Franz Kafka

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{{Infobox_Biography |subject_name=Franz Kafka |image_name=Kafka_aprox1917_small.jpg |image_caption= |date_of_birth=July 3, 1883 |place_of_birth=Prague, Austria-Hungary (today in the Czech Republic) |dead=dead |date_of_death=June 3, 1924 |place_of_death=Vienna, Austria}}

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

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was one of the major German-language novelists and short story writers of the 20th century, whose unique body of writing — most of it incomplete, and published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed — has become iconic in Western literature.<ref name="esp">Template:Es iconContijoch, Francesc Miralles (2000) "Franz Kafka". Oceano Grupo Editorial, S.A. Barcelona. ISBN 84-494-1811-9.</ref>

His most famous pieces of writing include his short story Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) and his unfinished novel Der Prozess (The Trial). The adjective "kafkaesque" has come into common use to denote mundane yet absurd and surreal circumstances of the kind commonly found in Kafka's work.

Contents

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Life

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom that was then part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" (Corngold 1972) and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature ..." <ref>Franz Kafka's Letter to his father www.kafka-franz.com</ref>. Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a butcher, and came to Prague from Osek, a Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856—1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Podebrady, and was better educated than her husband.<ref>Gilman, Sander L. (2005) "Franz Kafka". Reaktion Books Ltd. London, UK. p.20-21. ISBN 1-86189-254-3.</ref>

Kafka had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, each of whom died before reaching the age of two (before Kafka was six), and three younger sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943), all of whom were sent with their families to the Łódź ghetto and who died there or in concentration camps. Ottla is believed to have been sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then to the death camp at Auschwitz.

On business days, both parents were absent from the home. His mother helped to manage her husband's business and worked in it as much as 12 hours a day. The children were largely reared by a succession of governesses and servants.

Kafka learned German as his first language, but he was also almost fluent in Czech. (Later, Kafka also acquired some knowledge of French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Flaubert.)

From 1889 to 1893, he attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys' elementary school at the Fleischmarkt (meat market), the street now known as Masná Street in Prague. His Jewish education was limited to his Bar Mitzvah celebration at 13 and going to the synagogue four times a year with his father. <ref>Franz Kafka Biography www.kafka-franz.com</ref> After elementary school, he was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, an academic secondary school with eight grade levels, where German was also the language of instruction, at Staroměstské náměstí, within the Kinsky Palace in the Old Town. He completed his Matura exams in 1901.

Admitted to the Charles University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law, offering a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history.

Kakfa obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.<ref name="esp"/> For nearly a year he worked for Assicurazioni Generali, an aggressive Italian insurance company, then, with the help of a friend, found more congenial employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He often referred to his job as insurance officer as a "Brotberuf," literally "bread job," a job done only to pay the bills. Together with his close friends Max Brod and Felix Weltsch these three were called "Der enge Prager Kreis", the inner Prague circle.

In 1912, at the home of his lifelong friend Max Brod, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company. Over the next five years they corresponded a great deal, met occasionally, and were engaged to be married twice. The relationship finally ended in 1917.

In 1917, he began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla.

Image:Kafka monument.jpg While at school he took an active role in organizing literary and social events, doing much to promote and organize performances for the Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor <ref>Ryan McKittrick speaks with director Dominique Serrand and Gideon Lester about Amerika www.amrep.org</ref>.

Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father. In the early 1920s he developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. In 1923, he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 19-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud <ref>Lothar Hempel www.atlegerhardsen.com</ref>.

While it is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life, he suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk (the latter possibly the cause of his tuberculosis <ref>Researchers discover ancient origins of tuberculosis-causing bacteria www.brightsurf.com</ref>).

However, Kafka's tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, then went to a sanatorium near Vienna for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924, apparently from starvation. The condition of Kafka's throat made it too painful to eat, and since intravenous therapy had not been developed, there was no way to feed him (a fate resembling that of Gregor in the Metamorphosis and the main character of A Hunger Artist). His body was ultimately brought back to Prague where he was interred on June 11, 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov. Image:Grave of Kafka.JPG

Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small part of his work, and never finished any of his novels. His writing attracted little attention until after his death. Prior to his death, he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his manuscripts. His lover, Dora Diamant, partially executed his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers. Brod overrode Kafka's instructions and instead oversaw the publication of most of his work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard.

All his published works, except several Czech letters to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.

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Critical interpretation

There have been many critics who have tried to make sense of Kafka's works by interpreting them through certain schools of literary criticism such as modernism, magical realism, and so on <ref name=interpretation>Franz Kafka 1883 – 1924 www.coskunfineart.com</ref>. The apparent hopelessness and the absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism. Others have tried to locate a Marxist influence in his satirization of bureaucracy in pieces such as In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle<ref name=interpretation/>, whereas others point to anarchism as an inspiration for Kafka's anti-bureaucratic viewpoint. Still others have interpreted his works through the lens of Judaism (Borges made a few perceptive remarks in this regard), through Freudianism <ref name=interpretation/> (because of his familial struggles), or as allegories of a metaphysical quest for God (Thomas Mann was a proponent of this theory).

