Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, in what was then the Bohemian region of Austro-Hungary. He was a Jew; he grew up in a bilingual (German and Czech) environment, but was schooled in German; and he died on 3 June 1924. The 100-year anniversary of his death has engendered a LOT of articles and events.

I studied Kafka as an undergraduate. My inventory of books passed records several relevant items, all dated 1979. In German, there was a volume containing all the stories, plus something called Das Kafka-Buch, which was an annotated collection of autobiographical pieces taken from diaries and letters. In English (I'm not sure why), I had a copy of The Trial. There's a note alongside the Kafka entries: "Never really a Kafka fan, although his style does stay with you somehow."

I spent my third undergrad year at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, where I conspicuously failed to attend the Kafka course that was on offer. Which was a pity, as the oral examiner for my finals the following year, back at my home uni, was the self-same lecturer who had delivered those lectures. And, of course, the discussion came round to Kafka... Awkward.

Kafka's motifs have entered global culture. We all recognize the idea of waking up to find you're a gigantic insect (The Metamorphosis -- actually, the thing Gregor Samsa turns into is an "Ungeziefer", which really means vermin, but it's difficult to make the word vermin singular in English, so it's usually translated as insect, and imagined as a kind of big cockroach). Similarly, we all recognize the idea of being arrested without having done anything wrong, and never finding out what crime you're supposed to have committed (The Trial). Familiar too is a situation where you're try to gain access to the terrain of some indecipherable powers-that-be (The Castle).

"Kafkaesque" -- meaning strange, nightmarish, confusing, threatening, and impenetrable -- has become a known term (later we'll come to the question of whether we use it correctly or not). I mostly reach for it when we're being given the bureaucratic run-around (which happens very, very often...)

So that's what I still had in my head. But precious little detail remained from those undergraduate days.


Kafka's father's business card. Kafka is the Czech word for jackdaw

So I decided, given all the hoo-ha surrounding the death-centenary, that this was an ideal time to revisit Kafka's life and work.

And why not? Claire Armitstead points out that "international fascination with him shows no sign of abating... On TikTok, the hashtags #kafka and #kafkaesque are attached to thousands of posts with many millions of views." I have read articles likening the UK's Post Office scandal to The Trial; or arguing that Kafka's work revolves around very contemporary themes, such as the fear of a superior power, or the ideas of transformation, control, and collapse.

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My way back in was initially via a couple of articles by Elif Batuman. The first flagged a Kafka-celebrating compilation that she has been involved in (more on that in another post). The second was the text of a paper she gave at a recent Kafka conference in Prague.

Batuman first became involved with Kafka while working as a journalist. She was asked to report on the legal case surrounding Max Brod's papers.

Max Brod? He's Kafka's friend and literary executor, who ignored the author's instructions to burn the vast majority of his work... In fairness, Brod says he told Kafka he wouldn't comply, and Kafka didn't name a new executor...

Anyway... Brod is a Jew, but he manages to leave Prague in 1939, bearing a suitcase full of Kafka's papers, just before the Nazis close the Czech border. A committed Zionist, he heads for Palestine.

Those papers, however, become mired in controversy. Brod eventually bequeaths them to his secretary and possibly lover, Esther Hoffe, who -- when her turns comes -- bequeaths them to her daughters, who live in Tel Aviv. The legality of this bequest is challenged by the National Library of Israel. Also claiming the right to house the documents is the German Literature Archive in Marbach, which already holds the manuscript of The Trial, and many other Kafka exhibits.

There's much more on the early part of the case in the article Batuman wrote for The New York Times in September 2010. The story, as she points out, is markedly Kafkaesque...

That article also gives a potted Kafka bio: He attended school and university in Prague, lived with his parents for most of his life, and worked in insurance.


Trieste, 2023. His first job was with Generali, founded in Trieste in 1832. Kafka told Hedwig Weiler, his then girlfriend: "I am learning Italian because first of all I will probably go to Trieste"

Kafka met Max Brod in 1902 during the law studies that both were undertaking. At that point, it was Brod who was the literary star. But he saw Kafka's talent, and pushed him to publish some of his pieces (the first collection appeared in a book called Meditation in 1913). In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis. We know of several failed relationships. But his last and best was with Dora Diamant. They met in 1923, and lived together in Berlin for a few months before moving to a sanatorium in Austria, where Kafka died. At that point fewer than 450 pages of his work had been published.

