Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, Prague in Czech Republic]—died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works—especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosos)—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. Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother. Subservient to her overwhelming ill-tempered husband and his exacting business, she shared with her spouse a lack of comprehension of their son’s unprofitable and, they feared, unhealthy dedication to the literary “recording of [his]…dreamlike inner life.”
Kafka and his father
The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed his work as well as his existence. The figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations. In his imagination this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch who worshipped nothing but material success and social advancement belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant. In Kafka’s most important attempt at autobiography, Brief an den Vater (written 1919; Letter to Father), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to live, to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood, as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his own impotence. He felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka’s story Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in Das Schloss [1926; The Castle]). Yet the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship with his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings—the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in—and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.
Works of Franz Kafka
Sought out by leading avant-garde publishers, Kafka reluctantly published a few of his writings during his lifetime. These publications include two sections (1909) from Beschreibung eines Kampfes (1936; Description of a Struggle) and Betrachtung (1913; Meditation), a collection of short prose pieces. They also include other works representative of Kafka’s maturity as an artist:
