Kafka (Franz Kafka in general)

Member Name: Deany

Product:	Franz Kafka in general
Date:	09/07/01 (136 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Engrossing tales of Everyman against faceless bureaucracy

Disadvantages: Takes a little getting used to

A man wakes up one morning to find himself changed into a huge insect. Another is arrested at dawn for an unnamed crime and dragged through an insane series of court appearances. A third man arrives in a village with the simple aim of entering the castle but finds his efforts thwarted at every turn. A fourth willingly throws himself into a river and drowns at his father’s command while a fifth allows himself to be strapped to a torture machine and is killed by a device that inscribes his punishment upon his back. Welcome to the world of Franz Kafka.

Kafka was born in 1883 and lived in Prague when it was still part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a member of the German speaking minority he felt excluded from the people around him, a sense of exclusion that was further enhanced by his Jewishness which even set him apart from his fellow German speakers. He lived in constant fear of his father – a relationship that forms the basis of many of his writings and, most significantly, of the “Brief and den Vater”, or letter to his father. The letter is a soul-searching attempt by Kafka to evaluate the feelings he held for his father that is longer than many of his works of fiction and it is now published in book form. Kafka’s father felt that his son’s writing was a waste of time and encouraged him to study. The guilt that this awoke in Kafka shows through in many of his stories such as in “Das Urteil” (The Judgment) where a man is condemned to death by his father for not living up to the high ideals expected of him.

Professionally, Kafka studied law and worked for an insurance company. His daily work brought him into contact with the never-ending stream of red tape and bureaucracy that so many people have grown to associate with his writings. The basic premise of many of his stories is the tale of the Everyman suddenly confronted by the unfathomable face of a bureaucratic system he cannot understand. In &
#8220;Der Prozess” (The Trial), perhaps Kafka’s most famous piece of work, the central character, Joseph K, is accused of a crime by a bizarre court that meets in a block of flats in the city. Unable to even discover the crime he is accused of K in turn tries to go along with the authorities, fights against them and finally accepts his fate. The futile nature of K’s quest is emphasised by the fact that Kafka himself never put the chapters he wrote into any definitive order. It was only after his death that the chapters were arranged into the form in which they are now published and some experts argue for a different sequence of events. But, perhaps the point is that whatever sequence the events happen in, the end result is the same – the bureaucracy grinds on in its indefatigable way and K is eventually overcome by it.

Kafka would spend the days working at the office in a job that frustrated him and then stay awake at night to write the stories that were mostly unpublished until after his death. He saw the writing as an affliction that he could not free himself of and claimed that the tuberculosis that was to plague his later years was brought about by one particularly intense night of writing. For Kafka it was natural that an activity he saw as shameful would eventually lead to illness.

Kafka’s work in the insurance company also taught him the destructive power of machinery. This was not only the figurative machinery of bureaucracy that destroys the life of the characters in “Der Prozess” (The Trial) and “Das Schloß” (The Castle), but also the physical machinery used in factories that regularly claimed the fingers or even lives of workers. Kafka would regularly process claims from injured factory workers and this enabled him to write the prophetic short story “In der Strafkolonie” (In the Penal Colony) shortly after the outbreak of World War I. This story describes in horrific deta
il the consequences of solider submitting himself to machinery that eventually kills him – surely a warning of the death that Kafka saw looming in the first mechanised war the world had ever known.

Mostly though, Kafka was unconcerned with the wider events in the world. Indeed, in his diary entry at the outbreak of the war in 1914 Kafka simply writes a sentence saying that his country is at war and then describes how he went swimming that day. For Kafka, his writing is more of an attempt at therapy to understand the relationships in which he finds himself. The characters often bear his initials or are simply called “K”, the women bear names similar to his fiancée Felice Bauer, the tyrannical figures he fears merge with the picture Kafka paints of his own father. In “Die Verwandlung” (Metamorphosis) when Kafka writes of a man who becomes an “Ungeziefer” (vermin, not beetle or insect as it is often translated) that the father wants to crush Kafka is writing of himself and for himself.

It is telling that Kafka did often not think that what he wrote was worth publishing. Upon his death he asked his friend Max Brod to burn the manuscripts of what he had written. Brod went against this wish and it was only after Kafka’s death that his most famous works were brought to the attention of the reading public.

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