of money force him to return to living with his parents, a humiliating experience for him. He dies on June 3 in an advanced stage of tuberculosis of the throat in a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna. His last words to Robert Klopstock are “Kill me, or you are a mur derer.” Before his death, Kafka asks Max Brod to destroy all of his unpublished manuscripts.
1925 Disregarding Kafka’s request, Brod begins publishing his friend’s work, starting with the first of Kafka’s three unfin ished novels, The Trial.
1926 Brod publishes The Castle, an account of the futile efforts of a man to be recognized by the authorities.
1927 Max Brod publishes Amerika, an immigrant’s adventures in a baffling new country.
1933 The Nazis ban Kafka’s work and hold public burnings of his books.
1940 Grete Bloch, who had met Kafka in 1913, claims to be the
1942 mother of his child, a boy who died at age six and about whom Kafka had known nothing. The Nazis remove Franz Kafka’s sisters Elli and Valli and their husbands to the Lodz ghetto in Poland, where they die.
1943 Kafka’s sister Ottla, because of her marriage to an “Aryan,” is exempt from Nazi deportation. Disdaining the prefer ential treatment, she divorces her husband and chooses to be led away; she ultimately is taken to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where she dies.
1944 Grete Bloch is beaten to death by a Nazi soldier. Milena Jesenská-Pollak dies at the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, in Germany.
1952 Dora Diamant dies in London.
1960 Felice Bauer dies in America.
INTRODUCTION
FRANZ KAFKA’S FICTION DOESN’T make sense. Kafka was no doubt aware of the resulting awkwardness, and perhaps he hoped to hide from future readers when he asked his confidant Max Brod to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts upon his death. Kafka’s writing is on the one hand specific and realistic, and on the other incomprehensible. His literary puzzles resemble the unreal landscapes and structures of M. C. Escher’s drawings and lithographs. Actually, Escher’s imagery offers a useful way to visualize Kafka’s literature. As if leading the reader up and down endless staircases of logic, Kafka focuses on multiple dualities at once, all of which crisscross in three dimensions. Rather than a linear argument, Kafka writes a spiral one, which often makes readers dizzy, if not seasick. Interestingly, metamorphosis was one of Escher’s favorite subjects, and three of his most famous woodcuts share this title with Kafka’s novella. Metamorphosis, Anthony Thorlby argues, is the theme implicit in all Kafka’s prose (“Kafka’s Narrative: A Matter of Form”; see “For Further Reading”). Kafka’s content is somehow incongruous with his form, and as a result, the language must either undergo a metamorphosis itself to accommodate his pen, or perish—and sometimes it does both. At its best, Kafka’s prose is re-formed into a new mode of signification; at its worst, his words are deformed, depleted, meaningless. In striving to fit his impossible situations into the feeble vehicle of language, Kafka knowingly embarks on a failed enterprise. He attempts to express the inexpressible.
The metamorphosis of his writing, Kafka’s real accomplishment, takes readers to a place at once familiar and unfamiliar. Intrigued by this immediacy, critics have celebrated Kafka for his “universality.” This flattery overreaches perhaps, but the term “universal” was not picked by accident. Kafka’s fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It’s a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there’s no map.
But Kafka’s universe nonetheless resonates deeply with who we are and who we’ve become. Early readers who hailed Kafka’s universality had never seen their lives in books, and they had only dimly recognized the “Kafkaesque” as an unnamed thing. Kafka was among the first to describe bourgeois labor and its degrading impact on the soul. In his fable “Poseidon,” Kafka even portrays the god of the sea as consumed with tedious, never-ending paperwork. Kafka brings to mind a vocabulary of images—an endless trail of meaningless forms to be filled out, a death apparatus to rival Poe’s pendulum, a man wearing a bowler hat, a gigantic insect. Thanks to interpretations like Orson Welles’s film version of The Trial, Kafka’s universe has expanded to include rows of office desks, oppressive light, and snapping typewriters. Kafka understood the trajectory of bureaucracy, and his literature predicts the nightmarish corporate world we live in today.
Kafka’s fiction, though concrete in its particulars, suggests an array of interpretive possibilities. “The Metamorphosis” alone has inspired Catholics