The novelist and short-story writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, today situated in the Czech Republic, but back in the late-nineteenth century was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the eldest child of Julie and Herman Kafka – both of whom would come to outlive him. Very early on in his life, Kafka had an unfortunate knowledge of tragedy. After he was born, Julie had two more boys, Georg and Heinrich, but both of these younger brothers of Kafka’s would die before he had reached the age of seven. Even more tragic was that Kafka also had three sisters, all of whom would be killed during the Holocaust of World War II, since they were from a family of German-speaking, middle-class Jews – though Kafka would not live long enough to witness this Europe-wide slaughter.
Kafka’s writing was probably influenced in his writing by his switch to study law (from chemistry) at university in Prague. Even more importantly, it was at university where he met Max Brod, who became his closest friend – and literary companion. They read many canonical works of literature and philosophy together, often in their original language.
One of Kafka’s best known works, Metamorphosis, was published in 1915. This novella depicts a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find that he has been transformed into a giant insect and the repercussions of this metamorphosis on him and his family become the story’s preoccupation. It is considered a masterpiece of twentieth century fiction and with good reason.
Who can forget the matter-of-fact surrealism of the opening sentence, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect”? Kafka grabs us from the very first. We know nothing about this Samsa; there is no Dickensian or Austenian introduction or description of his character, no sophisticated build up to the horror which besets him. All we know is that he is a man who has just had the impossible happen to him.
In this scene Kafka also comically exposes the absurd mind-set of a mechanised, clock-work society when, rather than react with horror at the supernatural event which has befallen him, it becomes clear that Samsa’s main concern is that he’ll be late for work “I’d better get up, since my train goes at five.” What follows is an extraordinary insight into how our physicality shapes the way in which we think and perceive the world as Samsa adapts to his grotesque body. And added to this, in regards to the way in which Samsa’s transformation puts considerable strain his relationship with his family, Kafka issues a profound meditation on compassion and humanity.
His other masterpiece, an unfinished novel called The Trial (similarly about a man who gets out of bed to find that he is to be arrested without being told why), came close to never making it into the public sphere – along with his other unfinished novels The Castle and Amerika). For a very long time Kafka had been ill with tuberculosis and before his death he made Max Brod promise to burn all of his unfinished works (Kafka famously detested his own writing). He eventually died on the 3rd June 1924 of starvation, unable to eat due to his illness. Realising the genius of his writing, Brod, as administrator of Kafka’s estate, published all of his unfinished works and papers, starting with The Trial in 1925, simultaneously ignoring Kafka’s instructions and performing the greatest service to literature of the twentieth century.
Image: By anonymous (the author never disclosed his identity); as much is indicated by omission of reference in 1958's Archiv Frans Wagenbach. (http://www.tkinter.smig.net/Stuff/Kafka/index.htm) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
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