With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction.
(A Country Doctor is a short story written in 1917 by Fran...)
A Country Doctor is a short story written in 1917 by Franz Kafka. It was first published in the collection of short stories of the same title. In the story, a country doctor makes an emergency visit to a sick patient on a winter night.
(In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka. This...)
In the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafka. This story is set in a penal colony with no name. The book describes the last use of a torture and execution device developed sculpting condemned the judgment against her skin before you let him die, all in the course of twelve hours.
(The last book published during Kafka's lifetime, A Hunger...)
The last book published during Kafka's lifetime, A Hunger Artist (1924) explores many of the themes that were close to him: spiritual poverty, asceticism, futility, and the alienation of the modern artist.
(Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important n...)
Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.
(The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unava...)
The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power previously unknown to English language readers.
(Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story...)
Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story of the young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexual misadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents. Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.
(The essential philosophical writings of one of the twenti...)
The essential philosophical writings of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers are now gathered into a single volume with an introduction and afterword by the celebrated writer and publisher Roberto Calasso.
(The Burrow is an incomplete narrative by Franz Kafka, wri...)
The Burrow is an incomplete narrative by Franz Kafka, written 1923-1924, and published posthumously in the magazine Witiko in 1931 by Max Brod. It tells of an animal’s futile struggle to perfect the defence of his giant burrow against enemies. The narrative deals with becoming entangled in obsessive observation of a self-created labyrinth-like construct that causes heightened paranoia.
(Investigations of a Dog is a short story by Franz Kafka w...)
Investigations of a Dog is a short story by Franz Kafka written in 1922. It was published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (Berlin, 1931). Told from the perspective of a dog, the story concerns the nature and limits of knowledge, by way of the dog's inquiries into the practices of his culture.
(These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year befo...)
These diaries cover the years 1910 to 1923, the year before Kafka’s death at the age of forty. They provide a penetrating look into life in Prague and into Kafka’s accounts of his dreams, his feelings for the father he worshipped, and the woman he could not bring himself to marry, his sense of guilt, and his feelings of being an outcast. They offer an account of a life of almost unbearable intensity.
(In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Le...)
In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into a passionate but doomed epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifter and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.
(Franz Kafka wrote this letter to Hermann Kafka in Novembe...)
Franz Kafka wrote this letter to Hermann Kafka in November 1919; he was then thirty-six years old. Kafka's probing of the abyss between them spared neither his father nor himself, and his cry for acceptance has an undertone of despair. He could not help seeing the lack of understanding between father and son as another moment in the universal predicament depicited in so much of his work. Probably realizing the futility of her son's gesture, his mother did not deliver the letter, but returned it to Kafka instead. Kafka died five years later, in 1924, of tuberculosis.
(Collected after his death by his friend and literary exec...)
Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades' worth of Franz Kafka's letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924.
(The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice ...)
The more than five hundred letters Kafka wrote to Felice - through their breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final parting in the fall of that year, when Kafka began to feel the effects of the tuberculosis that would eventually claim his life - reveal the full measure of his inner turmoil as he tried, in vain, to balance his desire for human connection with what he felt were the solitary demands of his craft.
(The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stori...)
The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," and "A Hunger Artist" to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume.
(Written by Kafka between 1909 and 1924, these letters off...)
Written by Kafka between 1909 and 1924, these letters offer a unique insight into the workings of the Kafka family, their relationship with the Prague Jewish community, and Kafka's own feelings about his parents and siblings.
(A devastating indictment of the modern family, The Sons r...)
A devastating indictment of the modern family, The Sons represents Kafka's most concentrated literary achievement as well as the story of his own domestic tragedy.
(Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms an...)
Franz Kafka’s imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales. Scrupulously naturalistic on the surface, uncanny in their depths, these stories represent the achieved art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real.
Franz Kafka was the Czech-born German novelist and short-story writer. He is one of the founders of modern literature. Kafka's most famous works, including The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle have come to be seen as stories of the struggles of individuals to preserve their dignity and humanity in an increasingly faceless and bureaucratic world.
Background
Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Austria-Hungary (present-day Czech Republic), the eldest son of an upper-middle-class Jewish family. His father, Hermann Kafka was believed to be a selfish businessman. His mother, Julie was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Podìbrady.
