Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (born 1883, Prague, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic]—died 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria) was a German-language writer whose works—most famously The Trial (Der Prozess, 1925) and Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915)—gave us the twentieth century’s most imperishable fables about disorientation, guilt, and absurdity and, more generally, about the human condition in modernity. His writings, particularly his diaries and letters, also point to the complex ways “Western” Jews have negotiated between assimilation and tradition. The son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, Franz Kafka was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. In his “Letter to the Father” (“Brief an den Vater,” 1919), Kafka blames his father for his alienation from his own Jewish heritage. “It was conceivable that we might have found each other in Judaism.” But the flimsy vestiges of Judaism passed on to him, Kafka writes, were “an insufficient scrap . . . a mere nothing, a joke—not even a joke. . . . It all dribbled away while you were passing it on” (Letter to his Father. New York: Schocken, 1966, p. 182). Kafka’s conflict with his father gets its fictional expression in his breakthrough story The Judgment (Das Urteil, 1913). Kafka did associate with German-Jewish intellectuals in Prague, including Max Brod, who would become Kafka’s promoter, literary executor, and first biographer. Kafka proved no less sensitive than Brod and his Zionist friends to the roiling anti-Semitism that would reach its horrific climax only after Kafka’s death. (Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.) Kafka witnessed firsthand the rising racism that accompanied the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire, including a three-day riot in Prague in December 1897. Yet Kafka did not take refuge in the embrace of Jewish belonging. “What have I in common with Jews?” he later remarked. “I have hardly anything in common with myself” (The Diaries of Franz Kafka. Translated by Ross Benjamin. New York: Schocken, 2023, p. 330). At age twenty-five, after earning a law degree at the University of Prague, Kafka was hired at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. One of only two Jews among the 260 employees, he earned a reputation for diligence but found the office drudgery unbearable. He remained there until 1917, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. With considerable reluctance, Kafka published some fiction during his lifetime, including The Judgment, Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie, 1919), and A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt, 1919). A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler, 1924) appeared shortly after his death. For the rest, we owe the survival of Kafka’s works to Brod’s disregard of Kafka’s instruction that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed. After the Second World War, Brod edited a collected edition of Kafka’s works and letters (published in seven volumes by S. Fischer Verlag in 1976).