"
Franz Kafka - " Don't bend, don't water it down, don't try to make it logical, don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. "Franz Kafka one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, was a Jewish Czech writer, born in Praque on this day July 3, 1883.who died at the age of 40, in 1924, of TB largely unpublished and unknown, but not after having written some of the most extraordinary works of all time. After his death with the posthumous publication of his novels, letters and diaries he rose to international fame as a literary genius, one of the founding fathers of magic realism and the modern novel.
He is now considered the most influential profoundly misunderstood writers of our time. Often reduced to abstract philosophical despair, his writing was also often a scathing critique of capitalist society and bureaucracy informed by his contact with radical political groups . His most famous works are two unfinished novels, The Trial and The Castle and the short story The Metamorphosis,(Die Verwandlung) an eerie tale of a man who finds himelf changed into a giant insect. This shocking and beautifully told novella is widely acclaimed for its greatness.Written before the holocaust, a literary sighting of the terror that we can create and the beasts we can so easily become.
His family was of German culture but as they belonged to the ghetto, they were excluded from realtionships with the German minority in Praque.Tragedy shaped the Kafka home. Franz’s two younger brothers, George and Heinrich, died in infancy by the time Kafka was 6, leaving the boy the only son in a family that included three daughters (all of whom would later die in Nazi death camps or a Polish ghetto).
Kafka had a difficult relationship with both of his parents. His mother, Julie, was a devoted homemaker who lacked the intellectual depth to understand her son’s dreams to become a writer. Kafka’s father, Hermann, had a forceful personality that often overwhelmed the Kafka home. He was a success in business, making his living retailing men’s and women’s clothes. His father ruled the family with great authority, who has been described as a huge ill-tempered domestic tyrant, who on many occasions directed his anger towards his son and was disrespectful towards his escape into literature. This led to Franz becoming an extremely sensitive adult, with a delicate personality.
He finished secondary school and entered the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität in 1901, studying first chemistry and then law .While in his first year of university, Kafka became friends with Max Brod. They remained friends for Kafka's entire life. Brod encouraged Kafka's love of reading, and introduced him to some of the influences on his later work, including Dostoyevsky, Goethe, and Gogol.
In 1906, Kafka earned his Doctor of Law degree and began his professional career. Though he wanted to be writing, Kafka worked foran insurance agency, fpr 14 years, the Worker’s Accident Institute of Bohemia from 30 August 1908 to his early retirement on 1 July 1922, in a relatively undemanding job that left him time to write. Kafka had tried to join the military to fight in World War I, but he was denied due to his poor health.
He was not an ordinary person, it is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life, and also suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains, he was different, living in a state of anxious solitude, which resulted in him turning into a tormented genius. "I need solitude for my writing " the author said, but "not like a hermit - that wouldn't be enough but like a dead man." His writings stem from his battle with tuberculosis, complicated by neurosis and psychosomatic disorders associated with organic disease. On all accounts Kafka seemed to be a well established and elegant figure, respected and liked by his circle of associates, he tried to keep private just how nervous he felt, and only revealed this to his director (at the Worker’s Accident Institute of Bohemia) when he had to ask for an extended leave with pay.
His complicated love life did not make his life any easier for him, despite his complications, he was a bit of a ladies man. But his personal life raged with complications. His inhibitions and insecurities plagued his relationships. Twice he was engaged to marry his girlfriend, Felice Bauer, before the two finally went their separate ways in 1917.
A political radical who was an admirer of the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, and was drawn into the world of the libertarian socialism movement. Kafka’s opposition to established society became apparent when, as an adolescent, he declared himself a socialist as well as an atheist. Throughout his adult life he expressed qualified sympathies for the socialists, he attended meetings of Czech anarchists (before World War I). Even then he was essentially passive and politically unengaged. As a Jew, Kafka was isolated from the German community in Prague, but, as a modern intellectual, he was also alienated from his own Jewish heritage. He was sympathetic to Czech political and cultural aspirations but his identification with German culture kept even these sympathies subdued. Thus, social isolation and rootlessness contributed to Kafka’s lifelong personal unhappiness.
Kafkas strange stories, appeal to me a lot, earning their own adjective, Kafkaesque, to describe an aspect of social reality and political science that tends to be overlooked. With his libertarian sensibility, Kafka succeeded in capturing the oppressive and absurd nature of the bureaucratic nightmare, the opacity, the impenetrable and incomprehensive character of the rules of the state hierarchy as they are seen from below and outside, which destroys the mind and body and numbs the soul. Despite his perverse search of guilt to expiate , he did not surrender. In front of the omnipresence of evil and falsity he took refuge in words as an antidote to despair. Kafka’s heroes search for truth in a world of alienation, irrationality and injustice. They submit and endure and try to explain the inexplicable.
Kafka later would fall in love with Dora Dymant (Diamant), who shared his Jewish roots and a preference for socialism. Amidst Kafka’s increasingly dire health, the two fell in love and lived together in Berlin. Their relationship largely centered on Kafka’s illnesses. For many years, even before he contracted tuberculosis, Kafka had not been well. Constantly strained and stressed, he suffered from migraines, boils, depression, anxiety and insomnia. He died in Kierling, Austria, on June 3, 1924. He was buried beside his parents in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery in Olsanske.
Plagued by self-doubt, Kafka burned a huge amount of his writing, it's estimated that he burned more than 90% of what he wrote and, aware that his fragile health was failing, he asked his best friend Max Brod, who was to be his literary executor, to destroy any unfinished manuscripts on his death, unread. Fortunately for the world, Brod published it instead.
The Trial, written in 1914, was published in 1925. It tells the bizarre story of a man named Josef K., who works at a bank. He is arrested on his 30th birthday but he is never told what for. He is released and told to wait for his trial. It drags on for two years and Josef never knows what he is charged with. On his 32nd birthday, two men show up at him home and take him away. They stab him in the heart and he dies.
The Castle, which Kafka started in 1922, was unfinished when the author died in 1924. It was published by Max Brod after Kafka's death. It tells the story of a man named only K. who comes to a village. The village is ruled by a castle beside it, though no one is completely sure what the castle does. K.'s right to be in the village is questioned and then revoked when K. is about to die.
Sadly a lot of his work still chimes with the world today as the world again descends into fear and madness. Many years after his death his works act like guidebooks to the very dark feelings most of us know only to well , concerned with powerlessness, self-disgust and anxiety. This literary genius turned the stuff of nightmares however, into redemptive, consoling art. Kafka taught us, truth always ends as it begins, in the inexplicable, can any hope for a better future exist? It is this sense of despair and pessimism , and in his letters, Kafka writes of listening to “the frightened voices from within”, as it is these fears that form a path to truth. Everybody should read some Kafka.
Will Self's Kafka journey: A Praque walking tour.