Education
Kafka attended Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys' elementary school in the Masný Street from 1889 to 1893. After attending the elementary school, Kafka was sent to the rigorous classics-oriented state Gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium. It was an academic secondary school at Old Town Square. Kafka completed his Maturita exams in 1901.
The same year, he was enrolled at Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität of Prague (now Charles University). After studying chemistry for two weeks, he shifted to law. Law gave Kafka a wide range of career possibilities and provided him with ample time for taking classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he also met Max Brod, who remained his close friend throughout his life. Felix Weltsch was another close friend of Kafka who studied law with him. On June 18, 1906 Kafka received the degree of Doctor of Law.
In October 1906 Kafka started to practice at the criminal court and later at the civil court in Prague, while serving as an interne in the office of an attorney in order to gain some practical experience. In early 1908 he joined the staff of the Workmen's Compensation Division of the Austrian government, in a semi-governmental post which he held until his retirement for reasons of ill health in July 1922. Here he came to know the suffering of the underprivileged workmen and wrote his first published work, "Conversation with a Beggar" and "Conversation with a Drunkard," two sections from Die Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Description of a Struggle). In 1909 these two pieces were published by Franz Blei in his journal, Hyperion.
Kafka's first collection of stories was published in 1913 under the title Betrachtung (Contemplation). These sketches are polished, light impressions based on observation of life in and around Prague. Preoccupied with problems of reality and appearance, they reveal his objective realism based on urban middle-class life. The book is dedicated "To M. B.," that is, Max Brod, who had been his closest friend since their first meeting as university students in 1902.
In September 1912 Kafka composed in a single sitting, on the night of September 22/23, the story Das Urteil (The Verdict), dedicated to his future fiancée, Felice, and published the following year in Brod's annual, Arcadia. The story contains all the elements normally associated with Kafka's world, the most disorderly universe ever presented by a major artist. The judgment is passed by a bedridden, authoritarian father on his conscientious but guilt-haunted son, who obediently commits suicide. In this story Kafka successfully blends the disparate aspects of his writing - fantasy, realism, speculation, and psychological insight - into a new unity.
Kafka's next work, completed in May 1913, was the story Der Heizer (The Stoker), later incorporated in his fragmentary novel Amerika and awarded in 1915 the Fontane Prize, his first public recognition.
The year 1913 saw the publication of Kafka's best-known story about the man degraded to an animal, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). By means of an unerhörte Begebenheit (outrageous event), Kafka creates for his reader a world of psychotic delusion which his narrative art preserves as a reality in its own right.
One of Kafka's most frightening stories is the novella In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony), written in 1914. In spite of this literary output, Kafka maintained his position in Prague until the end of 1917, when he found that he had tuberculosis. The stories written during the war years, from 1916 to 1918, were published in 1919 in a collection dedicated to his father and entitled Der Landarzt (The Country Doctor), and the following year, in October, Die neue Rundschau published his story Ein Hungerkünstler (The Hunger Artist). Again, as in Die Verwandlung, it is the outsiders, however sensitive and gifted, who succumb, whereas the healthy realists survive in the struggle for existence. Ein Hungerkünstler became the title story for the last book published during the author's lifetime, a collection of four delicate stories that appeared in 1923.
One of Kafka's most important writings is the 100-page letter to his father, written in November 1919 as an attempt to clarify his conscience before his father and to assert his final independence of the latter's authority. There follows a detailed analysis of the relationship between father and son, essentially a short autobiography, emphasizing the years of his childhood.
Kafka's three great novel fragments, Amerika, Der Prozes (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle), might have been lost to the world altogether had it not been for the courage of Max Brod, who edited them posthumously, ignoring his friend's request to destroy all of his unpublished manuscripts.
The first of them, begun in 1912 and originally referred to by Kafka as Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), was published in 1927 under the title Amerika. The book, which may be considered a Bildungsroman, or novel of education (in the tradition of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister), recounts the adventures of Karl Rossmann, who, banished by his father because he was seduced by a servant girl, emigrates to America. Perhaps his "love affair," in which he was the passive party, explains Karl's vague sense of guilt, a feeling from which most of Kafka's heroes suffer.
The anonymous hero of Kafka's next novel fragment, The Trial, which was begun in 1914 and published in 1925, is suddenly arrested and accused of a crime, the nature of which is never explained. Put before a mysterious court, he is finally condemned to death and executed on the eve of his thirty-first birthday.
