Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers.
About Franz Kafka in brief
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. Kafka was born into a middle-class German-Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis. Few of Kafka’s works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung and Ein Landarzt, and individual stories were published in literary magazines but received little public attention. In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend Max Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including Der Prozess, Das Schloss and Der Verschollene, but Brod ignored these instructions. His work has influenced a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th and 21st centuries.
The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those found in his writing. The dominating figure of his father had a significant influence on Franz Kafka’s writing. Franz’s mother, Julie Kafka, was better educated than her husband. The Kafka family had a girl living with them in a cramped apartment with a servant. In November 1913, the family moved into a bigger apartment, which was often cold and quiet. Both Ellie and Valli also had children at the time, although the sisters did not know where their husbands were in the military and moved back in the early 1930s. All three died during the Holocaust of World War II, in 1942, but that is the last documentation of her. Ottilie was Kafka’s favourite sister. Franz was the eldest of six children; his two brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven; his three sisters were Gabriele , Valerie andOttilie . All three were killed in World War I and the Holocaust. In August 1914, Franz and Ellie moved out of the first apartment and moved into the bigger one, by contrast, by the time Franz was 31 years old. Franz lived by himself for the first time by contrast and lived by the former husbands for the rest of the time. He had a troubled relationship with his father and was profoundly affected by his father’s authoritarian character.
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This page is based on the article Franz Kafka published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
