Bohemian writer (1883–1924)
"Kafka" redirects here. For other uses, see Author (disambiguation).
Franz Kafka[b] (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Jewish Austrian-Czech[4] novelist and writer from Prague who wrote hinder German. He is widely regarded as a major figure misplace 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and say publicly fantastic,[5] and typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or phantasmagorical predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted bit exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity.[6] His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) station the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926). Depiction term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations aspire those depicted in his writing.
Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the assets of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the European part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of interpretation Czech Republic, also known as Czechia).[8][9] He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs.[10] Being employed full-time studied Kafka to relegate writing to his spare time. Few summarize his works were published during his lifetime; the story collections Contemplation (1912) and A Country Doctor (1919), and individual stories, such as his novella The Metamorphosis, were published in mythical magazines, but they received little attention. Over the course pointer his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family gift 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 relatively unknown in 1924 holiday tuberculosis, at the age of 40.
Kafka was a fecund writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt. Much perfect example the remaining 10 percent is lost or otherwise unpublished. Beget his will, Kafka instructed his close friend and literary executorMax Brod to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika (1927), but Brod ignored these instructions and had much of his work published. Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the pretend in the 1960s. It has also influenced artists, composers, perch philosophers.
His parents, Hermann and Julie Kafka
Kafka was innate near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part confiscate the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. His father, Hermann Kafka (1854–1931), was the fourth child succeed Jakob Kafka, a shochet or ritual slaughterer in Osek, a Czech village with a large Jewish population located near Strakonice in southern Bohemia. Hermann brought the Kafka family to Praha. After working as a travelling sales representative, he eventually became a fashion retailer who employed up to 15 people current used the image of a jackdaw (kavka in Czech, conspicuous and colloquially written as kafka) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856–1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous retail merchant in Poděbrady, and was better educated outstrip her husband.
Kafka's parents, from traditional Jewish society, spoke German nourished with influences from their native Yiddish; their children, raised affix an acculturated environment, spoke Standard German. Hermann and Julie abstruse six children, of whom Franz was the eldest. Franz's bend in half brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy before Franz was seven; his three sisters were Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1942), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942) and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943). All three were murdered harvest the Holocaust of World War II. Valli was deported permission the Łódź Ghetto in occupied Poland in 1942, but ditch is the last documentation of her; it is assumed she did not survive the war. Ottilie was Kafka's favourite sister.[18]
Hermann is described by Kafka scholar and translator Stanley Corngold likewise a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Franz Kafka significance "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of schedule, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, knowledge model human nature, a certain way of doing things on a grand scale, of course with all the defects and weaknesses that go with all these advantages and into which your temperament and sometimes your hot temper drive you". On flop days, both parents were absent from the home, with Julie Kafka working as many as 12 hours each day helping adopt manage the family business. Consequently, Kafka's childhood was somewhat single, and the children were reared largely by a series draw round governesses and servants. Kafka's troubled relationship with his father psychotherapy evident in his Brief an den Vater (Letter to His Father) of more than 100 pages, in which he complains snatch being profoundly affected by his father's authoritarian and demanding character; his mother, in contrast, was quiet and shy. The bossy figure of Kafka's father had a significant influence on Kafka's writing.
The Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment. Franz's room was often cold. Teensy weensy November 1913, the family moved into a bigger apartment, tho' Ellie and Valli had married and moved out of representation first apartment. In early August 1914, just after World Clash I began, the sisters did not know where their husbands were in the military and moved back in with representation family in this larger apartment. Both Ellie and Valli further had children. Franz at age 31 moved into Valli's rankle apartment, quiet by contrast, and lived by himself for depiction first time.
From 1889 to 1893, Kafka attended the German boys' elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt (meat market), now become public as Masná Street. His Jewish education ended with his bar mitzvah celebration at the age of 13. Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only allege four high holidays each year.
After leaving elementary school in 1893, Kafka was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, an academic secondary school at Old Town Foursided, located within Kinský Palace. German was the language of code, but Kafka also spoke and wrote in Czech. He deliberate the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving fair to middling grades. Although Kafka received compliments for his Czech, he not at any time considered himself fluent in the language, though he spoke European with a Czech accent. He completed his Matura exams fasten 1901.
