Kafka wrote German nightmares from a Prague insurance desk
Franz Kafka (1883–1924), a German-speaking Jewish Czech from Prague, fused realist detail with the fantastique. Trained in law and tied to insurance jobs, he published little, died of tuberculosis at forty, and asked that his papers be destroyed—a wish his friend Max Brod ignored.
His father Hermann, son of a kosher butcher in the Bohemian village of Osek, ran a Prague haberdashery with up to fifteen staff and a jackdaw logo, since kavka is Czech for jackdaw. His mother Julie worked in the shop up to twelve hours a day, so governesses and servants largely raised the children. Franz was the eldest of six; brothers Georg and Heinrich died in infancy, and sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla, his favourite, were all later killed in the Holocaust.
His parents spoke a Yiddish-tinged German, but he was raised on Standard German, and the unusual purity of his prose may reflect growing up with the language in a mostly Czech-speaking land. He studied Czech for eight years at a classical gymnasium in the Kinský Palace and got praise for it, yet never felt fluent and spoke German with a Czech accent. Of his father he left a Letter of more than 100 pages complaining of an authoritarian, demanding presence that shaped his writing.
At the German university in Prague in 1901 he lasted two weeks in chemistry before switching to law, a field that bored him but pleased his father and left room for German studies and art history. There he met Max Brod, a lifelong friend who later named their group the Close Prague Circle. Brod found him shy but profound; together they read Plato in Greek and Flaubert in French, and Kafka called Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Gogol, Grillparzer and Kleist his true blood brothers.
In his lifetime only the collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor and a few magazine stories, including The Metamorphosis, reached print, to little notice. He was engaged several times but never married. The Trial and The Castle appeared posthumously in 1925 and 1926, and the word Kafkaesque now names nightmares of isolation before baffling bureaucracy.
Source: Franz Kafka
