Famous Authors — The Life and Works of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in June 1883 in a house on this spot in Prague. Now the beautiful capital of the independent Czech Republic, it was at this time part of the huge Austro-Hungarian Empire. The local language was of course Czech, but the German-speaking emperors had long ago ruled that education was to be in German. So Kafka was to grow up speaking Czech to the servants and German at school and work. Kafka is unusual amongst writers in that his name is probably even better known than his work. We describe as Kafka-like a situation where the individuals in a society or a work situation are beginning to lose touch with their individuality and disappear into the or the life of a mass and industrialized society, where people see themselves only as cogs in a wheel. Kafka was obsessed by his childhood and the terrible effects he felt it had had on his outlook on life. His father, Hermann Kafka, he considered cold and unfeeling. Hermann had had little or no childhood himself. He was the son of a poor Jewish butcher in an outlying village and he had come to Prague as a peddler to make his way. By the age of 31, when Kafka was born, he had succeeded. Jewish, yes, in ancestry, but otherwise he spoke Czech at home and German in business and had little to do with the Jewish faith. By 30, Hermann was rich enough to marry Julie Loewe, daughter of a wealthy class Jewish brewery owner. Her German-speaking father was a strong supporter of the emperor and of Jewish assimilation into Austro-Hungarian society. However, her mother died when she was young and she was brought up by an unloving stepmother. Julie was always very warm-hearted, but probably married Hermann because it would be a safe situation for her. She had her eldest son, Franz, about a year later and she was 27. Hermann's wholesale and retail dry goods store shop was in the bottom part of this huge building on the main square of Prague. The incredible architecture of Prague very quickly makes you feel rather small and unimportant. It is easy to feel that even if you lived here all your life, like Kafka, you are only a passing trace of no importance whatever. The apartment that Kafka settled into was just around the corner from the square. This doorway is all that remains of the original building. The street on the left leads to what was the Jewish quarter. On the right towers the Christian church of Saint Nicholas. After Franz came two more boys in quick succession. However, the first of these died by the age of three and the second lived only a year. So the delicate five-year-old Franz had to look on as his mother fell into a frenzy of grief over the deaths of her sons, which probably affected her for the rest of her life. Like all elder children, he had resented the arrival of his brothers and wished them gone. And then they were gone and his parents mourned and he felt in some way responsible. It is intriguing to note that around this time Sigmund Freud, who did so much to establish psychoanalysis and attempt to explain the working of our minds, was growing up with a remarkably similar background. Freud was born in a little Czech village in 1856. His Jewish textile merchant father went bankrupt and the family moved to Vienna in 1859 when Freud was three. So when Kafka was born he was just 13. Both of them were in the rising Jewish middle class. Like all tribes and religions, the Jews tried to control the education of their children in the way of their beliefs. If they did not, the beliefs died. The Jews also stuck to their own language, Yiddish. They tended to live in the same areas of town and, as minorities, were sometimes forced to do so. When it comes to getting a grip on your followers, the Jews have always been big time. However, in 1763, a revolutionary decree by the enlightened King Frederick of Prussia announced that henceforth four years of primary education were to become compulsory throughout the land. He was an absolute Protestant monarch. He claimed to have his power from his God. And everyone in his country had to do what they were told. Of course, such education brought dramatic results. When people learn to read and write, they are never the same. The huge, rambling Austro-Hungarian Empire included not just Austria and Hungary, but Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, Romanians, and a host of other minorities. The Empress Marie-Thérèse, this is a memorial to her in Prague Castle, was a staunch Roman Catholic. But many of these people were breakaway Christians like the Calvinists and Lutherans. And then there were the Jews. She was desperate to find a way of unifying her disparate peoples. So, following the example of her cousin Frederick, the Empress hit on a powerful and effective solution to her problem. In 1774, compulsory education was introduced throughout the Empire. And it was to be conducted in German, no matter what the religion of the child. Of course, it worked to a huge degree, because the business of government throughout the Empire was conducted in German. If you wanted a government job, you had to speak German. In 1782, the Empire went even further. In generous terms, they announced that Jews were no longer to be segregated in any way. All jobs and universities were to be open to them. Just to be on the safe side, if Jews wanted to marry, they had to have an elementary school certificate. In German, of course. Of course, Jews married just like everyone else. So the German language schools quickly filled up and taught less and less about the Jewish religion. The Jews integrated and spoke German. To this day, Jews argue about whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. All this meant that by Kafka's day, although there were still Orthodox practicing Jews in Prague this is their city headquarters, the vast majority were German-speaking and assimilated. Hermann Kafka didn't speak Yiddish, didn't practice Jewish rites, and saw his business as business with the people of Prague and his Jewishness as history. The Kafkas moved house quite a few times as they became more successful and finally settled in this house right on the main square. The boy was six and he lived here for the next seven years of his life. The ancient designs on the walls were covered by whitewash in his time. School was in two parts, elementary school until he was ten and secondary school. In both, he was a successful pupil and the teachers approved of him. He loathed them and feared them, however, and the only thing that meant anything to him was the friendship of his schoolmates. The secondary school or gymnasium was on the third floor of this building called the Kinski Palace. The students learned Greek and Latin for one third of the time and memorized lots of it. Otherwise, they learned some mathematics, geography and history and had two hours of religion. In the opinion of one of the students, there was absolutely nothing that equipped them for life outside. Life at home had produced three sisters. Perhaps this kept his mother a little busier and in later life he had three persons who were part of his family, at least. But life at home also meant his father, domineering and demanding and his mother constantly supporting her husband to the neglect of her children. She apparently played cards with him every night of their life and she supported him in his business life most effectively. None of this did much for Kafka. Any attempt to make life in Kafka's Prague seem simple is doomed to failure. As he was going through the gymnasium, the main matter in Prague was language. If you spoke German, then you supported the empire and you were seen as anti-Czech. But of course, he was at a German-speaking school. He was sent there. He didn't choose it. Also, although his family didn't practice the Jewish religion, everyone knew he came from Jewish stock. People who spoke German got on in life because that was the way the government had arranged things. Naturally, patriotic Czech-speakers didn't like it. It was impossible to avoid being categorized, castigated, condemned, even beaten up for just being who you were and not opening your mouth. This atmosphere was the world in which Kafka grew up. Kafka knew double-think from the inside. He understood the operation of corruption, nepotism, and unfair influence perfectly. In the fair streets of Prague, where Mozart had strutted his stuff and architects and builders had outdone themselves in glorious structures, the human beings who lived there were contorted and twisted to such a degree that it took a Kafka to depict it all and happily to begin to sort out the tensions. Another major factor was having an effect. In the whole of the empire, nowhere was so effective at industrialization as Bohemia, of which Prague was the center. So people were becoming rich. Factories were booming and people poured in from the countryside to work in them. Naturally, well-educated German-speaking Jews were in the forefront of these commercial developments. Yet another reason for anti-Semitic feeling. Kafka may have loathed his school, but he fortunately had his friends. As far as finding people of like intelligence and interests, he was lucky. One boy in particular, Hugo Bergman, had been Kafka's classmate from the first days of school. Bergman was always top of the class and sailed through all the academic institutions they attended with ease. Bergman was also a totally committed Jew and a Zionist. This last meant that he felt the Jews must establish their own state in Palestine, the land promised to them by their God. Kafka was totally opposed to all this, but their differences didn't prevent them being close friends until university and good friends thereafter for the rest of their lives. At the age of 14, Kafka declared to Bergman that he was going to be a writer. Another close friend was Oskar Pollack in his class at the Gymnasium. The friendship between Pollack and Kafka was close, intense and almost passionate. Pollack was the first person to whom Kafka showed his early writing. Pollack was very mature for his years and much more sophisticated in his tastes and knowledge of art. He was just the person to help Kafka to look at the wider world outside Prague and see the provincial limitations they were living in. Of course, they lived in a totally male world. Women were either the female members of one's family and so untouchable, or the women of the streets, available so easily for the middle-class young man to pleasure himself. In the uncertainties of such a restricted adolescence, it's not surprising that the Pollack-Kafka relationship had a homoerotic tinge to it. Kafka recognized it and thought nothing of it. For him, Pollack was nothing but good. Who else among all the people he knew could be trusted to read his writings with sensitivity? Pollack went on to a career in academe in Italy, then was killed in the Great War, fighting the Italians he so admired. There's no doubt that such a sensitive person as Kafka would have had a complicated life under any circumstances. But in the Prague of his day, it was a nightmare. He went to university and began to study law. Of course, the University of Prague was as bad as anywhere when it came to lecturing and he was bored to stupefaction. It was no more than he expected. What he did not