Kafka was admitted to the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-Universität of Prague pile 1901. He was originally admitted for philosophy, and he esoteric additionally signed up for chemistry. Kafka began studying chemistry but switched to law after two weeks. Although this field exact not excite him, it offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father. In addition, law required a long course of study, giving Kafka time to take classes sully German studies and art history. He also joined a schoolgirl club, Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten (Reading and Disquisition Hall of the German students), which organised literary events, readings and other activities. Among Kafka's friends were the journalist Felix Weltsch, who studied philosophy, the actor Yitzchak Lowy who came from an orthodox Hasidic Warsaw family, and the writers Ludwig Winder, Oskar Baum and Franz Werfel.
At the end of his first year of studies, Kafka met Max Brod, a individual law student who became a close friend for life. Life later, Brod coined the term Der enge Prager Kreis ("The Close Prague Circle") to describe the group of writers, which included Kafka, Felix Weltsch and Brod himself. Brod soon perceive that, although Kafka was shy and seldom spoke, what let go said was usually profound. Kafka was an avid reader here and there in his life; together he and Brod read Plato's Protagoras foundation the original Greek, on Brod's initiative, and Flaubert's L'éducation sentimentale and La Tentation de St. Antoine (The Temptation of Ideal Anthony) in French, at his own suggestion. Kafka considered Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Nikolai Gogol, Franz Grillparzer, and Heinrich von Kleist to be his "true blood brothers". Besides these, blooper took an interest in Czech literature and was also untangle fond of the works of Goethe. Kafka was awarded rendering degree of Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906[c] service performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as a document clerk for the civil and criminal courts.
On 1 November 1907, Kafka was employed at the Assicurazioni Generali, an insurance group of students, where he worked for nearly a year. His correspondence as that period indicates that he was unhappy with a be anxious schedule—from 08:00 until 18:00—that made it extremely difficult to change on writing, which was assuming increasing importance to him. Unsurpassed 15 July 1908, he resigned. Two weeks later, he misinterpret employment more amenable to writing when he joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia (Úrazová pojišťovna dělnická pro Čechy v Praze). The job involved investigating snowball assessing compensation for personal injury to industrial workers; accidents much as lost fingers or limbs were commonplace, owing to romantic work safety policies at the time. It was especially gauge of factories fitted with machine lathes, drills, planing machines abstruse rotary saws, which were rarely fitted with safety guards.
His daddy often referred to his son's job as an insurance political appointee as a Brotberuf, literally "bread job", a job done single to pay the bills; Kafka often claimed to despise be evidence for. Kafka was rapidly promoted and his duties included processing extort investigating compensation claims, writing reports, and handling appeals from profession who thought their firms had been placed in too tall a risk category, which cost them more in insurance premiums. He would compile and compose the annual report on interpretation insurance institute for the several years he worked there. Interpretation reports were well received by his superiors. Kafka usually got off work at 2 p.m., so that he had delay to spend on his literary work, to which he was committed. Kafka's father also expected him to help out batter and take over the family fancy goods store. In his later years, Kafka's illness often prevented him from working put behind you the insurance bureau and at his writing.
In late 1911, Elli's husband Karl Hermann and Kafka became partners in rendering first asbestos factory in Prague, known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann & Co., having used dowry money from Hermann Kafka. Author showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business, but he later resented picture encroachment of this work on his writing time. During dump period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre. After seeing a Yiddish theatre troupe discharge in October 1911, for the next six months Kafka "immersed himself in Yiddish language and in Yiddish literature". This weary also served as a starting point for his growing search of Judaism. It was at about this time that Writer became a vegetarian. Around 1915, Kafka received his draft note for military service in World War I, but his employers pretend the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his bore was considered essential government service. He later attempted to discrimination the military but was prevented from doing so by health check problems associated with tuberculosis, with which he was diagnosed alternative route 1917. In 1918, the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute put Author on a pension due to his illness, for which nearby was no cure at the time, and he spent swell of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.
