Franz Kafka

 NAME  Franz Kafka

WHAT FAMOUS FOR The Czech-born German author of The Trial and The Metamorphosis gave us the word ‘Kafkaesque’, which means something that has ‘a complex, bizarre, or illogical quality’. Before his death, he ordered his close friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished manuscripts, but Brod ignored the instructions, ensuring Kafka's work reached a global audience. (1) (2)

BIRTH Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, near Prague’s Old Town Square. At the time Prague was a multilingual city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: predominantly Czech-speaking, with a substantial German-speaking minority and a Jewish population divided by class, language and degree of religious observance. Kafka’s birthplace, in the former House at the Tower near the Church of St. Nicholas, no longer survives in its original form, but a plaque marks the site. (3) 

FAMILY BACKGROUND Kafka was the eldest surviving child of Hermann Kafka, a merchant, and Julie Kafka, née Löwy. His father had risen from very poor rural circumstances: Hermann’s father had been a kosher butcher in the south Bohemian village of Osek. Julie came from the better-established Löwy family, whose relatives included merchants, doctors and Talmudic scholars. Hermann and Julie were ambitious, assimilated Jews who made a comfortable place for themselves in Prague’s German-speaking middle class. (4) 

CHILDHOOD Kafka had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, both of whom died in infancy. He then grew up with three sisters: Gabriele, known as Elli; Valerie, known as Valli; and Ottilie, known as Ottla. The youngest, Ottla, became the sibling closest to him. 

Kafka at about ten with his sisters Valli (left) and Elli (center)

Kafka later portrayed his father as dominating, loud and physically imposing, while he saw himself as frail and inadequate by comparison. His mother worked long hours in the family business, so the children were often cared for by governesses and servants. (4) 

His relationship with Hermann Kafka became one of the central dramas of his inner life. In his never-delivered 1919 Letter to His Father, Kafka accused Hermann of humiliating and intimidating him, while also recognizing the father’s energy and hard-won commercial success. The emotional truth of the letter should not be treated as a complete impartial family history, but it reveals how deeply Kafka understood himself as unequal to his father’s forceful personality. (5)

EDUCATION Kafka attended the German Boys’ Elementary School in Prague from 1889 to 1893 and then the rigorous Old Town German Grammar School, the Altstädter Staatsgymnasium. He did well academically and passed his final examinations in 1901. His schooling was conducted in German, though he also knew Czech and later had some French and English. He studied in an intellectual environment that valued German culture while existing within a city where Czech national feeling was increasingly strong. (6) (7)

In 1901 Kafka enrolled at Prague’s German Charles-Ferdinand University, now Charles University. He initially chose chemistry, but switched to law after two weeks, a practical move that pleased his father and promised reliable employment. Law also left scope for classes in philosophy, German literature and art history. Kafka received his Doctor of Law degree on June 18, 1906, then completed the compulsory year of unpaid legal training in Prague’s civil and criminal courts. (8)

CAREER RECORD 1906–1907 Worked as an unpaid clerk at the civil and criminal courts in Prague to fulfill his mandatory post-degree legal practice. 

1907–1908 Employed at the Assicurazioni Generali, an Italian insurance company, working long, grueling night shifts that left him with little energy or time for writing. 

1908–1922 Joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His duties involved investigating industrial injuries, assessing risk classifications, and drafting legal reports. He was a meticulous and highly respected employee, earned several promotions, and worked there until his early retirement due to illness in July 1922

1912 Kafka wrote The Judgment in a single night and soon began The Metamorphosis. He published stories and sketches in literary journals, but writing remained a private, precarious vocation rather than a commercially successful career.

