K Land

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883, still under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He spent most of his life there. He both loved and hated his city. It was his home, his fortress and his prison.

Kafka’s life and literature are linked to his hometown. Although his stories are not explicitly set in Prague, the strangely oppressive atmosphere in which all but the earliest of them are set undoubtedly evokes that central European city.

Kafka, a German-speaking Czech native, also determined his complex cultural identity by his Jewish roots. Kafka grew up in the Prague ghetto, one of the oldest in Europe. Many legends are linked to this ghetto full of winding alleys, enigmatic passages and small hidden courtyards. The best known is that of Rabbi Löew, a scholar who served as a spiritual guide to the capital’s Jews in the 16th century. According to the myth, the Rabbi created a clay being – the Golem – to protect the members of his community. In 1915, the Golem was the subject of Gustav Meyrink’s well-known novel, through which these fantastic stories became popular even among those not educated in Judaism, such as Kafka. Prague’s fame as a magical and somewhat sinister city is often attributed to the Czech writer, but Meyrink first spread it. Kafka’s magical Prague has, in any case, another meaning, marked by the great author’s intellectual lucidity.

Despite his family’s Jewish background, Kafka’s relationship with his religious tradition was ambiguous. He was not educated in Judaism and hardly practised it. His father wanted to distance himself from the Jewish community to which he belonged in order to leave behind all traces of his humble past. Nevertheless, he sometimes went to a synagogue with his only son. Kafka even performed the Bar Mitzvah, one of the most important Jewish ceremonies, marking the transition to adulthood and the assumption of religious responsibilities.

The arrival in Prague of a small Yiddish theatre group from Poland is known to have had a strong influence on the young Franz. Years later, he became interested in Hasidism, an Eastern European branch of Judaism that delved into mystical experiences and the supernatural. Influenced by his friend Max Brod, Kafka also approached Zionism and even considered emigrating to the ‘Promised Land’, but always had mixed feelings about the Zionist project.

Kafka lived through a particularly violent period for a middle-class Jew: «I spend my evenings bathing in anti-Semitic hatred». He himself showed signs of anti-Semitism on more than one occasion. In a letter to Milena, he asked, «What do I have in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself».  It is interpreted as part of his daily dose of self-deprecation – a Jewish self-deprecation, by the way – but it should not be forgotten that one of the great themes of his work is identity. Kafka does not seem capable of feeling part of any collective: neither Jewish, nor Czech, nor practically human.

Franz Kafka was the first-born son of Hermann Kafka and Julie (Löwy), both of Jewish and rural origin. His father was a man of imposing physique and personality. From a humble background, he made his own way by emigrating to the city and setting up a cloth and thread business with his wife, which, with a lot of hard work, turned out to be prosperous. On the other hand, Julie belonged to a well-off, educated family of textile merchants. Franz always felt closer to his mother’s family, especially to his two uncles, Alfred, whom everyone called «the uncle from Madrid», and Siegfried, a country doctor. Julie often protected little Franz from his stern father, but the expectations of their first-born and only son to lead a free life away from the family business probably disappointed both parents. This sort of strain is reflected in many of Kafka’s stories and novels.

Franz had three sisters: Gabriele (Elli), Valerie (Valli) and Ottilie (Ottla). Ottilie, the youngest, nine years younger than Kafka, was his accomplice and most beloved sister.

Franz lived with his family for most of his short life. He was often unsettled by the domestic environment’s noise, but he never quite left the family home. At the end of his days, he concealed the severity of his condition from his parents, and the affection and respect he extended to them in his last letters also seemed to testify to the close bond that united him with his family.

Hermann Kafka was born in a small village in southern Bohemia into a humble family, headed by Jacob Kafka, his father, a kosher butcher from whom he inherited a sturdy appearance and character. Hermann worked from an early age and could not study, but he was fluent in Czech and German, which was very useful in his determination to prosper. He enjoyed life in the army for three years, where he became a sergeant. He always liked to show off his authority and strength.

His marriage to July Löry, who came from a well-off rural family, already meant a certain social advancement for him. They met in Prague, where, once they were married, Hermann set up a lucrative business with her help. He worked hard and did his best to leave behind all traces of his past, including his Jewish background. He enforced the German language as the family language, and he outwardly claimed that they were Czechs. He was a respected merchant and an exemplary head of a family. He wanted his only son, Franz, to follow in his footsteps, take over the business in the future, and start his own family. His son, who was nothing like him, had his own plans.

Since childhood, Franz had been terrorised by his father, who had always regarded him as a pushover. In the famous’ Letter to my father’, which Hermann never read, his son wrote: «All my writings are about you’». Most of Kafka’s stories contain themes such as fear of superior power, guilt, humiliation, and conflicts with authority, which undoubtedly stem from his dreaded father figure. Despite the life-long tensions with his father, he always admired him.

Women were both a refuge and a threat to Kafka. His protectors in the family were his mother and sisters, especially his youngest, Ottla, who, as an adult, took him first to the little house in Prague’s Golden Lane and then to the estate in Zürau, where Kafka was able to write several of his stories without the distractions of his father’s home. Ottla was his greatest accomplice and his dearest sister.