Kafka's relationship with Jewish culture was predictably complicated: In 1922, Batuman tells us, he compiled a list of things he had failed at; it included the piano, languages, gardening, Zionism, and anti-Zionism. At one point he planned to move to Palestine, and began studying Hebrew. He and Diamant fantasized about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv... But Brod felt the need to censor the occasional anti-Zionist or even anti-Semitic comments in Kafka's diaries (as well as unsalubrious details such as the pair's visits to sex workers). And Kafka didn't start learning Hebrew until he pretty much knew his illness would prevent him going to Palestine.

Batuman's Prague paper brings the documents story up to date (since 2019, everything has been at the National Library of Israel), and turns our attention towards the figure of Brod. We wouldn't have most of Kafka's work if it hadn't been for Brod; yet, on the other hand, in his redaction of Kafka's diary, for example, and in his hagiographic account of Kafka's life, he proved to be a bit of a stern gatekeeper (akin to the one depicted in Kafka's story Before the Law). Some argue that Brod never really understood Kafka.

On some mythical third hand, however, as Batuman points out, Kafka benefited from his interaction with Brod (one of his famous quotes, for example, actually derives from a dialogue with his friend, rather than arising as the product of solitary thought). And our understanding of Kafka has largely been mediated by what Brod noted and collected: "Can we really say it was totally unavailable to Brod himself?" There's a kind of symbiosis that is underlined by the fact that when Kafka's works came out, Brod's biography followed along right behind -- with exactly the same style of binding, making it pretty much indistinguishable from the work by Kafka himself.


A page from Kafka's diary

Batuman, via Brod, also highlights a facet of Kafka that we really pay little attention to: "Funny Kafka". Brod recalls how he and their friends laughed uproariously when Kafka read them the first chapter of The Trial. Kafka himself laughed so hard he sometimes couln't carry on reading. Which is not at all what we imagine from these dark tales... Walter Benjamin wrote: "I think I am on the track of the truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his Hardy -- and that was Brod." Reiner Stach, a highly regarded Kafka biographer, also detects comic features in the relationship.

There are also aspects of literary collaboration. Kafka and Brod never finish the journey-based novel they try to write together. But they both start diaries at the same time, and Kurt Wolff, Kafka's first publisher, characterizes Brod as an impresario.

Nor is "Funny Kafka" (inextricably connected with Brod) too far removed from "Political Kafka", Batuman contends. Benjamin, for example, connects Kafka/Brod not only to Laurel/Hardy but also to the famous pair in Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes. Dubbed the first modern novel, it is also -- I'm told -- both funny and political.

"If Kafka’s defining feature is ambiguity…," asks Batuman, "what if Brod’s lack of ambiguity is the foil that lets him express it?"

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I've also been reading Leonard Gaya, whose Year of Reading Kafka begins here. And we're a third of the way through Kafka, a German-language mini-series originally screened by ARD.

Naturally, I've been reading Kafka, starting with work published in his lifetime. In a testamentary letter to Brod, Kafka regards as "valid" only what has already been published: The books (namely, The Judgement, The Stoker, Metamorphosis, In a Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor) and the story entitled A Hunger Artist. He says there is no need to destroy the remaining copies of Contemplation, but insists that nothing should be reprinted. He explains that when he describes the five books and the story as "valid", he doesn't mean he wants them to be reprinted. In fact, he hopes they will be "lost completely", but he won't stop anyone who wants to from preserving them. Anything else he has written (whether printed in magazines, still in manuscript, or in the form of letters) Brod was to burn as soon as possible.

So, I thought the first stage of my little project would be to read/reread those pieces that Kafka regarded as "valid". Here's where we are so far:

-- The Judgment (1913)
In a searing reflection of Kafka's REALLY bad relationship with his father, a young man is ordered by his parent to kill himself.


Illustration by Adolf Hoffmeister

-- In the Penal Colony (1919)
This is a hard-to-read story, featuring a machine that tortures condemned people to death by carving their sentence into their bodies. The Officer, whose pursuit of efficiency and single-minded reverence for this product of a previous generation has eclipsed any remaining shreds of humanity, extols the virtues of the apparatus in glowing terms, and is determined to demonstrate its effects to the visiting Traveller by using it to execute the hapless Prisoner. The Officer's proud devotion to detail is surely an illustration of the banality of evil. But when the Traveller refuses to give his endorsement to such a barbaric practice, the Officer orders the Prisoner to be released, and subjects himself to the torture apparatus. The machine malfunctions, however, and everything goes awry, killing the Officer in an excess of gore.

A haunting story indeed.