APPEARANCE Kafka was tall, slim and dark-haired, with prominent cheekbones, large ears and an intense, watchful gaze. Surviving photographs show an elegant young man, particularly in the famous 1910 portrait taken in Prague. He was acutely self-critical about his body and often described himself in letters and diaries as weak, unattractive or physically deficient. His self-image was not necessarily shared by others. Friends remembered him as strikingly good-looking, intelligent and composed. (9) 

Kafka in 1910

FASHION Kafka dressed conventionally and carefully for a professional man of his era. Photographs commonly show him in a dark suit, white shirt, tie and high collar. He neither cultivated bohemian eccentricity nor used clothes to advertise the fact that he was a writer. As an insurance official, he had to appear respectable; his restrained, neat clothing helped him pass in the bourgeois Prague world from which his fiction so often seemed inwardly estranged. (9) 

CHARACTER Kafka’s diaries and letters can make him appear relentlessly self-disparaging, hypersensitive and tortured. He repeatedly feared that others found him mentally and physically repulsive, and he doubted his ability to sustain ordinary adult commitments such as marriage, domestic life and professional advancement. Yet this is only one side of the man. Max Brod and other friends found him intelligent, truthful, courteous and capable of close companionship. He could be quiet and cautious, but he was not merely the helpless victim of the mythology that later developed around his name. (9) 

SPEAKING VOICE Kafka spoke German as his principal literary and social language, though he could also converse in Czech. Contemporary accounts suggest that his manner of speaking was soft, precise and restrained rather than rhetorical or theatrical. His writing voice can seem coldly exact, but friends emphasized his ability to make a point with exceptional economy.  (4) 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Despite the dark themes of his fiction, Kafka possessed a strong, often darkly comic sense of humour. His friend Max Brod recalled that, while reading the opening chapter of The Trial aloud to a small circle of friends, Kafka laughed so hard that at times he could not continue. Kafka himself wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer: “I can also laugh … I am even known as a big laugher.” 

His humour was usually ironic, grotesque and self-mocking rather than cheerful in any conventional sense. (10) (11)

RELATIONSHIPS Kafka never married, although he had several important romantic relationships. The most famous was with Felice Bauer, a Berlin office worker whom he met at Max Brod’s home in Prague on August 13, 1912. Their relationship was largely conducted through letters. Kafka sent Felice nearly 600 letters and postcards between 1912 and 1917, while their personal meetings were relatively rare. 

Kafka and Felice became engaged twice, in 1914 and again in 1917, but each engagement ended. His fears about marriage were entwined with his devotion to writing and his need for solitude. The second engagement collapsed after his tuberculosis diagnosis. The surviving correspondence is unusually revealing because Felice preserved his letters, while her replies to him did not survive. (12) 

Felice Bauer and Franz Kafka

He also had relationships with the Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenská and, in his final year, Dora Diamant, a Polish-born Jewish woman he met in 1923. Kafka and Dora lived together in Berlin for a time. When his illness became severe, she helped care for him and remained deeply important to him until his death. (13)

MONEY AND FAME Kafka earned a respectable professional salary as an insurance official and remained financially tied to the security of middle-class employment for most of his adult life. He did not live in poverty, but he was never rich and did not become famous during his lifetime. A small number of his stories appeared in journals and books, often in limited editions. The international Kafka industry—translations, adaptations, university courses, museums and tourism—developed after his death. (14) 

FOOD AND DRINK Kafka was interested in health reform and followed a largely vegetarian diet from around 1910. He drank little alcohol, did not smoke and was preoccupied with digestion and physical wellbeing. 

He experimented with “Fletcherizing,” the then-fashionable practice of chewing food excessively before swallowing. This habit caused tension at the family table and seems to have fitted his desire to bring strict discipline to a body he felt often betrayed him. 

Max Brod recalled a famous anecdote in which Kafka addressed fish in a Berlin aquarium: “Now at least I can look at you in peace. I don’t eat you anymore.” The story may have been polished in retelling, but it captures both Kafka’s vegetarianism and his capacity for deadpan humour. (15) (16)

MUSIC AND ARTS Kafka attended theatres, cabarets, lectures and concerts in Prague, a city rich in German, Czech and Jewish cultural life. He had a particular interest in Yiddish theatre after seeing a troupe from Lemberg, now Lviv, perform in Prague in 1911. He befriended the actor Yitzhak Löwy and defended the troupe against condescension from assimilated Jewish audiences. The experience sharpened his interest in Jewish identity, performance and the precarious status of artists. (4) 

WRITING CAREER Franz Kafka had the slightly unfortunate arrangement of being a writer who needed a day job. He wrote in German, usually late at night, after spending the day working at an insurance office, which is not an especially promising recipe for literary genius but apparently worked for him. He was also afflicted with such severe self-doubt and perfectionism that he regularly abandoned large projects when they failed to meet the exacting standards of the man who had written them. Several of his novels were left unfinished, as if even Kafka's books could not quite bring themselves to reach the end.