The third and longest novel fragment is The Castle, begun in 1918 and published in 1926. The anonymous hero tries in vain to gain access to a mysterious castle - somehow symbolizing security - in which a supreme master dwells. Again and again he seeks to settle in the village belonging to the castle, but his every attempt to be accepted as a recognized citizen of the village community is thwarted.
During the years 1920 to 1922, when he was working on The Castle, Kafka's health was badly threatened, and he was forced to take sick leave for cures in Meran and the Tatra Mountains. Kafka left Prague at the end of July 1923 and moved to Berlin-Steglitz, where he wrote his last, comparatively happy story, "The Little Woman," returning to Prague only 3 months before his death on June 3, 1924.
Kafka grew up in Prague as a German-speaking Jew. Though proud of his cosmopolitan existence, Kafka’s father still insisted that his children learn about their religion. This education was, however, superficial, and Judaism was not practiced in the home. Franz's bar mitzvah, which triggered intense episodes of fear and anxiety during his preparation, consisted of a short speech and an inconsequential party. As a boy, he detested it all.
In the following years, Kafka grew interested in Judaism and Zionism, and even fantasized about moving to Israel. Later, Kafka had declared himself an atheist.
In Letter to His Father, Kafka wrote, "I could not understand how, with the insignificant scrap of Judaism you yourself possessed, you could reproach me for not making an effort …to cling to a similar, insignificant scrap."
Politics
Kafka didn’t adhere to any one political party or political philosophy. He explored ideas about Imperialism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Pacificism, Zionism, and found advantages - and problems - in all. Kafka envisioned a possible world that human beings would construct in which the actions of man depend on nothing but himself and his spontaneity, and in which human society is governed by laws prescribed by man himself rather than by mysterious forces, whether they be interpreted as emanating from above or from below.
Prior to World War I, Kafka attended meetings of the Klub mladých, anti-militarist, and anti-clerical organization. Hugo Bergmann claims that Kafka wore a red carnation to school to show his support for socialism.
The idea that Kafka was a political writer has long been contentious. Marxist literary critics have been deeply divided over Kafka. One reason for this is that Kafka’s work came to prominence at the same time that Stalinists were advancing the doctrine of "socialist realism." Kafka, along with other modernists, was accused of "excessive formalism." He was charged with creating an alienated vision of reality where people were transformed from active participants in history to clinical observers - and where reality was reduced to unintelligible chaos. But other Marxists argued that Kafka’s work should be seen in a different light. His novels and short stories were not just an unreflecting expression of disorientation and despair, they argued, but a finely observed critique of power and the alienation of modern capitalism.
Views
The main themes of Kafka’s works are those of tragic loneliness and disunity of people in the modern bourgeois world, the absurdity and alogism of their daily existence in it, the domination of dark forces of evil and destruction, hidden under the cloak of everyday life both in the external world surrounding a person and at the bottom of his own soul. Kafka sincerely loves his heroes and has compassion for them, and therefore surrounds them with an atmosphere of humor and heartfelt sympathy. But, experiencing deep indignation at the existing evil, Kafka does not seek to philosophically investigate the causes of this evil.
Kafka encountered Zionism around 1909, when his friend Max Brod clashed with the small Zionist student society in Prague. His growing interest in Zionism was practical and cultural. From the Yiddish actors who visited Prague in 1910 - 12, Kafka gained his first impression of a living Jewish culture with its own lore and legends. Kafka turned to Jewish history and to Meyer Isser Pinès’s history of Yiddish literature. During the First World War he spent much time with Jewish refugees in Prague, and encouraged his fiancée Felice Bauer to teach in a school for refugee children in Berlin; after the war he took a close interest in the Jewish elementary school founded in Prague in 1920, and, in 1923, when he and his lover Dora Diamant were living in Berlin, both attended classes at the Academy for Jewish Studies. Kafka also studied Hebrew with the evident intention of following such friends as Hugo Bergmann and Felix Weltsch to Palestine. Franz was also sharply aware of anti-Semitism. He felt the position of Jews in Europe to be untenable.
Quotations:
"If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you're okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don't let them go. People like that are hard to find."
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
"There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship."
"It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves."
"I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea."
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
"I am a cage, in search of a bird."
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."
"All language is but a poor translation."
"You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."
"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired."
"There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us."