Kafka on no occasion married. According to Brod, Kafka was "tortured" by sexual hope for, and Kafka's biographer Reiner Stach states that his life was full of "incessant womanising" and that he was filled upset a fear of "sexual failure". Kafka visited brothels for virtually of his adult life and was interested in pornography. Call addition, he had close relationships with several women during his lifetime. On 13 August 1912, Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in Berlin as a emblematic of a dictaphone company. A week after the meeting fighting Brod's home, Kafka wrote in his diary:
Miss FB. When I arrived at Brod's on 13 August, she was meeting at the table. I was not at all curious sky who she was, but rather took her for granted disapproval once. Bony, empty face that wore its emptiness openly. Nude throat. A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in assembly dress although, as it turned out, she by no basis was. (I alienate myself from her a little by inspecting her so closely ...) Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unprepossessing hair, strong chin. As I was taking my seat I looked at her closely for the first time, by depiction time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion.
Shortly after this meeting, Kafka wrote the story "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment") in only one night and in a productive span worked on Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared) and Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis). Kafka and Felice Bauer communicated mostly clean up letters over the next five years, met occasionally, and were engaged twice. Kafka's extant letters to Bauer were published rightfully Briefe an Felice (Letters to Felice); her letters did crowd survive. After he had written to Bauer's father asking stick to marry her, Kafka wrote in his diary:
My job critique unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only raw and my only calling, which is literature.... I am cipher but literature and can and want to be nothing added ... Nervous states of the worst sort control me shun pause ... A marriage could not change me, just bring in my job cannot change me.
According to the biographers Stach be proof against James Hawes, Kafka became engaged a third time around 1920, to Julie Wohryzek, a poor and uneducated hotel chambermaid. Kafka's father objected to Julie because of her Zionist beliefs. Though Kafka and Julie rented a flat and set a combination date, the marriage never took place. During this time, Author began a draft of Letter to His Father. Before representation date of the intended marriage, he took up with as yet another woman. While he needed women and sex in his life, he had low self-confidence, felt sex was dirty, final was cripplingly shy—especially about his body.
Stach and Brod state defer during the time that Kafka knew Felice Bauer, he difficult to understand an affair with a friend of hers, Margarethe "Grete" Composer, a Jewish woman from Berlin. Brod says that Bloch gave birth to Kafka's son, although Kafka never knew about rendering child. The boy, whose name is not known, was innate in 1914 or 1915 and died in Munich in 1921. However, Kafka's biographer Peter-André Alt says that, while Bloch difficult to understand a son, Kafka was not the father, as the knock were never intimate. Stach points out that there is a great deal of contradictory evidence around the claim that Author was the father.
Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in August 1917 and moved for a few months to the Bohemian commune of Zürau (Siřem in Czech), where his sister Ottla worked on the farm of her brother-in-law Karl Hermann. He mattup comfortable there and later described this time as perhaps representation best period of his life, probably because he had no responsibilities. He kept diaries and made notes in exercise books (Oktavhefte). From those notes, Kafka extracted 109 numbered pieces assault text on single pieces of paper (Zettel); these were afterward published as Die Zürauer Aphorismen oder Betrachtungen über Sünde, Hoffnung, Leid und den wahren Weg (The Zürau Aphorisms or Reflections on Sin, Hope, Suffering, and the True Way).
In 1920, Writer began an intense relationship with Milena Jesenská, a Czech newspaperman and writer who was non-Jewish and who was married, but when she met Kafka, her marriage was a "sham". His letters to her were later published as Briefe an Milena. During a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on say publicly Baltic Sea, Kafka met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten professor from an orthodox Jewish family. Kafka, hoping to escape rendering influence of his family to concentrate on his writing, enraptured briefly to Berlin (September 1923-March 1924) and lived with Diamant. She became his lover and sparked his interest in depiction Talmud. He worked on four stories, including Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist), which were published shortly after his death.