expect was Max Brodt. Brodt was about a year younger and in temperament the exact opposite of Kafka. He was an optimist and his delight in life never wavered in spite of a hard early life and some physical deformation of his back. This very outlook attracted Kafka and the two became firm friends. If Kafka was educated, it was not the fault of the institutions he attended, but through his own efforts and the contact with friends such as Pollock and Brodt. Brodt was as optimistic and convinced of his friend's talent as he was that life was worth living. And if it had not been for Brodt, it is likely that Kafka's work would have remained unrevealed to the outside world. For Kafka, graduation from law school came with a doctor's degree and a job with an insurance firm. Kafka ought to have been grateful, but he was still only interested in writing and within six months he had left his post in the grand building of the company and joined another government insurance company where life was easier. And after 1 p.m. he was free to work on his writing. This was his main consideration. He was able to earn an income enough to give him time to write. It was a major plank in Kafka's view on art that what an artist produced had to be free of the taint of the need to sell it. It's always been a problem with artists. If nobody wanted to buy his work, then that was fine. It didn't stop him writing it. With his insurance job, he didn't need the money to live on. Mozart had the same problem. He tried to give up playing the piano for a living in order to write music. He was always hunting for the patron who would pay him and then let him get on with composing. However, the hours in the office took their toll on Kafka's health and his spirit, already tending well towards depression. In fact, he apparently did the job well. Over the years he was there, he got rises in salary. He was given special commissions. But the whole system of bureaucracy he saw as soul-destroying. Corruption, idleness, sycophancy, nepotism. It was all there. Perhaps if he had not had his job, we would not have had the legacy of books we do have. Via Brot, one or two short stories got published. Over long periods of time, he struggled over the three novels by which he is now known. A writer such as Kafka, whose background was so tortured in its social framework and even in the family in which he lived, obviously writes powerfully from the experience he knows. But when you read his books, there is absolutely nothing personal in them. So it is the work that matters. About the rest of Kafka's life, two aspects seem to corner him and his being unable to get the better of him, his life came to what we must regret as an early end with no huge amount of work behind him. Firstly was the matter of his health. He never felt he was fit. He was perfectly aware of the relationship between the state of his mind and his physical well-being. He knew that good diet and exercise were what he most needed, and he put himself through endless regimens of physical fitness. This was a great time for physical fitness in the German-speaking world, keen to make itself the master race. And, of course, dieting. So extreme was he in his attitude to what he ate and how he ate that his family was forced to see him chew his food many times more than normal. It was the advice of an American doctor whose work he had read. If religions could make huge food-fetish demands on their followers, then he could do even better. It was never a question of will. He had plenty of that. By the time he got tuberculosis, striking him as arbitrarily as it struck anyone else, then after the strains he had put upon his body, it is not surprising it was hardly able to cope. Then there was his problem with women. He fell in love often enough and longed for the happy married life he saw his sisters have. But the women he loved were immediately goddesses who were in the end unapproachable or for whom he was not good enough. Freud would have had a field day and Kafka himself was constantly seeing through the impossible demands he made on these relationships. He always saw himself as ugly when in fact he was tall and handsome and even graceful. Everyone who knew him spoke of his essential nobility of character and his gentle tactfulness and sense of humour. Remarkably, he was also intensely practical when it came to ordinary affairs and many people benefited from his advice. Perhaps this accounted for his success in negotiations between workers and employers in his insurance cases. It is hardly surprising then that women were attracted to him. He almost married two women. Felice Barr was one of these. She treasured his letters to the end of her life. But these affairs were no sooner commenced than certainly to the bewilderment of the girls they began turning into the sort of tortured nightmares his stories depict so well. Eventually, he found reasons to break off. Apart from these personal matters Kafka lived through the First World War in all its awfulness. He was not fit for service but he lost friends like Pollock. He could see more clearly than most the disintegration of the old world values of Europe. In any other writer, it might be astonishing that there is no direct reflection of the terrible events through which he lived in his work. What concerned him, however, was the individual. He flatly refused to see the world in terms of mass movements of belief or race or nationality or even of going to war. In his writing, there is no trace of his background. What mattered was that a person knew nothing better than him or herself and the struggle of life is with one's own identity and those around you. Astonishingly, he