KAFKA, FRANZ

KAFKA, FRANZ (1883–1924), Czech-born German novelist, whose work has had an enormous impact on western art and literature. Kafka, who was born and raised in Prague, studied law at the German University there. He worked in a law office and then for an insurance company, writing only in his spare time. A tyrannical father greatly affected Kafka's psychological development. He never married, but three women played an important part in his life. The first was Felice Bauer, known only as F. or F.B. from Kafka's Diaries until she sold his letters to her to Schocken in 1955; they were finally published in 1967 as Briefe an Felice (Letters to Felice, 1973). Kafka met her in 1912 and they were engaged twice before Kafka finally broke off their tortured relationship in 1916. Representing for Kafka the "real" world, the world of home and family, she could not overcome the pull of Kafka's other world, the   world of his literary imagination. The second woman was the journalist Milena Jesenska, wife of the Jewish intellectual Ernst Pollak, with whom he maintained a close relationship from 1920; the last was Dora Dymant, a Polish Jewess who nursed him in his last illness. During his lifetime, Kafka published some collections of sketches and stories: Betrachtung (1913); Das Urteil (1916); Die Verwandlung (1916; The Metamorphosis, 1937); In der Strafkolonie (1919; The Penal Colony, 1948); and Ein Landarzt (1919; The Country Doctor, 1945). Kafka suffered from migraine and insomnia for years. In 1917 his illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis, and he spent much of the rest of his life in a sanatorium. He deposited his manuscripts with his close friend and eventual biographer, max brod , and when he was dying left instructions that they were to be burnt. Brod, however, was fully aware of the importance of Kafka's work, and succeeded in getting it published. Kafka's most famous novels are Der Prozess (1925; The Trial, 1937); Das Schloss (1926; The Castle, 1930); and Amerika (1927; America, 1938). Between 1925 and 1937 Brod published Kafka's collected works, together with his Tagebuecher und Briefe. The action in most of Kafka's books is centered in the hero's unremitting search for identity. The nature of this identity is never revealed and can only be vaguely conjectured from the obstacles placed in the hero's path and his failure to reach his goal. The story generally begins with an event outside normal everyday experience: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K. for without his having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning." This is the opening of The Trial, a sentence which, in its sheer simplicity, foreshadows the nightmare quality of the novel. The hero never knows what he is accused of, never discovers the nature of his tribunal, and is either unconscious of any guilt, or only too conscious of it. The Trial has a tragic finale, but in the other novels there is no ending at all. The Castle is even more obscure: no goal is ever reached, the castle can never be entered. Few writers are as difficult to interpret as Kafka. Some critics see in his works a mirror of his own life; others are psychoanalytical, stressing his relationship with his father. There are those who explain the alienation of his heroes from their environment in terms of the Jew's isolation in the world. Most interpreters, however, sense in his works a symbolic representation of the religious plight of contemporary man. Even these interpretations range from nihilistic existentialism to a positive faith in divine salvation. The latter view is that of Max Brod. However, Kafka must be regarded primarily as a creative artist, not as a prophet or a philosopher. Through his imaginative writing, he tried to elevate his own existential situation into the realm of what he himself called "the true, the pure, the indestructible." His prose is unusually lucid, with a melodic range that lifts it to the heights of poetry. His narration is full of surprises, sudden shifts of perspective, and contradictions whose humor only accentuates the grimness of a particular situation. In common with most assimilated Prague Jews, Kafka was at first only vaguely conscious of his Jewish heritage, but learned about Zionism from Max Brod and hugo bergman . He heard about Jewish life in Eastern Europe from Isaac Loewy, an actor in a Yiddish theatrical troupe with whom he struck up a friendship. Through the writer Georg Langer, he became interested in hasidism . He studied Hebrew, attended lectures at the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin and, when he came to know Dora Dymant, toyed with the idea of settling in Palestine with her. This progress toward a deeper understanding and appreciation of Judaism corresponds to Kafka's search for his ideal of genuineness and his intense longing for a pure life. Kafka's novels have been translated into many languages, including Hebrew. They have been adapted for plays, operas, and movies. The Theater of the Absurd is unthinkable without Kafka, and "Kafkaesque" has become an international word to describe the feeling of being trapped in a maze of grotesque happenings. In the introduction to the collection of unpublished stories and fragments issued in 1931 as Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer ("The Building of the Chinese Wall"), Kafka is eulogized as "a master-stylist and a master of the short story, a novelist to be compared only with the very greatest, and an inexorable molder and interpreter of our time." It was not, however, until 1964 that the Czech Communist government thought fit to rehabilitate this "decadent" genius. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: KAFKA LITERATURE: R. Hemmerle, Franz Kafka, eine Bibliographie (1958); H. Järv, Kafka-Literatur (1961), contains about 5,000 titles. STUDIES BY MAX BROD, THE PRINCIPAL AUTHORITY ON KAFKA: Franz Kafka, a Biography (1947); Franz Kafka's Glauben und Lehre (1948); Franz Kafka als wegweisende Gestalt (1951); Verzweiflung und Erloesung im Werk Franz Kafkas (1959); Der Prager Kreis (1966); in: Jewish Quarterly, 6:1 (1958), 12–14. WORKS BY OTHER CRITICS: J. Starobinski, in: E.J. Finbert (ed.), Aspects du Génie d'Israël (1950), 287–92; A. Flores and H. Swander, Franz Kafka Today (1958), includes bibliography; F. Weltsch, Franz Kafka, Datiyyut ve-Humor be-Ḥayyav u-vi-Yẓirato (1959); W. Emrich, Franz Kafka (Eng., 1968); Binder, in: YLBI, 12 (1967), 135–48; M. Greenberg, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature (1968); J. Urzidil, There Goes Kafka (1969). ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Canetti, Der andere Prozess (1969; Kafka's Other Trial: The Letters to Felice (1974); E. Pavel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (1984); N. Murray, Kafka (2004). (Felix Weltsch)