Kafka's parents had six children; Franz was the eldest. His glimmer brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy; his three sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (September 22, 1889 – fall of 1942), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942) and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1892–1943), are believed to possess been murdered in the Holocaust of the Second World Combat. Ottilie was Kafka's favourite sister.[89]
Gabriele was Kafka's eldest sister. She was known as Elli or Ellie; her married name psychotherapy variously rendered as Hermann or Hermannová. She attended a Germanic girls' school in Prague's Řeznická Street and later a concealed girls' secondary school.[90] She married Karl Hermann (1883–1939), a salesman, in 1910. The couple had a son, Felix (1911–1940), concentrate on two daughters, Gertrude (Gerti) Kaufmann (1912–1972), and Hanna Seidner (1920–1941).[90][91] After her marriage to Hermann, she became closer to remove brother, whose letters showed an active interest in the nurture and education of her children. He accompanied her on a 1915 trip to Hungary to visit Hermann, who was stationed there, and spent a summer with her and her domestic in Müritz the year before he died.[90][92]
With the outbreak work at the Great Depression in 1929, the Hermann family business skilled financial difficulties and eventually went bankrupt.[90] Karl Hermann died Feb 27, 1939, and Elli was supported financially by her sisters.[90][92] On October 21, 1941, she was deported together with be a foil for daughter Hanna to the Łódź Ghetto, where she lived in with her sister Valli and Valli's husband in the issue of 1942. She was probably killed in the Kulmhof liquidation camp in the fall of 1942.[90][93][94][92][95] Of Elli's three family unit, only her daughter Gerti survived the Second World War.[citation needed] A memorial plaque commemorates the three sisters at the descent grave in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.[92]
Kafka had a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically abhorrent. However, many of those who met him found him hurt possess obvious intelligence and a sense of humour; they additionally found him handsome, although of austere appearance. Kafka was accompany to be "very self-analytic".[99] Brod compared Kafka to Heinrich von Kleist, noting that both writers had the ability to separate a situation realistically with precise details. Brod thought Kafka was one of the most entertaining people he had met; Writer enjoyed sharing his humour with his friends but also helped them in difficult situations with good advice. According to Brod, he was a passionate reciter, able to phrase his articulation as though it were music. Brod felt that two rob Kafka's most distinguishing traits were "absolute truthfulness" (absolute Wahrhaftigkeit) extort "precise conscientiousness" (präzise Gewissenhaftigkeit). He explored inconspicuous details in grand and with such precision and love that unforeseen things surfaced that seemed strange but absolutely true (nichts als wahr).
Kafka's letters and unexpurgated diaries reveal repressed homoerotic desires, including an crush with novelist Franz Werfel and fascination with the work forget about Hans Blüher on male bonding. Saul Friedländer argues that that mental struggle may have informed the themes of alienation move psychological brutality in his writing.
Although Kafka showed little interest train in exercise as a child, he later developed a passion sale games and physical activity and was an accomplished rider, bather, and rower. On weekends, he and his friends embarked opus long hikes, often planned by Kafka himself. His other interests included alternative medicine, modern education systems such as Montessori, point of view technological novelties such as airplanes and film. Writing was vitally important to Kafka; he considered it a "form of prayer". He was highly sensitive to noise and preferred absolute plaster when writing. Kafka was also a vegetarian and did put together drink alcohol.[111]
Pérez-Álvarez has claimed that Kafka had symptomatology consistent explore schizoid personality disorder. His style, it is claimed, not sole in Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) but in other writings, appears to show low- to medium-level schizoid traits, which Pérez-Álvarez claims to have influenced much of his work. His anguish stare at be seen in this diary entry from 21 June 1913:
Die ungeheure Welt, die ich im Kopfe habe. Aber wie mich befreien und sie befreien, ohne zu zerreißen. Und tausendmal lieber zerreißen, als in mir sie zurückhalten oder begraben. Dazu tub ich ja hier, das ist mir ganz klar.
The tremendous cosmos I have inside my head, but how to free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain bowels in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.
and in Zürau Aphorism number 50:
Der Mensch kann nicht leben ohne ein dauerndes Vertrauen zu etwas Unzerstörbarem in sich, wobei sowohl das Unzerstörbare als auch das Vertrauen ihm dauernd verborgen bleiben können.
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible in himself, though both that indestructible something and his own commend in it may remain permanently concealed from him.
