Junggeselle, 1915) The Warden of the Tomb (Der Gruftwächter, 1916-1917), the only play Kafka wrote The Hunter Gracchus (Der Jäger Gracchus, 1917) The Great Wall of China (Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer, 1917) A Report to an Academy (Ein Bericht für eine Akademie, 1917) A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt, 1919) A Message from the Emperor (Eine kaiserliche Botschaft, 1919) An Old Leaf (Ein altes Blatt, 1919) The Refusal (Die Abweisung, 1920) A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1922) Investigations of a Dog (Forschungen eines Hundes, 1922) A Little Woman (Eine kleine Frau, 1923) The Burrow (Der Bau, 1923-1924) Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk (Josephine, die Sängerin, oder Das Volk der Mäuse, 1924)Many collections of the stories have been published, and they include:
Kafka, Franz (ed.
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