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Franz Kafka

"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Kafka (disambiguation).

Franz Kafka
Black-and-white photograph of Kafka as a young man with dark hair in a formal suit
Kafka in 1923
Born(1883-07-03)3 July 1883
Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
Died3 June 1924(1924-06-03) (aged 40)
Klosterneuburg, Austria
Burial placeNew Jewish Cemetery, Prague
Citizenship
Alma materGerman Charles-Ferdinand University
Occupations
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • insurance officer
WorksList
StyleModernism
Signature

Franz Kafka[b] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a novelist and writer from Prague who was Jewish, Austrian, and Czech[4] and wrote in German. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastique,[5] and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surreal predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. The term Kafkaesque has entered the lexicon to describe bizarre situations like those depicted in his writing.[6] The domain of mystical parables overlaps with the alienating experience of urban life's indecipherable complexities in these stories.[7] His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926).

Though the novels and short stories that Kafka wrote are typically invoked in his précis, he is also celebrated for his brief fables and aphorisms.[8] Like his longer fiction, these sketches may be brutal in some aspects, but their dreadfulness is frequently funny.[8] A close acquaintance of Kafka's remarks that both his audience and the author himself sometimes laughed so much during readings that Kafka could not continue in his delivery, finding it necessary to collect himself before completing his recitation of the work.[9]

The parables are sometimes noted for their resemblance to Chasidic fairy tales, in a universe where the transcendental source of authority is absent or unknowable.[10][11][12][13]

Kafka's impact is evident in the frequent reception of his writing as a form of prophetic or premonitory vision, anticipating the character of a totalitarian future in the nightmarish logic of his presentation of the lived-present.[14][15][16][7][17][18][19] These perceptions appear in the way that he renders the world inhabited by his characters and in his commentaries written in diaries, letters and aphorisms.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire (later the capital of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic).[20][21] He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs.[22] His professional obligations led to internal conflict as he felt that his true vocation was writing. Only a minority of his works were published during his life; the story-collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, but they received little attention. He wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40.

Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (1927), but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published.

Kafka's writings began to receive the highest possible critical acclaim when they were re-released amidst the imposition of the Nuremberg Racial Hygiene Laws in 1935 as a complete set by Schocken, however distribution and broad awareness of these works was stymied by the totalitarian atmosphere of the Nazi regime.[23] The final volumes of this set were released after Schocken was forced to relocate to Prague.[23] The works became more famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. A critical edition of his complete works, including many elements that had been edited out by Brod in the earlier Schocken collection, was released by S. Fischer Verlag in the final decades of the 20th century.

It has also influenced artists, composers, film-makers, historians, religious scholars, cultural theorists and philosophers.


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  1. ^ Koelb 2010, p. 12.
  2. ^ Czech Embassy 2012.
  3. ^ "Kafka". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Archived from the original on 26 December 2014.
  4. ^ Herz, Julius M. (1978). "Franz Kafka and Austria: National Background and Ethnic Identity". Modern Austrian Literature. 11 (3/4): 301–318. JSTOR 24645937. Retrieved 22 January 2025. Kafka, after all, was not just a Prague Jew living in Bohemia. He was also, for more than thirty-five years, an Austrian citizen caught in the middle of many cross-currents.... We might wonder whether or to what extent he considered himself an Austrian, for this question must have occurred to him more than once. For the Jews living in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy life was seriously affected by the highly heterogeneous population. Quotation on p. 301.
  5. ^ Spindler, William (1993). "Magical Realism: A Typology". Forum for Modern Language Studies. XXIX (1): 90–93. doi:10.1093/fmls/XXIX.1.75. ISSN 0015-8518.
  6. ^ Steinhauer 1983, pp. 390–408.
  7. ^ a b Benjamin, Walter (1938). "Some Remarks on Kafka". Illuminations. New York: Schocken (published 1968). pp. 141–145. Kafka's work is an ellipse with foci that are far apart and are determined, on the one hand, by mystical experience (in particular, the experience of tradition) and, on the other, by the experience of the modern big-city dweller. In speaking of the experience of the big-city dweller, I have a variety of things in mind. On the one hand, I think of the modern citizen who knows that he is at the mercy of a vast machinery of officialdom whose functioning is directed by authorities that remain nebulous to the executive organs, let alone to the people they deal with.
  8. ^ a b Foster-Wallace, David (1998). "Laughing with Kafka" (PDF). Harper's Magazine. 297 (1778): 23–27.
  9. ^ Parvulescu, Anca (2015). "Kafka's Laughter: On Joy and the Kafkaesque". PMLA. 130 (5): 1420–1432. ISSN 0030-8129.
  10. ^ Scholem, Gershom (1934). Correspondence of Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Schocken. pp. 126–127.
  11. ^ Kamenetz, Rodger (2010). Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka. Jewish Encounters Ser. Westminster: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-307-37933-7.
  12. ^ Biale, David (1985). "RE: 'Satz 10' in Gershom Scholem's Ten Unhistorical Aphorisms on Kabbalah: Text and Commentary". Modern Judaism. 5 (1): 67–93. ISSN 0276-1114.
  13. ^ Benjamin, Walter (1938). "Some Remarks on Kafka". Illuminations. New York: Schocken (published 1968). pp. 141-144
  14. ^ "Franz Kafka: A Revaluation". Hannah Arendt. Retrieved 20 June 2025.
  15. ^ Steiner, George (1970). "The Hollow Miracle". Language and silence; essays on language, literature, and the inhuman. Internet Archive. New York, Atheneum. p. 8.
  16. ^ Steiner, George (1970). "Silence and the Poet". Language and silence; essays on language, literature, and the inhuman. Internet Archive. New York, Atheneum. p. 50.
  17. ^ Adorno, Theodor W. (1983). "Notes on Kafka". Prisms. Internet Archive. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-51025-7.
  18. ^ Rosenbaum, Ron (2004). "No. 17-George Steiner: Singling out the Jewish 'Invention of Conscience'". Explaining Hitler: the search for the origens of his evil (1st HarperPerennial ed., [Nachdr.] ed.). New York: HarperPerennial. ISBN 978-0-06-095339-3.
  19. ^ Kafka, Franz (1992). "Introduction by George Steiner". The Trial. New York, NY: Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-40994-6.
  20. ^ "Heroes – Trailblazers of the Jewish People". Beit Hatfutsot. Archived from the original on 31 July 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2019.
  21. ^ "A new translation of Franz Kafka's diaries restores much of his Jewish musings". www.jta.org. 12 January 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2024.
  22. ^ Gray, Jefferson M., review in The Federal Lawyer, October 2009, of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.
  23. ^ a b Kafka, Franz (2012). "Translator's Introduction by Breon Mitchell". The Trial: A New Translation Based on the Restored Text. The Schocken Kafka Library. Breon Mitchell. Westminster: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8052-0999-0.

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