FRANZ KAFKA
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish household in which he grew up with feelings of inferiority, guilt, resentment, and confinement. He was the eldest of his parents’ six children; two brothers died in infancy, and he had three sisters. Franz’s domineering father expected his son to take up a profitable business career that would ensure social advancement for the family, as well as a successful marriage promising the same. His mother was submissive to her husband, always siding with him in matters concerning Franz. Toward her son she was alternately fawning and neglectful.
Kafka earned his doctorate in law in 1906 but decided against practicing, to the disappointment of his father. Instead, in 1908 he took a position at an insurance agency, which left afternoons and evenings open for writing, and at which he remained until 1922—two years before his death.
Kafka’s literary method follows the logic of dreams and other unconscious processes, and his stories read like allegories without an established point of reference. Kafka’s best-known story, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), in which he translated his experience as family breadwinner into a parable of alienation, transformation, and ultimately death, epitomizes his style. During his early writing life Kafka was introduced to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Thomas Mann, and became part of a literary and philosophical circle that included Oskar Baum, Martin Buber, and Felix Weltsch.
Kafka had significant relationships with several women during his brief life, notably Felice Bauer, to whom he became engaged in 1914 and 1917; Julie Wohryzek; Milena Jesenská-Pollack, his Czech translator, with whom he became involved in 1920; and Dora Diamant, a young Polish woman he met a year before his death. Kafka’s sporadic literary career was in part fueled by these relationships, which varied in degree of dysfunction, and in which he vacillated emotionally, paralleling his mother’s behavior toward him as a boy.
Diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, Kafka saw the publication of a limited number of his works during his lifetime, including “The Judgment” (1913), “The Stoker” (1913), for which he received the Fontane Prize in 1915, “The Metamorphosis” (1915), “A Country Doctor” (1919), and “In the Penal Colony” (1919). In 1924 Kafka asked his confidant Max Brod to burn his remaining unpublished manuscripts. Instead, Brod dedicated the rest of his life to the full publication of Kafka’s works. Among these are the novels The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927). Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, near Vienna.
THE WORLD OF FRANZ KAFKA AND
“THE METAMORPHOSIS”
1846 Fyodor Dostoevsky publishes The Double, a work that will greatly influence Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis.”
1850 Charles Dickens publishes David Copperfield; Kafka will imitate the novel’s style in “The Stoker” (1913).
1870 Leopold von Sacher-Masoch publishes Venus in Furs, which lays the foundation for masochism and has an enor mous influence on Kafka.
1883 Franz Kafka is born on July 3 in Prague to Hermann and Julie (née Löwy) Kafka. The family is Jewish and middle class, and speaks both German and Czech. Franz is the eldest of his siblings; his two brothers die in infancy.
1889 Franz begins elementary school at Fleischmarkt. His sister Elli (Gabriele) is born.
1890 His sister Valli (Valerie) is born.
1892 Franz’s sister Ottla (Ottilie) is born; of all his family, Kafka is closest with Ottla, for whom he plays the role of pro tective older brother.
1893 Kafka begins his studies at the German gymnasium in Prague, where he forms a friendship with Oskar Pollak, who will become a respected art historian and introduce Kafka to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. He also meets Czech-born poet, playwright, and novelist Franz Werfel.
1899 Kafka reads the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Darwin, Knut Hamsun, Baruch Spinoza, and Jules Verne. He forms a friendship with Hugo Bergmann, who will be come a leading thinker in the Zionist movement. Kafka begins writing, although none of this early work survives.
1900 The Germans first test the zeppelin.
1902 Kafka meets writer and editor Max Brod at Brod’s lecture on the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. Brod becomes Kafka’s most intimate friend and eventually his interpreter, translator, biographer, and posthumous pub lisher. They discuss the works of Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Hermann Hesse, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, and August Strindberg. Kafka’s literary circle also includes dramatist Oskar Baum, existentialist and influential Jewish thinker Martin Buber, and philosopher Felix Weltsch.
1903 Thomas Mann publishes Tonio Kröger, a favorite of Kafka’s.
1904 Kafka begins writing the surreal story “Description of a Struggle,” his earliest surviving work.
1906 Kafka