Themes of alienation and persecution are repeatedly emphasized, and the emphasis on this quality, notably in the work of Marthe Robert, partly inspired the counter-criticism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who argued that there was much more to Kafka than the stereotype of a lonely figure writing out of anguish, and that his work was more deliberate, subversive, and more "joyful" than it appears to be.

Biographers have said that it was common for Kafka to read chapters of the books he was working on to his closest friends, and that those readings usually concentrated on the humorous side of his prose. Milan Kundera refers to the essentially surrealist humour of Kafka as a main predecessor of later artists such as Federico Fellini, Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie. For Márquez it was as he said the reading of Kafka's The Metamorphosis that showed him "that it was possible to write in a different way".

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Writings and translations

Readers of Kafka should pay particular attention to the dates of the publications (whether German or translated) of his writing when choosing an edition to read. Following is a brief history to assist the reader in understanding the editions.

Kafka died before preparing (in some cases even finishing) some of his writings for publication. Therefore, the novels The Castle (which stopped mid-sentence and had ambiguity on content), The Trial (chapters were unnumbered and some were incomplete) and Amerika (Kafka's original title was The Man who Disappeared) were all prepared for publishing by Max Brod - Kafka's close friend. It appears Brod took a few liberties with the manuscript (moving chapters, changing the German and cleaning up the punctuation) and hence the original German text, that was not published, was altered. The editions by Brod are generally referred to as the Definitive Editions.

According to the publisher's note <ref>A Kafka For The 21st Century by Arthur Samuelson, publisher, Schocken Books www.jhom.com</ref> for The Castle (Schocken Books, 1998), Malcolm Pasley was able to get most of the Kafka's original handwritten work into the Oxford Bodleian Library in 1961. The text for The Trial was later acquired through auction and is stored at the German literary archives <ref>Template:De icon Herzlich Willkommen www.dla-marbach.de </ref> at Marbach, Germany (publisher's note, The Trial, Schocken Books, 1998).

Subsequently, Pasley headed a team (including Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit, and Jürgen Born) in reconstructing the German novels and S. Fischer Verlag republished them.<ref name="Adler_oct131995">Stepping into Kafka’s head, Jeremy Adler, Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 13, 1995 (http://www.textkritik.de/rezensionen/kafka/einl_04.htm)</ref> Pasley was the editor for Das Schloβ (The Castle), published in 1982, and Der Proceβ (The Trial), published in 1990. Jost Schillemeit was the editor of Der Verschollene ( Amerika) published in 1983. These are all called the 'Critical Editions' or the 'Fischer Editions'. The German critical text of these, and Kafka's other works, may be found online at The Kafka Project <ref>The Kafka Project - Kafka's Works in German According to the Manuscript www.kafka.org</ref>.

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Translations

There are two primary sources for the translations based on the two German editions. The earliest English translations were by Edwin and Willa Muir and published by Alfred A. Knopf. These editions were widely published and spurred the late-1940's surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States. Later editions (notably the 1954 editions) had the addition of the deleted text translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. These are known 'Definitive Editions'. They translated both The Trial, Definitive and The Castle, Definitive among other writings. Definitive Editions are generally accepted to have a number of biases and to be dated in interpretation.

After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published -- The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004 ). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.

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Kafka in visual media

For a full list of films The IMDb filmography

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Bibliography

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Short stories

Many collections of the stories have been published, and they include:

  • Kafka, Franz (ed. Nahum N. Glatzer). The Complete Stories. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.
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Novellas

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Novels

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Diaries and notebooks

  • Diaries of Franz Kafka
  • The Blue Octavo Notebooks
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Letters

  • Letters to Felice
  • Letters to Ottla
  • Letters to Milena
  • Franz Kafka: Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors
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On Kafka

  • Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.
  • Brod, Max. The biography of Franz Kafka, tr. from the German by G. Humphreys Roberts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947.
  • Citati, Pietro, Kafka, 1987.
  • Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986.
  • Greenberg, Martin, The terror of art; Kafka and modern literature. New York, Basic Books, 1968.
  • Hayman, Ronald. K, a Biography of Kafka., London: Phoenix Press, 2001.
  • Murray, Nicholas. Kafka. New Haven: Yale, 2004.
  • Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York : Vintage Books, 1985.
  • Thiher, Allen (ed.). Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, No. 12).
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See also

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References

  • Corngold, Stanley. Introduction to The Metamorphosis, Bantam Classics; Reissue edition (March 1, 1972), ISBN 0553213695

Footnotes: <references/>

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Online texts

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Further reading

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