KAFKA, FRANZ

KAFKA, FRANZ (1883–1924), Austrian German author.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, Bohemia, at that time one of the major population centers of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The German enclave in Prague developed a literary German that reflected its hyperawareness of its isolation within the Czech majority. Kafka's German prose is considered among the cleanest, strongest expressions of the German language throughout its literary history. Kafka considered himself a graphic artist, and his drawings accompanied his manuscripts throughout his life. He turned gradually to prose while studying law, publishing his first book of eight short stories in 1908.

Upon graduating law school, Kafka worked for the Austrian government in the seminationalized Workers' Accident Insurance Institute in Prague from 1908 until a year before his death in 1923. His experience in the law informed his stories and novels: His posthumous novels Der Prozess (1925; The Trial) and Das Schloss (1926; The Castle) deal with criminal and civil litigation as symbols and processes of human existence in culture. Kafkaesque is the adjective that expresses the absurdity, indeed surreal horror of plunging into these processes in the conduct of a life. Kafka's vision of the individual caught in the mazes of the twentieth-century state resonated in his time, as well as in the light of the totalitarian state that arose shortly after his death, and early critical appreciation of him highlighted this existential plight.

Kafka's visual intelligence, attested to by his lifelong friend and first biographer Max Brod, was enhanced by his studies of the descriptive psychology of Franz Brentano (1838–1917) and Anton Marty (1847–1914), and his familiarity with Sigmund Freud's understanding of the expressions of mind in human gesture. His prose has been described as that of the exact human gesture by the Weimar German critic Walter Benjamin and his own Austrian German contemporary Robert von Musil.

Kafka's prose was directed at two audiences, the average reader and the writer. His appeal to the ordinary reader is achieved by his clean, disarmingly simple prose. Kafka is said to have read children's stories before he wrote, taking a preparatory cue from one of his own favorite authors, Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880). Kafka directed his publisher, Kurt Wolff, to issue his 1919 collection of stories Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor) with the larger type face of a primer. Kafka increasingly brought myths and legends into his stories to broaden the appeal to an ordinary audience. The mythic material is given interesting twists to provoke reader deliberation of meaning.

The narrative level that is directed to his contemporary writers is an encoded one, wordplay and imagery that even in its simple prose is designed to evoke reflection on past literary as well as pictorial methods of comprehending reality. Kafka saw himself as a writer in a tradition of the written story that stretched back into the earliest modern prose experiments of the seventeenth century. He believed that only through an aesthetic perspective could people guide themselves toward an authentic, that is, truthful life, and that his generation of artists had a mission to augment the aesthetic understandings of their predecessors. Kafka agreed with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his contemporaries that aesthetics could engender a more rigorous knowing and living. As he wrote in his journals of 1918: "Art flies towards the truth, but with the decisive intent not to be burnt. Its gift lies in its ability to find the saving beam of light in the dark emptiness, without previously knowing of its existence" (1953, p. 104). The best criticism of the late twentieth century took up Kafka's concern with aesthetics, both visual and verbal. While controversy still occurs over the chapter sequences of his three major novels, still unpublished in his lifetime, Amerika, The Trial, and The Castle, there is a consensus among scores of scholars that Kafka's own aesthetic concerns justify a critical focus on literary theory, linguistics, and semiotics as the major avenues for comprehending the intent and meaning of his prose.

Kafka's engagement to Felice Bauer before World War I and his later romance with Milena Polak, née Jesenská, were the most intense dramas of his life, generating two collections of love letters that are as humanly instructive as his fiction. The women of his novels have the strength and sexual aliveness that he retreated from in his actual relations, which he justified by an unwillingness to commit to a relationship that might compromise his artistry.

See alsoNietzsche, Friedrich.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Kafka, Franz. The Complete Stories. Edited by Nahum N. Glatzer; with a foreword by John Updike. New York, 1995. Translation of short stories published during Kafka's lifetime, 1908–1924.

——. Hochzeitsvorbereitungen auf dem Lande. Frankfurt am Main, 1953. Journal. Translated as Wedding Preparations in the Country, and Other Posthumous Prose Writings, with notes by Max Brod. Translated from the German by Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins. London, 1973.

Secondary Sources

Gray, Richard T., ed. Approaches to Teaching Kafka's Short Fiction. New York, 1995. A collection of criticism, selected by the Modern Language Association of America.

Preece, Julian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. Cambridge, U.K., 2002. Includes sociological and gender studies, alongside the aesthetic analyses.

Rolleston, James, ed. A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka. Rochester, N.Y., 2002. A range of critical perspectives that includes the social historical as well as linguistic and semiotic.

Mark E. Blum