Kafka, Franz << KAHF kah, frahnts >> (1883-1924), was a Czech writer who gained worldwide fame only after World War II. Only a few of his short stories were published during his lifetime. Kafka wanted his unpublished manuscripts to be burned after his death, but his friend Max Brod edited and published them anyhow.
Kafka’s highly imaginative works have been associated with such intellectual movements as Expressionism, Surrealism, and Existentialism. But he could not identify himself with any particular creed, class, or ethnic group, and his writings do not belong to any particular literary school. Kafka wrote in German.
Kafka’s writings uniquely combine a realistic, sometimes grotesquely exact description of details with an overall atmosphere of fantasies, dreams, and nightmares. He portrays objects and events with precision, but they appear to have no purpose or meaning.
Kafka presents a world in which people are deprived of spiritual security, and tortured by anxiety and loneliness. Kafka’s characters repeatedly are frustrated in attempts to gain their goals, such as knowledge, social acceptance, or salvation. They represent typical human conditions and attitudes. Their lives are marked by patterns of hope and despair, attempt and failure. They painfully experience their remoteness from a divine authority. This alienation is rooted in personal guilt and at the same time appears as an inescapable destiny.
Kafka wrote three novels and many short stories. In his novel The Trial (1925), a man is arrested, convicted, and executed by a mysterious court. His attempts to learn the nature of his guilt and of the secret court fail, and he dies in ignorance. Another novel, The Castle (1926), presents the futile struggle of a newcomer to win acceptance in a village and gain entry to a castle, home of an unknown supreme authority. Amerika (1927) is a comic novel about the adventures of an adolescent European immigrant in America. Kafka’s best-known short stories include “The Judgment,” “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist.”
Kafka was born in Prague of German-speaking Jewish parents on July 3, 1883. He spent most of his life as a state insurance lawyer. He died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924.