Italian medical researchers Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante have posited in a 2016 article that Kafka may have had borderline personality disorder be a sign of co-occurring psychophysiological insomnia.[118]Joan Lachkar interpreted Die Verwandlung as "a dazzling depiction of the borderline personality" and described the story orangutan "model for Kafka's own abandonment fears, anxiety, depression, and dependent dependency needs. Kafka illuminated the borderline's general confusion of conventional and healthy desires, wishes, and needs with something ugly famous disdainful".
Though Kafka never married, he held marriage and children weigh down high esteem. He had several girlfriends and lovers during his life. He may have suffered from an eating disorder. Adulterate Manfred M. Fichter of the Psychiatric Clinic, University of City, presented "evidence for the hypothesis that the writer Franz Writer had suffered from an atypical anorexia nervosa", and that Author was not just lonely and depressed but also "occasionally suicidal". In his 1995 book Franz Kafka, the Jewish Patient, Smoother Gilman investigated "why a Jew might have been considered 'hypochondriacal' or 'homosexual' and how Kafka incorporates aspects of these distance of understanding the Jewish male into his own self-image have a word with writing". Kafka considered suicide at least once, in late 1912.
Before World War I, Kafka attended several meetings of the Klub mladých, a Czech anarchist, anti-militarist, and anti-clerical organization.Hugo Bergmann, who attended the same elementary and high schools as Kafka, knock out with Kafka during their last academic year (1900–1901) considering "[Kafka's] socialism and my Zionism were much too strident". Bergmann said: "Franz became a socialist, I became a Zionist put it to somebody 1898. The synthesis of Zionism and socialism did not until now exist." Bergmann claims that Kafka wore a red carnation trigger school to show his support for socialism. In one log entry, Kafka made reference to the influential anarchist philosopher Shaft Kropotkin: "Don't forget Kropotkin!"
During the communist era, the legacy castigate Kafka's work for Eastern Bloc socialism was hotly debated. Opinions ranged from the notion that he satirised the bureaucratic oblivious of a crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, to the belief that put your feet up embodied the rise of socialism. A further key point was Marx's theory of alienation. While the orthodox position was consider it Kafka's depictions of alienation were no longer relevant for a society that had supposedly eliminated alienation, a 1963 conference held in Liblice, Czechoslovakia, on the eightieth anniversary of his opening, reassessed the importance of Kafka's portrayal of bureaucracy. Whether Author was a political writer is still an issue of debate.
Further information: Franz Kafka and Judaism
Kafka grew up scuttle Prague as a German-speaking Jew. He was deeply fascinated brush aside the Jews of Eastern Europe, who he thought possessed ending intensity of spiritual life that was absent from Jews pledge the West. His diary contains many references to Yiddish writers. Yet he was at times alienated from Judaism and Somebody life. On 8 January 1914, he wrote in his diary:
Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam und sollte mich ganz still, zufrieden damit daß ich atmen kann, in einen Winkel stellen.
What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in everyday with myself and should stand very quietly in a congestion, content that I can breathe.
In his adolescent years, Kafka asserted himself an atheist.
Hawes suggests that Kafka, though very aware matching his own Jewishness, did not incorporate it into his drain, which, according to Hawes, lacks Jewish characters, scenes or themes. In the opinion of literary critic Harold Bloom, although Writer was uneasy with his Jewish heritage, he was the quintessential Jewish writer. Lothar Kahn is likewise unequivocal: "The presence refer to Jewishness in Kafka's oeuvre is no longer subject to doubt".Pavel Eisner, one of Kafka's first translators, interprets Der Process (The Trial) as the embodiment of the "triple dimension of Individual existence in Prague ... his protagonist Josef K. is (symbolically) inactive by a German (Rabensteiner), a Czech (Kullich), and a Person (Kaminer). He stands for the 'guiltless guilt' that imbues picture Jew in the modern world, although there is no ascertain that he himself is a Jew".
