Franz Kafka

"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Kafka (disambiguation).

Franz Kafka
Black-and-white photograph of Kafka as a young man with dark hair in a formal suit
Kafka in 1923
Born(1883-07-03)3 July 1883
Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary
Died3 June 1924(1924-06-03) (aged 40)
Klosterneuburg, Lower Austria, Austria
Resting placeNew Jewish Cemetery, Prague
Citizenship
Alma materGerman Charles-Ferdinand University
Occupations
  • Novelist
  • short story writer
  • insurance officer
WorksList
StyleModernism
Signature

Franz Kafka[b] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was an Austrian-Czech[4] novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature; he wrote in German. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic.[5] It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.[6] His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.[7]

Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic, also known as Czechia).[8][9] He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time, for a year handling cases for the indigent in the city's Provincial and Criminal Courts by an insurance company, then working for nine months for an Italian insurance company, and finally, starting in 1908, spending 14 years with the Austrian Imperial and Royal Workmen's Accident Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia and its successor under the Czechoslovak Republic, rising to the position of chief legal secretary.[10]

Being employed full-time forced Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.

Kafka was a prolific writer, spending most of his free time writing, often late into the night. He burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to his persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much of the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. Few of Kafka's works were published during his lifetime; although the story collections Contemplation and A Country Doctor, and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in literary magazines, they received little attention.

In his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published. Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s. It has also influenced artists, composers, and philosophers.


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  1. ^ Koelb 2010, p. 12.
  2. ^ Czech Embassy 2012.
  3. ^ "Kafka". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. Archived from the original on 26 December 2014.
  4. ^ Herz, Julius M. (1978). "Franz Kafka and Austria: National Background and Ethnic Identity". Modern Austrian Literature. 11 (3/4): 301–318. JSTOR 24645937. Retrieved 11 October 2024.
  5. ^ Spindler, William (1993). "Magical Realism: A Typology". Forum for Modern Language Studies. XXIX (1): 90–93. doi:10.1093/fmls/XXIX.1.75. ISSN 0015-8518.
  6. ^ Franz Kafka at the Encyclopædia Britannica
  7. ^ Steinhauer 1983, pp. 390–408.
  8. ^ "Heroes – Trailblazers of the Jewish People". Beit Hatfutsot. Archived from the original on 31 July 2020. Retrieved 14 November 2019.
  9. ^ "A new translation of Franz Kafka's diaries restores much of his Jewish musings". www.jta.org. 12 January 2023. Retrieved 2 October 2024.
  10. ^ Gray, Jefferson M., review in The Federal Lawyer, October 2009, of Franz Kafka: The Office Writings. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009.