Personality
Franz Kafka feared that people would find him mentally and physically repulsive. However, those who met him found him to possess a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence, and a dry sense of humour; they also found him boyishly handsome, although of austere appearance. Kafka enjoyed sharing humour with his friends, but also helped them in difficult situations with good advice.
Franz Kafka showed interest in games and physical activity, as a good rider, swimmer, and rower. On weekends he and his friends embarked on long hikes, often planned by Kafka himself. His other interests included alternative medicine, modern education systems such as Montessori, and technical novelties such as airplanes and film.
Physical Characteristics:
Kafka had dark blue-gray eyes and lustrous, raven-black hair.
Quotes from others about the person
Alan Bennett: "He is interested in the feelings of the squash ball, and of the champagne bottle that launches the ship. In a football match his sympathy is not with either of the teams but with the ball, or, in a match ending nil-nil, with the hunger of the goalmouth."
Albert Camus: "The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be reread."
Interests
riding, swimming, rowing, hiking, alternative medicine, modern education systems such as Montessori, technical novelties such as airplanes and film
Connections
Franz Kafka never married, but he had close relationships with several women during his life. In September 1912 Kafka met a young Jewish girl from Berlin, Felice Bauer, with whom he fell in love - an affair which was to have far-reaching consequences for all his future work.
Early in 1913 Kafka became unofficially engaged to Felice in Berlin, but by the end of the summer he had broken all his ties, sending a long letter to her father with the explanation that his daughter could never find happiness in marriage to a man like himself whose sole interest in life was literature. The engagement, nevertheless, was officially announced in June 1914, only to be dissolved 6 weeks later. Kafka maintained his relations with Felice Bauer until the end of 1917.
In the summer of 1923 Kafka and his sister Olga were vacationing in Müritz on the Baltic when he met a 19-year-old girl, Dora Dymant, an employee of the Berlin Jewish People's Home. He fell deeply in love with her. She remained with him until the end, and under her influence he finally cut all ties with his family and managed to live with her in Berlin. For the first time he was happy, independent at last in spite of parental objections.
Father:
Hermann Chaim Kafka
Mother:
Julie Kafka
Brother:
Georg Kafka
Brother:
Heinrich Kafka
Sister:
Gabriela "Elli" Hermannová (Kafka)
Sister:
Valerie "Valli" Pollak (Kafka)
Sister:
Ottilie "Ottia" David (Kafka)
Partner:
Felice Bauer
Partner:
Dora Dymant
Friend:
Max Brod
Friend:
Felix Weltsch
References
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka gives us not only a more vivid and lifelike picture of Kafka than that painted by any of his contemporaries, but also a fascinating portrayal of the complicated interaction between two writers of different temperaments but similar backgrounds who together helped shape the future of twentieth-century literature.
1947
Franz Kafka: Quotes & Facts
This book is an anthology of quotes from Franz Kafka and selected facts about Franz Kafka.
2015
Kafka: The Early Years
How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography answers that question with more facts, detail, and insight than ever before, describing the complex personal, political, and cultural circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis."
2014
Franz Kafka
Sander L. Gilman brings together Kafka's literary works, personal writings, and biography to create a compelling and wholly accessible narrative of the literary master's life.
Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son: A Biography
Alt’s biography explores Franz Kafka’s own view of life and writing as a unity that shaped his identity. He locates links and echoes among the author’s work, life, and surroundings, situating him within the traditions of Prague's German literature, modernity, psychoanalysis, and philosophy as well as within its Jewish culture, arts, theater, and intellectual tradition.
2005
Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt
In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka’s life that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka’s dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author’s novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka’s letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality.
Kafka
The book is a wonderful educational tool for those unfamiliar with Kafka, including a brief but inclusive biography as well as the plots of many of his works, all illustrated by Crumb, making this newly designed edition a must-have for admirers of both Kafka and Crumb.
1993
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer
Franz Kafka: Subversive Dreamer is an attempt to identify and properly contextualize the social critique in Kafka’s biography and work that links father-son antagonisms, heterodox Jewish religious thinking, and anti-authoritarian or anarchist protest against the rising power of bureaucratic modernity.
In 1915, Franz Kafka was awarded the Fontane Prize, his first public recognition, for the story Der Heizer (The Stoker), later incorporated in his fragmentary novel Amerika.
In 1915, Franz Kafka was awarded the Fontane Prize, his first public recognition, for the story Der Heizer (The Stoker), later incorporated in his fragmentary novel Amerika.