Kafka, Franz

Kafka, Franz (1883-1924), Austrian (Czech) Jewish novelist and short-story writer, whose disturbing, symbolic fiction, written in German, prefigured the oppression and despair of the late 20th century. He is considered one of the most significant figures in modern world literature; the term “Kafkaesque” has, in fact, come to be applied commonly to grotesque, anxiety-producing social conditions or their treatment in literature.

Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague (then in Austria-Hungary) on July 3, 1883. His father, a merchant, was a domineering figure whose influence pervaded his son's work and (as Kafka perceived it) stifled his life. Brief an den Vater (1919; Letters to My Father, 1966) expresses his feelings of inferiority and paternal rejection. Nevertheless, Kafka lived with his family most of his life, never marrying although engaged twice. His uneasy relationship with Felice Bauer, a young German woman whom he courted between 1912 and 1917, is revealed in the series Briefe an Felice (1967; Letters to Felice, 1973).

Although he had studied law at the German Charles University in Prague, Kafka took a civil service post and wrote in his spare time. With the strain of this dual life, added to his anxiety and depression, Kafka contracted tuberculosis in 1917 and died in a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, on June 3, 1924.

The themes of Kafka's work are the loneliness, frustration, and oppressive guilt of an individual threatened by anonymous forces beyond his comprehension or control. In philosophy, Kafka is akin to the Danish thinker Søren Aabye Kierkegaard and to 20th-century existentialists (see Existentialism). In literary technique, his work has the qualities both of Expressionism and of Surrealism. Kafka's lucid style, blending reality with fantasy and tinged with ironic humour, contributes to the nightmarish, claustrophobic effect of his work—as in his long short story “Die Verwandlung” (1915; The Metamorphosis, 1937). In it, the hero, a hardworking insurance agent, awakens to find that he has turned into an enormous beetle; rejected by his family, he is left to die alone. Another story, “In der Strafkolonie” (1919; In the Penal Colony, 1941), is a chilling fantasy of imprisonment and torture.

Contrary to Kafka's wish that his unpublished manuscripts be destroyed after his death, his friend and biographer, the Austrian writer Max Brod, published them posthumously and thus established Kafka's reputation. Among these works are the three novels for which Kafka is best known (all first translated by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir and his wife Willa Anderson Muir): Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937); Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930), and Amerika (1927; trans. 1938).