During his lifetime, Kafka published only a modest amount of work, including The Judgment in 1913, The Metamorphosis in 1915 and In the Penal Colony in 1919. His three major novels—The Trial, The Castle and Amerika—were still unfinished when he died. They were published after his death in 1925, 1926 and 1927 respectively, and went on to become some of the defining works of modern literature. Kafka, meanwhile, had apparently intended that none of this should happen.

In the final months of his life, Kafka asked his closest friend, Max Brod, who was also his literary executor, to burn his unpublished notebooks, manuscripts, letters and sketches without reading them. This was an unusually drastic form of editing, but Kafka was quite clear about it. Brod ignored the instruction.

Instead, he preserved the papers, edited the unfinished novels and arranged for their publication. Thanks to Brod's disobedience, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika survived and became central works of modern literature. Whether Kafka secretly expected Brod to ignore him has been debated ever since. Perhaps he knew his friend too well. In any case, the facts are wonderfully Kafkaesque: a writer who wanted his life's work destroyed entrusted the destruction to a man who decided, rather sensibly for the rest of us, not to do it.

LITERATURE Kafka began writing seriously while still young and regarded literature not as a diversion but as a necessity. His major influences included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, Gustave Flaubert, Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. He admired concise, exact prose and distrusted decorative literary display. His own work combines surreal premises with sober narration, creating an effect in which the impossible is reported as if it were administrative routine. (9) 

NATURE Although associated with urban anxiety and office corridors, Kafka found restoration in fresh air, walks, gardens, swimming and sanatorium life. Brod remembered his fascination with “the greatness of nature” and with simple, health-giving things. 

Kafka often took holidays outside Prague and wrote appreciatively of landscapes, though he was rarely an uncomplicated outdoorsman; bodily discomfort and self-observation travelled with him. (9) (16)

PETS Kafka did not keep pets, largely due to his urban apartment living, his obsession with cleanliness, and his delicate health. Animals, however, are everywhere in his imaginative world: the insect-like Gregor Samsa, the ape narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” the dog of “Investigations of a Dog,” the mole-like creature of “The Burrow,” and the hunger artist’s panther. His animal stories use non-human perspectives to expose the arbitrary rules and isolation of human society. (2) 

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Kafka was not athletically competitive, but he took his physical condition seriously. He swam, walked, rowed, exercised and practised the daily fitness system devised by the Danish athlete Jørgen Peter Müller. He visited health resorts and sanatoriums, sought fresh air and slept with windows open. These activities were not merely hobbies: they were part of a disciplined, sometimes obsessive attempt to manage his nerves, digestion and growing frailty. (15) (16)

SCIENCE AND MATHS Kafka briefly enrolled to study chemistry before changing to law. 

Kafka had a functional knowledge of science and mathematics required for his legal work in industrial accident insurance, where he evaluated machinery hazards, risk statistics, and safety engineering reports. (14)

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY  Kafka was born into an assimilated Jewish family. Though non-observant for much of his life, he developed a deep interest in Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, and the Hebrew language in his later years.

Kafka's notebook with his studies of Hebrew

Kafka’s fiction has inspired Jewish, Christian, existentialist, psychoanalytic and political interpretations, but it refuses to settle comfortably into any one system. His stories repeatedly stage questions of guilt, judgment, law, grace and inaccessible authority, but they rarely offer a stable theological answer. (4) 

POLITICS Kafka lived through the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First World War and the creation of Czechoslovakia, all of which shaped Prague’s tense national and linguistic politics. He sympathized with Zionism at times and attended Jewish cultural events, but his principal political legacy is indirect: readers have found in his writing powerful descriptions of bureaucratic dehumanization and the individual’s vulnerability before institutions. (4) 

SCANDAL Kafka’s most notorious private “scandal” was the 1914 collapse of his engagement to Felice Bauer after a painful confrontation at Berlin’s Askanischer Hof hotel. Kafka later described the scene in terms that made it resemble a tribunal, an experience often linked to his work on The Trial. His correspondence with Felice’s friend Grete Bloch added to the tension, though the details are difficult to judge fairly because the surviving record is incomplete and disproportionately reflects Kafka’s side. (12) (17)

