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Franz Kafka

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Writers and critics

   CAPTION: Franz Kafka

   Photograph of Franz Kafka taken in 1917
   Born: July 3, 1883
   Prague, Austria-Hungary (today in the Czech Republic)
   Died: June 3, 1924
   Vienna, Austria
   Occupation(s): insurance officer, factory manager, novelist, short
   story writer
   Nationality: Ashkenazi Jewish- Bohemian ( Austria-Hungary)
   Genre(s): novel, short story
   Literary movement: modernism, existentialism, Surrealism, precursor to
   magical realism
   Influences: Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Dickens,
   Friedrich Nietzsche
   Influenced: Albert Camus, Federico Fellini, Isaac Bashevis Singer,
   Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Salman
   Rushdie, Haruki Murakami
   Kafka at the age of five
   Enlarge
   Kafka at the age of five

   Franz Kafka ( IPA: [ˈfranʦ ˈkafka]) ( 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 — much of it incomplete,
   and published posthumously despite his wish that it be destroyed — has
   become considered amongst the most influential in Western literature.

   His most famous pieces of writing include his short story Die
   Verwandlung ( The Metamorphosis) and his unfinished novel Das Schloß (
   The Castle). 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.

Life

Family

   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
   Austro-Hungarian Empire. 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 ..." .
   Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father. 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 Poděbrady, and was better educated
   than her husband.

   Kafka was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers,
   Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of fifteen months and six
   months, respectively, before Kafka was six, and three younger sisters,
   Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942), and
   Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943). 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's sisters were sent with their families to the Łódź ghetto and
   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.

Education

   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. After elementary school, he was admitted to the
   rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches
   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.
   Franz Kafka in 1906.
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   Franz Kafka in 1906.

   Admitted to the Charles University of Prague, Kafka first studied
   chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. This offered 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. At the university, he joined a student club, named
   Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary
   events, readings and other activities. In the end of his first year of
   studies, he met Max Brod, who would become a close friend of his
   throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who
   also studied law. Kafka 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.

Work

   On November 1, 1907, he was hired at the Assicurazioni Generali, an
   aggressive Italian insurance company, where he worked for nearly a
   year. His correspondence, during that period, witnesses that he was
   unhappy with his working time schedule - from 8 p.m until 6 a.m - as it
   made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On
   July 15, 1908, he resigned, and two weeks later 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. However, he did not show any signs of indifference towards his
   job, as the several promotions that he received during his career prove
   that he was a hard working employee. A little known fact about this
   period, reported by Peter Drucker in Managing in the Next Society, is
   that Kafka invented the safety helmet. He received a medal for this
   invention in 1912 because it reduced Bohemian steel mill deaths to
   fewer than 25 per thousand employees. (He was also given the task of
   compiling and composing the annual report and was reportedly quite
   proud of the results, sending copies to friends and family.) In
   parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work. Together with
   his close friends Max Brod and Felix Weltsch these three were called
   "Der enge Prager Kreis", the close Prague circle.

   In 1911, Karl Hermann, spouse of his sister Elli, proposed Kafka
   collaborate in the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager
   Asbestwerke Hermann and Co. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first,
   dedicating much of his free time to the business. During that period,
   he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish
   theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod,
   who usually supported him in everything else. Those performances also
   served as a starting point for his growing relationship with Judaism.

Later years

   Kafka with Felice Bauer in 1917.
   Enlarge
   Kafka with Felice Bauer in 1917.

   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 twice were engaged to be married. Their
   relationship finally ended in 1917.

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

   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
   25-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 .

   It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and
   social anxiety throughout his entire life. He also 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
   ). 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.

Personal views

   Kafka maintained his indifference to formal religion throughout most of
   his life. Yet, while never depicting the characters in his stories as
   Jewish, he never tried to obfuscate his Jewish roots. Intellectually,
   Hasidism held a strong appeal for him, especially because of the value
   it places in transcendent, mystical experience. During the last ten
   years of his life, Kafka even professed an interest in moving to
   Palestine. The ethical and procedural dilemmas presented in " The
   Judgment," " The Stoker," " A Hunger Artist," and " A Country Doctor
   all bear distinct traces of Kafka's interest in rabbinical teachings as
   they pertain to law and justice. The humorously meticulous style of the
   argumentative narrator in " Josephine the Singer," on the other hand,
   shadows the rhetorical conventions of rabbinical discource.

Literary work

   Franz Kafka's grave in Prague-Žižkov
   Enlarge
   Franz Kafka's grave in Prague-Žižkov

   Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small
   part of his work, and never finished any of his novels (with the
   possible exception of The Metamorphosis, which some consider to be a
   short novel). 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 of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in
   Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.

Style of writing

   Spoiler warning: Parts of this section contain references to characters
   and events in The Judgment.

   Born in Prague, Kafka was fluent in Czech, but chose to write in Prager
   Deutsch ( Prague German), the dialect spoken by the German-Jewish and
   -Christian minorities in the Bohemian capital. Prague German, he felt,
   was more "truthful" than High German: Using it skillfully, he was able
   to make it work for him in a way that was purely his own.

   Writing in German, which allows for rambling nonstop sentences that are
   capable of possessing an entire page, Kafka's stories often pack an
   unexpected punch just before the period—that punch being the finalizing
   meaning and focus. The reader discovers what Gregor Samsa has become,
   thanks to the past participle that procedes the period, verwandelt
   (transformed).

   Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how
   to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of
   words that have several meanings. An example is the Kafka's use of the
   German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of The Judgment. The sentence
   can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic
   crossed over the bridge." What gives added weight to the obvious double
   meaning of Verkehr is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer
   Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a
   violent ejaculation." In the English translation, of course, what can
   Verkehr be but "traffic"?

Critical interpretation

   Bronze statue of Franz Kafka in Prague
   Enlarge
   Bronze statue of Franz Kafka in Prague

   Many critics 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 . 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, 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 (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.

   Furthermore, an isolated reading of Kafka's work — focusing on the
   futility of his characters' struggling without the influence of any
   studies on Kafka's life — reveals the humor of Kafka. Kafka's work, in
   this sense, is not a written reflection of any of his own struggles,
   but a reflection of how people invent struggles.

   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".

Publications and dates

   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.

   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. 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 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 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. Pasley was the editor for Das
   Schloß (The Castle), published in 1982, and Der Prozeß (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 .

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.

Trivia

     * In a letter to his friend and publisher Kurt Wolff, Kafka wrote
       that he wished to include " The Judgment," " The Stoker", and " The
       Metamorphosis" in one volume under the title The Sons. This letter
       is dated April 4, 1913&madash;well before he had written either
       "The Stroker" or "The Metamorphosis."

     * In Mexico, this phrase is commonly used in printed media
       (newspapers) and digital media (blogs, forums) to tell how hopeless
       and absurd the country is: "Si Franz Kafka fuera mexicano, sería
       costumbrista" (If Franz Kafka were Mexican, he would be a
       Costumbrista writer).
     * The influential Scottish post-punk group Josef K was named after
       the protagonist in Kafka's novel The Trial, as band leader Paul
       Haig was a Kafka fan who considered himself an existentialist.
     * Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote a short story called
       A Friend of Kafka, which was about a Yiddish actor called Jacques
       Kohn who said he knew Franz Kafka. In this story, according to
       Jacques Kohn, Kafka believed in the Golem, a legendary creature
       from Jewish folklore.

Online texts

     * Works by Franz Kafka at Project Gutenberg
     * The Kafka Project Project initiated in 1998 with the purpose of
       publishing online all Kafka texts in German, in the form of the
       manuscripts

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