Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born on 3 July 1883 near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a German-language Jewish Czech writer and novelist from a middle-class, German-speaking Ashkenazi Jewish family. Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, later became the capital of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, but Kafka’s early world was shaped by the mixed languages and cultures of the empire. His parents came from traditional Jewish society and spoke German influenced by Yiddish, while Kafka and his siblings grew up speaking Standard German. He also spoke and wrote in Czech, though he never considered himself fluent.

Kafka became one of the major figures of 20th-century literature, though he died with little public recognition. His fiction is known for joining realism with the fantastique, often placing isolated protagonists inside strange, surreal predicaments and before social or bureaucratic powers they cannot understand. The word “Kafkaesque” entered common use to describe situations like those in his writing. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, and the novels The Trial, published in 1924, and The Castle, published in 1926. He is also known for brief fables and aphorisms that often mix comic elements with darker themes.

Before he was known as a writer, Kafka trained as a lawyer. In 1901 he entered the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität of Prague, first studying chemistry, then changing to law after two weeks. Law did not excite him, but it offered career possibilities and pleased his father. After completing his legal education, Kafka worked full-time in legal and insurance jobs. Those duties created an inner conflict, because he felt his real calling was writing. Only a small part of his work appeared during his lifetime, including the story collections Contemplation in 1912 and A Country Doctor in 1919, along with individual stories in literary magazines. They drew little attention at the time.

Kafka’s thinking and writing were strongly marked by family life. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a forceful businessman who had come to Prague in the 1870s and opened a shop selling haberdashery and ladies’ accessories. Kafka’s relationship with him was strained and formal, and the father’s demanding presence appears in Kafka’s long Letter to His Father. His mother, Julie, helped manage the family business and was often away from home for long hours. Kafka’s childhood was somewhat lonely, with the children largely cared for by governesses and servants. Of the six Kafka children, Franz was the eldest; his two brothers died in infancy, and his three sisters, Gabriele, Valerie, and Ottilie, were later murdered in the Holocaust.

Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family members and close friends. He became engaged to several women but never married. In 1924, at the age of 40, he died of tuberculosis, still relatively unknown. His friend and literary executor Max Brod ignored Kafka’s wish that his remaining works be destroyed and instead published them, bringing them to later acclaim. Kafka’s words still speak with unusual force because they give plain, exact shape to fear, isolation, authority, and absurdity. His characters face systems they cannot fully grasp, and that feeling remains familiar to readers far beyond his own century.