The principal post-mortem controversy centers on his friend Max Brod disobeying Kafka's final instructions to burn his unprinted manuscripts, a choice that created a bitter, decades-long legal dispute over the ownership of Kafka's literary archive. (2)

MILITARY RECORD During the First World War Kafka was initially exempted from active service because his work at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute was considered important to the war economy. He was later classified as fit only for limited service, and his tuberculosis ultimately made military duty impossible. (14) 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Kafka worried throughout his life about weakness, nervousness, insomnia and digestion. In August 1917 he began coughing blood and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He spent periods in sanatoriums and took leave from work, but the disease progressively worsened. By 1924 tuberculosis had affected his larynx, making swallowing painfully difficult and severely limiting his ability to eat. (2) 

HOMES Kafka spent most of his life in Prague and moved frequently within the city, often living with his parents or close to the family home. The Kafkas lived above Hermann’s fancy-goods business in the Old Town during Franz’s early years, and later moved through a series of rented flats. His lasting emotional geography was Prague: the Old Town, Jewish Quarter, riverbanks, cafés, offices and streets that hover behind the cityscapes of his fiction. (3)

Kinský Palace where Kafka's father owned a shop

In 1923 Kafka moved to Berlin with Dora Diamant, hoping that distance from Prague, family obligations and office work would enable him to write more freely. Inflation, poor health and worsening tuberculosis made the experiment short-lived. In April 1924 he returned to Austria for treatment. (2) 

TRAVEL Kafka travelled within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to Germany, Switzerland, France and Italy. He made several journeys to Berlin, partly because of Felice Bauer, and took holidays at health resorts and rural retreats. In 1911 he travelled with Max Brod to Paris, Milan and northern Italy. 

Travel did not turn him into a cosmopolitan adventurer; it often heightened his sensitivity to discomfort, hotels, strangers and the need to record experience in letters and diaries. (9) 

DEATH Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924, aged 40, at Dr. Hoffmann’s sanatorium in Kierling, near Klosterneuburg outside Vienna, Austria. The immediate cause was starvation caused by laryngeal tuberculosis. - because his throat condition made swallowing extremely painful, he was unable to eat.. Dora Diamant and his friend, the medical student Robert Klopstock, helped care for him during his final days. He was buried in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery on June 11, 1924. (2) 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA Kafka has appeared, directly and indirectly, in an immense range of films, television programs, plays, novels, songs, visual artworks and comic books. 

Notable screen adaptations include 

Orson Welles' film The Trial (1962). 

Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 film Kafka, starring Jeremy Irons, blends biographical material with the atmosphere of The Trial and The Castle. 

The BBC television play Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life (1993), which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

His work has also supplied the basis for adaptations of The Metamorphosis, The Trial and The Castle, while “Kafkaesque” has become a convenient shorthand in journalism and popular culture for administrative absurdity. 

ACHIEVEMENTS Kafka published comparatively little in his lifetime, but his posthumous achievement is extraordinary. The preservation of his papers by Max Brod enabled later readers to encounter novels and stories that transformed modern literature. His work has influenced writers including Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Philip Roth and J. M. Coetzee. 

More unusually, his surname has become a word: “Kafkaesque” is now used far beyond literary criticism for situations that feel simultaneously logical in procedure and irrational in outcome. 

Sources: (1) Wikipedia: Franz Kafka (2) Encyclopaedia Britannica: Franz Kafka (3) Franz Kafka Museum: Biography Timeline (4) YIVO Encyclopedia: Kafka, Franz (5) Kafka Online: Letter to His Father (6) Franz Kafka Museum: University (7) Goethe-Institut: Short Biography of Franz Kafka (8) Radio Prague International: Franz Kafka Biography (9) Shipwreck Library: Kafka Biography (10) Goethe-Institut: The Big Laugher (11) Johns Hopkins University Press: Franz Kafka (12) The New York Review: Kafka’s Love Letters (13) Porta Polonica: Dora Diamant (14) Generali: Franz Kafka, Distinguished Clerk (15) International Vegetarian Union: Franz Kafka, Vegetarian Activist (16) Seisma Magazine: Kafka, Eating and Health (17) Literary Hub: Kafka Was a Terrible Boyfriend