German Literature · 5 books
Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and died on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, of tuberculosis. He was forty years old. He published relatively little during his lifetime, destroyed a significant portion of what he wrote, and left instructions to his friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn the rest after his death. Brod did not comply. The consequences of that decision are difficult to overstate: had Brod obeyed, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika would not exist as we know them. The twentieth century’s literature would be different in ways that are impossible to map.
Kafka was born into a prosperous German-speaking Jewish family in a city that was predominantly Czech. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a self-made wholesale merchant who had risen from rural poverty and whose energy and physical presence dominated the household. The relationship between Franz and his father was one of the most extensively documented family tensions in literary history, largely because Kafka wrote about it himself — most directly in the Letter to His Father, a document of extraordinary length and psychological precision that Hermann apparently never read, and that was not published until after Franz’s death. The father does not need to be read as simply a villain in this account; the letter is too honest for that. But the sense of being judged against a standard of practical achievement that he could not meet, and did not want to meet, ran through Kafka’s adult life.
He studied law at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and received his doctorate in 1906. He then found employment at an insurance institution, eventually settling at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, where he worked until illness forced his retirement in 1922. He was, by all accounts, a competent and conscientious employee. He worked mornings at the office and wrote at night, which left him chronically exhausted and convinced that the two lives were in perpetual opposition.
His first significant published work appeared in 1913 — the story collection Meditation. In the Penal Colony, The Judgment, and The Metamorphosis all appeared between 1913 and 1915. The Metamorphosis, in which a traveling salesman named Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insect, is one of the most widely read works of the twentieth century. It is often approached as allegory or symbol, and those readings are valid; but it also functions as a precise account of illness, dependency, and the way a family reorganizes around a member who can no longer perform his economic function. The literalness with which Kafka renders the situation — the practical problems of movement, feeding, and furniture — gives it a force that more purely symbolic treatments could not achieve.
The three novels were all left unfinished and published posthumously. The Trial, written in 1914–15 and published in 1925, follows a bank official named Josef K., who is arrested one morning without being told what he is charged with and spends the rest of the novel attempting to navigate a legal process whose logic he cannot comprehend and whose authorities he cannot locate. The Castle, written in 1922 and published in 1926, follows a surveyor known only as K. who arrives in a village whose affairs are administered by a castle he can never reach and whose officials can never be directly contacted. Amerika, the earliest of the three novels, is more picaresque and stranger in tone than the others.
Kafka’s prose style — in German — is characterized by a precision that borders on the bureaucratic. His sentences are clear, subordinate clauses are carefully arranged, and the surface of the writing is calm. The horror accumulates not through distorted language but through the absolutely lucid description of situations that are themselves irrational. This combination — rational syntax, irrational world — is what gives the work its distinctive quality, and it is one reason why the adjective “Kafkaesque” has entered common usage to describe systems that operate by rules that cannot be understood or challenged.
He never married, though he was engaged twice to the same woman, Felice Bauer, and once to another, Julie Wohryzeck. His relationship with Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist who translated some of his work into Czech and with whom he maintained a significant correspondence, belongs to the last years before his illness became severe. In 1923 he met Dora Diamant, with whom he lived in Berlin for a period, and she was with him when he died at the Kierling sanatorium in June 1924.
His reputation was established almost entirely after his death, through Brod’s editorial work and the gradual recognition of his importance by figures in Czech, German, and then international literary culture. By the middle of the twentieth century he was acknowledged as one of the central writers of European modernism. The question of what his work means has never been settled, which is probably the right outcome for writing whose fundamental subject is the impossibility of settling questions.
The extent of Kafka’s posthumous influence is one of the more remarkable facts in modern literary history. He entered the English-language tradition primarily through the translations of Edwin and Willa Muir in the 1930s, and by the mid-twentieth century his name had become an adjective — a measure of how completely his vision had identified something that was already present in modern life and simply unnamed. Organizations that operate through processes one cannot understand, accusations that cannot be answered because they cannot be specified, authority that is simultaneously pervasive and inaccessible: these are the conditions his fiction mapped. They have not become less recognizable.
At Classics Retold, we have published new translations of his major works — editions that aim to convey the characteristic quality of his prose: clear, precise, and quietly relentless. Reading Kafka in a translation that preserves the tonal control of the original is a different experience from reading him in versions that either dramatize the strangeness or smooth it over. These editions attempt to let the strangeness stand on its own terms.
We’ve written more about his work here: Kafka Wrote The Trial Before His Arrest and Kafka Finished Nothing — The Castle Proves It.
