Franz Kafka, (born July 3, 1883, in Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary [now in Czech Republic] died June 3, 1924, Kierling, near Vienna, Austria), German-language writer of visionary fiction whose works especially the novel Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and the story Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis) express the anxieties and alienation felt by many in 20th-century Europe and North America.
Franz Kafka, the son of Julie Löwy and Hermann Kafka, a merchant, was born into a prosperous middle-class Jewish family. After two brothers died in infancy, he became the eldest child and remained, for the rest of his life, conscious of his role as an elder brother; Ottla, the youngest of his three sisters, became the family member closest to him. Kafka strongly identified with his maternal ancestors because of their spirituality, intellectual distinction, piety, rabbinical learning, melancholy disposition, and delicate physical and mental constitution. He was not, however, particularly close to his mother.
The figure of Kafka’s father overshadowed his work as well as his existence. The figure is, in fact, one of his most impressive creations. In his imagination this coarse, practical, and domineering shopkeeper and patriarch who worshipped nothing but material success and social advancement belonged to a race of giants and was an awesome, admirable, but repulsive tyrant. In Kafka’s most important attempt at autobiography, Brief a den Vater (written 1919; Letter to Father), a letter that never reached the addressee, Kafka attributed his failure to live, to cut loose from parental ties and establish himself in marriage and fatherhood, as well as his escape into literature, to the prohibitive father figure, which instilled in him the sense of his impotence. He felt his will had been broken by his father. The conflict with the father is reflected directly in Kafka’s story Das Urteil (1913; The Judgment). It is projected on a grander scale in Kafka’s novels, which portray in lucid, deceptively simple prose a man’s desperate struggle with an overwhelming power, one that may persecute its victim (as in The Trial) or one that may be sought after and begged in vain for approval (as in Das Schloss [1926; The Castle]). Yet the roots of Kafka’s anxiety and despair go deeper than his relationship with his father and family, with whom he chose to live in close and cramped proximity for the major part of his adult life. The source of Kafka’s despair lies in a sense of ultimate isolation from true communion with all human beings the friends he cherished, the women he loved, the job he detested, the society he lived in and with God, or, as he put it, with true indestructible Being.
Kafka did, however, become friendly with some German Jewish intellectuals and literati in Prague, and in 1902 he met Max Brod. This minor literary artist became the most intimate and solicitous of Kafka’s friends, and eventually, as Kafka’s literary executor, he emerged as the promoter, savior, and interpreter of Kafka’s writings and as his most influential biographer. The two men became acquainted while Kafka was studying law at the University of Prague. He received his doctorate in 1906, and in 1907 he took up regular employment with an insurance company. The long hours and exacting requirements of the Assicurazioni Generali, however, did not permit Kafka to devote himself to writing. In 1908 he found in Prague a job in the seminationalized Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. There he remained until 1917, when tuberculosis forced him to take intermittent sick leaves and, finally, to retire (with a pension) in 1922, about two years before he died. He was liked by all who worked with him.