Kafka scholar Stanley Corngold says that these two stories were "decisively important" for Kafka (who gave only two public readings of his work, and who picked precisely these pieces): "One speculative argument (of many) for his wanting to publish In the Penal Colony by reading it aloud -- a rare enough event -- is the way it reproduces at its core the structure and conclusion of The Judgment, which he so valued. The two works belong together as works of punishment... Both stories are built on a logomachy of sorts between two persons. At the outset, in The Judgment, the son assumes authority -- but Georg will be crushed and condemned to death by his father, at first the weaker. In [the case of] In the Penal Colony, traveler and officer debate; the officer attempts to assert his authority as executioner but his doubts are reinforced by the resistance of the traveler. The officer condemns himself to death. Both victims accede to their sentence."



-- A collection of stories entitled A Country Doctor (also 1919)

A few to pick out in particular (there are summaries of them all here):

+++++ For Oliver Tearle, the second story (called, like the collection, A Country Doctor) is "Kafka's most fantastical or surreal work", taking its cue from Edgar Allen Poe and the Gothic wave, and perhaps best understood as a sublimation.

+++++ An Old Manuscript reproduces society's residual fear of "nomads in the city".

+++++ Before the Law is for me one of the most powerful. It opens and closes like this: "Before the law sits a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper come a man from the country who asks to be allowed to enter the law. But the gatekeeper says that he can't grant him entry at the moment... [The man dies without being allowed to enter.] 'Everyone strives to reach the law,' says the man, 'so how is it that in all these years no one except me has requested entry?' The gatekeeper ... shouts to him, 'No one else can gain entry here, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I'm going to close it now." Made me think of my dealings with the pensions authorities...

+++++ Jackals and Arabs. A hate-hate relationship.

+++++ The Next Village. So brief I can quote it in its entirety (the translation is by Willa and Edwin Muir): "My grandfather used to say: 'Life is astoundingly short. To me, looking back over it, life seems so foreshortened that I scarcely understand, for instance, how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without being afraid that -- not to mention accidents -- even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.'" I think you have to be aging to understand this story. Unfortunately, I think I understand it.

+++++ An Imperial Message. This is the message that never gets through. "But you sit at your window and dream of it, when evening comes." This has a religious significance for me. So much gets lost in transmission. And yet we still hope to receive something.

+++++ The Cares of a Family Man. About "Odradek", a weird spool-like creature, this story wonders regretfully at the enduring nature of something apparently pointless: "He obviously does no harm to anyone; but the idea that he might also outlive me I find most painful."

+++++ A Fratricide. An early example of flash fiction, told by the epitome of the unreliable narrator. There's a brilliant comic-strip version here.

+++++ A Dream. The protagonist wakes "delighted" from a dream of his own death and burial.

There are reams of commentary about all these stories. At this point, I don't want to put them under the microscope. I just want to have them nest in my brain, as it were, and develop at their leisure.

The one thing I remember from my undergrad Kafka course is the comment that the work is dream-like, in that the scenes are often absurd and fantastical, but it's not dream-like in the sense of being vague or fuzzy. Rather, it's all conveyed with crystalline clarity. The language is beautiful. Accessible, elegant, and scalpel-like.

Leonard Gaya notes that the young Kafka was potentially influenced by his German teacher, Prof Deml, who urged the importance of clear, unadorned writing. Gaya continues: "Reading texts aloud was one of the few rewarding exercises at school, and Kafka found lifelong pleasure in this skill, which contrasted with his usual defensive demeanour. This, too, is an invaluable practice ... that any writer should use." It's easy to find recordings of the texts (in German at least), and I really enjoyed listening as I read. You definitely get an enhanced appreciation of their cadence that way.

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This is a super-long post already. But before I finish, two things from a 1998 speech by Cynthia Ozick:

Firstly, Kafka's three sisters ended their lives in Nazi concentration camps. It's tragic he died so young, but he was at least spared that.


There are many of these in the cities of eastern Europe. This one is in Zagreb

Secondly, "Kafkaesque". We regularly use this word as shorthand for something that is grotesque, surreal, irrational, and/or menacing. Yet this is not, Ozick contends, the essence of it: "'Kafkaesque' ought rightly to connote the opposite: rationality, the working of pure logic. The typical Kafkan figure is devoted to reason, and has the cognitive force of a chess master. Kafka’s creatures, human and animal, never premise the world on the zigzag or the unintelligible. What they anticipate is an external counterpart of their own orderly and plausible ways of comprehension. They rest on a presumption of the usual rather than the unusual, the ordinary rather than the erratic. Logic rules, or should; ordinariness is relied on, or should be; and what is most characteristic of the Kafkan quest is precisely this expectation of normality. In this the protagonists of Kafka’s stories are like his sisters, and like all the Jews of Prague: they live by reason in a surround of unreason, and are undone. It is not the fault of the Kafkan rule of logic if the world fails to conform. Kafka ... is always on the side of the normal: even when unintelligibility is most ferociously, most piteously, arrayed against it."

Let the quest continue.