wrote a book called America though he had never been there. It's about a young man's struggle to establish himself from scratch in a new world. But of course, it could be anywhere. It has nothing to do with the tribe you are in or success in terms of money or power or position. You shed your baggage and get on with being yourself in universal and human terms. Occasionally, Kafka travelled to neighbouring capitals like Berlin or Vienna. In Berlin, where Felice Bahr lived, he faced the agonising decision about whether or not to become engaged and then marry in the accepted bourgeois way or to scuttle back to Prague and his own private world and not commit himself to the settled married life he so much desired on the one hand and feared on the other. He wrote many short stories, two quite long ones, Metamorphosis and The Penal Colony, absolutely horrified many people who read them and they are characterised by the cool and emotional detachment with which they depict horrendous situations. When Kafka wrote, all the confusions and difficulties of his life seemed to fade away. There are few writers who can equal Kafka for the supreme confidence and clarity and the almost deadly precision with which he wrote. In his next novels, The Castle and The Trial, the heroes, modest individuals, are pitted against systems. They approach the systems with common sense and logic and they are met with totally illogical certainties. It is an astonishing picture of the way the world works. Kings, emperors, dictators, rulers of all sorts from time immemorial and for a whole medley of reasons have gained control over the rest of us. After Kafka, that control can never be the same. In the last few months of his life, a young Jewish girl of 19 set herself to live with and look after the now dying 40-year-old Kafka. And there is no doubt it was one of the happiest times in his life. Dora Diamond was perhaps the first person with whom he felt he could just let himself be. Kafka's illness was of course incurable at this time and he died a painful death unable to swallow even the meagre diet he required. He died on June 3rd, 1924 in a sanatorium in Austria and was brought back to be buried in Prague. At the time, unpublished and unknown. Fortunately, there was the incredibly industrious Max Brot. Himself already famous and the author of numerous published works. He had always been aware that his friend Kafka was a writer in a class of his own and he devoted himself to editing and publishing Kafka's works so that the rest of the world could judge for themselves. He also wrote the first biography of Kafka an invaluable and very personal portrait. Not surprisingly, the Nazis when they came along banned Kafka's writings. Hitler's illogical and deadly systems were the perfect embodiment of the systems Kafka's heroes met with. However, his books were translated into English and other languages and gradually seeped into the mainstream of world literature. It is now clear that no artist or inquirer after the world's values in any field today can ignore the work and the vision of the astonishing Franz Kafka. Kafka was a totally committed writer who published little or nothing in his lifetime. His close friend Max Brot edited and published his work after his death and what we have may be divided into three groups. Miscellaneous pieces, short stories and novels. Miscellaneous pieces. Kafka's diaries were certainly not meant for publication but because they exist and they throw a somewhat tortured light on his character they've been published. Reading them, one has to remember that people tend to write more about anguish in a diary than about joy. The letters to two of the women in his life Felice Bahr and Milena Jasenska are also published and reveal the other warmer sides to his nature. Short stories. Available in various complete editions they include two long stories or novellas Metamorphosis about a man who turns into a beetle and the effect this has on the people around him. The Penal Colony is an astonishing story about a torture machine and how brilliantly it works. Chillingly, the inventor takes just the same pride in its effectiveness as a baker takes in the good bread he bakes. Novels. Kafka wrote three novels all really unfinished. This doesn't at all detract from their magnificence. America is his first book and is at times quite comical and although its hearer goes through some hard times it has its warmth and charm. Kafka never went to America but in his book it is a sort of promised land which turns out to be a challenge. In The Castle a man goes to take up a job at the castle. What the job is exactly and who his employers are is never clear to him or us but his efforts to make a go of it are full of richly developed scenes which are totally convincing and quite spellbinding. Finally, in The Trial a man is arrested on charges which are never really made clear and he goes through a never-ending struggle to understand how he finds himself in this situation and how a verdict can be reached. All the time, like the hero you feel the answer must be in sight. Logically, of course, there is no end to this story but it's a journey worth taking. The essence of Kafka's work is to be found in the novella Metamorphoses. After you've read it much of the writing and drama and filmmaking of our own day becomes clearer. The novel The Castle is not finished but it's written with such power that you long for the hero to make it somehow and so you become part of the story yourself. Kafka writes with complete clarity so his work is not at all difficult to read or understand. We can take comfort from the knowledge that his heroes never give up.