Franz Kafka: 1883-1924 His Life and Work

Franz Kafka: 1883-1924

• His Life and Work

Kafka’s Parents

Kafka’s Sisters

Kafka, aged 10; Valli (left) and Elli (middle)

Kafka’s Sisters

At Ferdinand-Karls University

• Intended to study philosophy,

• against his father’s wishes

• Entered in 1901 to study law,

• against his own wishes

• Abandoned law for chemistry

• Returned to law

• Abandoned it again for German studies and art history

• Returned to law

• 1905, when his health failed, he left to recover

• In 1906 he returned and finished his doctorate in law

Professional Life

• Before finishing law school, he drafted legal notices for a local attorney

• Assisted his parents in the family business

• 1906: one year unpaid apprenticeship in Prague’s court system

• 1907: one year at the Assicurazioni Generali (Italian Insurance Agency)

• 1908-1922: Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt für das Königsreich Böhmen in Prag (Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia)

Assicurazioni Generali

Friends

• While at the university, he made friends with:

• Max Brod Oskar Baum Felix Weltsch

Novels

• 1925: Der Prozess (The Trial), ed. Brod

• 1926: Das Schloss (The Castle), ed. Brod

• 1927: Amerika, ed. Brod

Kafka’s Writings: Short Fiction

• 1913: “Der Heizer: Ein Fragment” (The Stoker: A Fragment”)

• 1913: Betrachtung (Meditations)

• 1915: Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis)

• 1916: “Das Urteil: Eine Geschichte” (“The Judgment: A Story”)

• 1919: In der Strafkolonie (In the Penal Colony)

• 1919: Eine Landarzt (A Country Doctor)

• 1924: Ein Hungerkunstler (A Hunger Artist)

Diaries

Recurring themes in Kafka’s work

• Father-son conflict

• Isolation or alienation of the individual

• Law as inaccessible/uncaring

• Science vs. the state of nature

• The dehumanizing aspect of the bureaucratic state

• Loss of individual security and social cohesion (through war, changing social order, industrialization)

• A sense of anxiety and doubt about earlier assumptions about the individual’s social and personal value

• A questioning of earlier narratives, especially religious ones, about the human problems of evil, suffering, and injustice

• The nightmare of modern experience in an industrialized world

Formal qualities of Kafka’s work

• The short stories are told as parables

• Each work is carefully constructed

• The world is carefully specified and described

• Naturalism: reality is external, not internal

• Expressionism: reality is distorted to reveal man’s absurd condition

• Comical elements

• The “fantastic,” natural supernaturalism, magical realism

Kafka’s Judaism

• His father was only perfunctorily attached to the Jewish community and its religious practices

• Haskalah – Jewish Enlightment movement

• Kafka was German both in language and culture

• Kafka was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations

• Later he studied Hebrew and supported Zionism

• Anti-Semitism in Prague

Prague

• Was a prominent provincial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

• Situated on the Vltava River

• Is important as background to Kafka’s stories, if not literally, symbolically

Kafka’s birthplace

Café Continental

Jewish Ghetto

Prague 1897

Modern Prague

Kafka in 1901

Kafka in 1910

Kafka in 1922

Kafka’s Grave, Jewish Cemetery, Prague