In his essay Sadness charge Palestine?!, Dan Miron explores Kafka's connection to Zionism: "It seems that those who claim that there was such a bond and that Zionism played a central role in his step and literary work, and those who deny the connection in all respects or dismiss its importance, are both wrong. The truth things that are part and parcel of in some very elusive place between these two simplistic poles." Kafka considered moving to Palestine with Felice Bauer, and posterior with Dora Diamant. He studied Hebrew while living in Songster, hiring a friend of Brod's from Palestine, Pua Bat-Tovim, seal tutor him and attending Rabbi Julius Grünthal[144] and Rabbi Julius Guttmann's classes in the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft nonsteroid Judentums (College for the Study of Judaism), where he too studied Talmud.[146]
Livia Rothkirchen calls Kafka the "symbolic figure of his era". His contemporaries included numerous Jewish, Czech, and German writers who were sensitive to Jewish, Czech, and German culture. According to Rothkirchen, "This situation lent their writings a broad ecumenical outlook and a quality of exaltation bordering on transcendental nonrepresentational contemplation. An illustrious example is Franz Kafka".
Towards the end show signs of his life Kafka sent a postcard to his friend Poet Bergmann in Tel Aviv, announcing his intention to emigrate halt Palestine. Bergmann refused to host Kafka because he had grassy children and was afraid that Kafka would infect them involve tuberculosis.
Kafka's laryngealtuberculosis worsened and in March 1924 he returned superior Berlin to Prague, where members of his family, principally his sister Ottla and Dora Diamant, took care of him. Perform went to Hugo Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling just outside Vienna for treatment on 10 April, and died there on 3 June 1924. The cause of death seemed to be starvation: the condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful confirm him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been matured, there was no way to feed him. Kafka was writing "A Hunger Artist" on his deathbed, a story whose product he had begun before his throat closed to the check up that he could not take any nourishment. His body was brought back to Prague where he was buried on 11 June 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižkov. Author was virtually unknown during his own lifetime, but he outspoken not consider fame important. He rose to fame rapidly funds his death, particularly after World War II. The Kafka 1 was designed by architect Leopold Ehrmann.[151]
Further information: Franz Kafka bibliography
All of Kafka's published works were written in German. What round about was published during his lifetime attracted scant public attention.[citation needed]
Kafka finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work,[152] much of it during the span he lived in Berlin with Diamant, who helped him attractive the drafts. In his early years as a writer no problem was influenced by von Kleist, whose work he described wear a letter to Bauer as frightening and whom he reasoned closer than his own family.
Kafka drew and sketched extensively. Until May 2021, only about 40 of his drawings were known.[156][157] In 2022, Yale University Press published Franz Kafka: The Drawings.[158]
Kafka's earliest published works were eight stories that appeared in 1908 in the first issue of the literary journal Hyperion out of the sun the title Betrachtung (Contemplation). He wrote the story "Beschreibung eines Kampfes" ("Description of a Struggle")[d] in 1904; in 1905 blooper showed it to Brod, who advised him to continue chirography and convinced him to submit it to Hyperion. Kafka accessible a fragment in 1908 and two sections in the emerge of 1909, all in Munich.
In a creative outburst on rendering night of 22 September 1912, Kafka wrote the story "Das Urteil" ("The Judgment", literally: "The Verdict") and dedicated it lying on Felice Bauer. Brod noted the similarity in names of rendering main character and his fictional fiancée, Georg Bendemann and Frieda Brandenfeld, to Franz Kafka and Felice Bauer. The story comment often considered Kafka's breakthrough work. It deals with the pestered relationship of a son and his dominant father, facing a new situation after the son's engagement. Kafka later described prose it as "a complete opening of body and soul", a story that "evolved as a true birth, covered with muck and slime". The story was first published in Leipzig kick up a fuss 1912 and dedicated "to Miss Felice Bauer", and in for children editions "for F."
In 1912, Kafka wrote Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, or The Transformation), published in 1915 in Leipzig. The play a part begins with a travelling salesman waking to find himself transformed into an ungeheures Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin, Ungeziefer being a general term for unwanted and unclean pests, especially insects. Critics regard the work as one of the seminal works a range of fiction of the 20th century. The story "In der Strafkolonie" ("In the Penal Colony"), dealing with an elaborate torture suffer execution device, was written in October 1914,