Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague and died in 1924 in Vienna. Being the son of a wealthy merchant from the German-speaking Jewish minority in Prague, Kafka felt the deep isolation created by these conditions. He enrolled at the University of Prague (1901), became a doctor of law (1906), and was later appointed (1908) to an insurance company.
Due to the depressive pressure exerted upon him by his father's strong personality (Letter to His Father - Brief an dem Vater, 1919), as well as his internal inability to create his own family and life, he withdrew from the idea of marrying Felicia Bauer twice. Some of his most agonizing texts date from that period, such as 'The Metamorphosis' (1916) and 'The Trial' (1925).
In 1917, the certainty that he had tuberculosis further distracted him from a normal life; his work at the office alternated with long periods spent in Bohemia and the Tatra Mountains. After yet another romantic failure with journalist Milena Jesenská (the 'Letters to Milena' were published long after his death, in 1952), Kafka found some meaning in life with Dora Diamant, with whom he settled in Berlin (1923).
However, a deterioration of his illness interrupted this fragile balance, and shortly thereafter led to his death. While he lived, he published very few works, always with the affectionate care of Max Brod; among them stand out 'The Judgement' (1913), 'The Metamorphosis' (1916), 'In the Penal Colony' (1919).
It is also thanks to Brod and Pulitzer that all of his works were published after his death, despite the contrary opinion he had expressed: 'The Trial' (1925), 'The Castle' (1926), America (1927), and later his 'Complete Works' (1935 to 1937 and 1946 to 1958). His negative attitude towards his works is characteristic of his personality and stems from his painful inability to accept life with all its manifestations.
He often equates the problem of choice with the agonizing search for freedom: the mouse in 'A Little Fable' (Kleine Fabel) runs toward the trap, which it is impossible to avoid. Kafka's man finds himself suspended before this unresolved problem of choice, where freedom and imprisonment coincide. He is therefore always guilty, according to a justice that is incomprehensible to him and is imposed by a bureaucracy that seems repulsive and petty to him ('The Trial').
In the narrative 'Before the Law,' which is interspersed in 'The Trial,' Kafka gives a vivid development of this theme, which in 'The Castle' will find its most complete expression. The court no longer accuses the man, but he seeks the charge that weighs upon him. Every choice implies guilt.
This perception is clearly influenced by 18th-century Jewish Hasidic mysticism and Eastern thought: the obsessive search for an existing truth, which, however, one can only reach through death, because knowledge is only possible outside of individual consciousness. Kafka's language, as well as the themes adapted to it, is nourished by the same insoluble contradictions that constitute - as the highest moral problem - the essence of his art.
His work has been given many interpretations: theological-philosophical, historical-social, and psychoanalytic. None, however, may be able to exhaust a problem of existential anxiety and the anxiety of modern man.
Manufacturer
- Author
- Franz Kafka
- Publisher
- Grammata
- Original Title
- Der Prozess
- Publishers
- Letters
- Type
- Classical Literature, Prose
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 279
- Publication Date
- 1991
- Dimensions
- 12x21 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9789603291527
Important information
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