Franz Kafka
Franz
Kafka was born in Prague,
Bohemia, July 3, 1883 and died June 3, 1924 of
tuberculosis at the age of 40.
He came from a middle-class Jewish family. His
father was a shopkeeper and
tried to climb up the social ladder by working hard
at his shop and sending
Franz to a prestigious German high school. He went on to
get a law degree and
worked for two insurance companies (not at the same time)
When his
.tuberculosis got bad in 1917 he was put on temporary retirement with
a
pension. German was the language the upper class spoke and by sending Franz
to
German schools his father tried to disassociate from the lower class
Jewish who
lived in the ghetto. They were always moving from apartment to
apartment
advancing as the business grew. Franz had a very strained
relationship with his
father that traumatically affected his whole life. This
is apparent in a letter
to his father he wrote, "What was always
incomprehensible to me was your total
lack of feeling for the suffering and
shame you could inflict on me with your
words and judgments. It was as though
you had no notion of your power"
(Letter) . Max Brod and Franz met in college
and became life long friends. It
was Max who persuaded Franz to publish some
of his work and it was Max who was
responsible for most of the Kafka writings
that are available today. Franz had
entrusted his manuscripts to Max and in
his last will and testament specified
that all his work was to be destroyed.
Instead Max had them published after
Franz’ death. Although he never
married, he was engaged several times but
always broke the engagement as the
wedding day would approach. Most of the
biographies about him tell of his
problem with women and repulsion from sex and
say that it was evident in his
writings. In an entry in his diary he wrote
"Coitus as the punishment for
the happiness of being together"
(Constructing). His romances and engagements
are well documented and it is
interesting to note his selection of books that
he gave to Felice Bauer:
"Tolstoy’s diaries, the New and Old Testament,
and Gerhart Hauptmann’s
‘Fool in Christ Emanuel Quint'" (Times ). Franz met
Felice Bauer at
Max’ house and they had a five year courtship mainly
through letters. He wrote
to her daily when at the sanatorium in Italy even
while he was carrying on with
an 18 year old Swiss girl who was there also.
Felice inspired him and he wrote
several pieces during this time; "The
Judgment," which he dedicated to her,
then "The Metamorphosis" and he started
Amerika (Kafka.) According to Daniel
Hornek "None of Kafka’s novels was
printed during his lifetime, and it was
only with reluctance that he
published a fraction of his shorter fiction. This
fiction included Meditation
(1913), a collection of short prose pieces; The
Judgment (1913), a long
short story, written in 1912, which Kafka himself
considered his decisive
breakthrough (it tells of a rebellious son condemned to
suicide by his
father); and The Metamorphosis (1915), dealing again with the
outsider, a son
who suffers the literal and symbolic transformation into a huge,
repulsive,
fatally wounded insect. In the Penal Colony (1919) is a parable of a
torture
machine and its operators and victims---equally applicable to a
person’s
inner sense of law, guilt, and retribution and to the age of World
War I.
The Country Doctor (1919) was another collection of short prose. At the
time
of his death Kafka was also preparing A Hunger Artist (1924), four
stories
centering on the artist’s inability either to negate or come to terms
with
life in the human community." Franz Kafka’s writings can be best
described
as nightmarish or dreamlike. He has impacted twentieth century
literature
greatly as evidenced by a word in the dictionary coined after him:
"Kafkaesque
(adj): Characteristic of the novels of Franz Kafka; especially,
bizarre or
absurd, and often marked by the ineffectuality of the individual"
(Funk ).
Bibliography
http://family.knick.net.thecastle/timeline. 2
Mar. 2000. Constructing Franz
Kafka. Hp. 1996 [last update]. Online.
Available: http://info.pitt.edu/~kafka/biblio.html.
1 Mar. 2000.
Contemporary Authors. Vol. 26. Detroit: Gale Research, 1989. Funk
&
Wagnalls New and Comprehensive International Dictionary of the
English
Language. NY:Publishers Guild Press, 1978. Hornek, Daniel. Xoom.
Hp. 1999 [last
update]. Online. Available:
http://members.xoom.com/danielhornek/. 1 Mar. 2000.
Kafka, Leni.
Biography. Hp. 2000 [last update]. Online. Available:
http://victorian.fortunecity.com/vermeer/287/biography.htm.
2 Mar. 2000.
Letter to His Father. Hp. 2000 [last update]. Online.
Available:
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/vermeer/287/lettertohisfather.htm
Magil,
Frank N. ed. Franz Kafka. Vol. 4 of Critical Survey of Short
Fiction . Pasadena:
Salem Press, 1993. Novels for Students Vol. 7
Farmington, MI: Gale Research,
1999. p281-297. Pawel, Ernst. The
Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka.
NY:Noonday Press, 1992.
Spann, Meno. Franz Kafka. George Prior Publishers, 1976.
Times Literary
Supplement, Aug. 22, 1997 n4925 p15(2). World Literature
Criticism 1500
to Present. Vol. 3. Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.