Franz never married. His love affairs were primarily epistolary and often as passionate as they were stormy. He was completely selfless in his letters, undressing with a shamelessness and an honesty that is striking in that he did not show his most flattering side in his courtship. However, he kept an obvious physical distance from women. This can often be explained by his complex sexuality, apparently marked by a murky youthful experience with a prostitute. He was also distanced from them by his intention to devote himself entirely to literature. Through his diaries and letters, we learn about the most important female figures in Kafka’s life: his fiancées Felice Bauer and Julie Worhryzek, Milena Jesenská – who understood him best and whom he respected most – and his last consolation, the young Dora Diamant. His correspondence with them was undoubtedly a literary workshop. They were his source of energy and inspired many of his stories. Kafka himself reveals in his letters and diaries that ‘The Judgement’ and ‘The Trial’ are closely linked to Felice and ‘The Castle’ inspired by Milena.

Kafka was a solitary and introverted man but by no means an antisocial one. He liked to observe and listen to what was going on around him. He tended to be smiling and friendly in public but distant, hiding behind a kind of glass wall. He was not approachable even to his closest friends, but he was a faithful friend who liked to enjoy himself as much as the next man in cabarets and night cafés.

It is well known that from his youth, he was linked to Max Brod, the writer and publisher to whom we owe the survival of Kafka’s work, which betrayed his wish that it should be destroyed after his death. An admirer of Kafka’s writings, Brod was his confidant and inseparable companion on trips around Europe, film sessions and literary gatherings such as the ‘Prague Circle’, to which the writer and good friend Franz Werfel also belonged. Oskar Pollak was another great friend of Kafka’s, and he had a particular influence on him during his student days. He wrote him these revealing lines about reading: «I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us.  If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? […] A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief». It is also known that Kafka took great pleasure in reading passages from his stories aloud, thereby provoking laughter from his friends.

Kafka felt disgusted with his body as a child. Tall and very thin, he often compared himself to his stocky father, to whom he looked puny and ridiculous whenever they went to the Civic Swimming School together. This feeling accompanied him forever. As an adult, he enthusiastically followed naturopathic exercise programmes and diets. Some of these, such as chewing each mouthful ten times, exasperated his father at the dinner table. His father, the son of a kosher butcher, did not take kindly to Franz’s decision to follow a vegetarian diet either.

Franz practised the Müller method every day for years. It consisted of exercising a series of movements for fifteen minutes naked in front of a window. He also enjoyed walking, rowing and tennis and never gave up swimming. As a member of the club of writer-swimmers, Kafka found swimming to be a vital necessity.

He suffered from insomnia and considered himself a sickly hypochondriac. He was always wary of traditional medicine and preferred to treat himself with rest and fresh air, which he found during his stays in various European spas and sanatoriums. After the first symptoms of pulmonary tuberculosis that would eventually lead to his death at the age of forty, Kafka had no choice but to turn to classical medicine. Even so, he was convinced that the disease was the result of his emotional stress. He spent the last days of his life in a sanatorium near Vienna with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant, barely able to eat or speak. Proof of his irony and the fact that his life and work were always linked, the last stories he wrote were ‘A Hunger Artist’ and ‘Josephine the Singer’.

Throughout his work, Kafka embodies the figure of the dehumanised bureaucrat. He was also forced to write at night to find the silence and time he lacked during the day. For this reason, it is generally believed that he detested the job he held throughout his working life at the Bohemian Kingdom Industrial Accident Insurance Company. This was not the case. A trained lawyer, he longed for greater freedom, and while some aspects of his work were tedious, his job, which he also performed with great diligence, made him feel worthy in his father’s eyes. His superiors recognised him and promoted him, preventing him from enlisting and going to the front in the Great War, considering him essential. The accident rate and death toll in Bohemian industries actually fell thanks to Kafka’s work.

Nor did Kafka set out to make literature his profession. He pursued it as a vital necessity rather than anything else. «All I am literature», he wrote in his diaries. Sitting down to write was, for him, an exercise in tenacious introspection, which distanced him from the world while allowing him to assimilate it. He wrote at night, in a kind of trance-like state close to reverie: «Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn’t pull a corpse from its grave, I can’t be dragged from my desk at night».

The turn of the century was a convulsive time in history. Technological innovations—the cinema and the aeroplane—which delighted Kafka coexisted with social tensions stemming from an enormously complex global political and economic landscape. The situation was worsened in his case by his status as an assimilated Jew amid a paradigm undergoing a transformation from the previous regime with the rise of nationalism. As a child, he witnessed displays of inveterate Jew hatred, and he himself despised himself for being Jewish. He witnessed the looting of shops, the burning of synagogues and Hebrew books, and emigrations to Palestine, where he himself considered going into exile.

His diary entry dated 2 Aug. 1914 is often mentioned: «Germany has declared war on Russia. Went swimming in the afternoon», but it is known that he tried to enlist, partly to escape his engagement to Felice Bauer and that his superiors in the office prevented him from doing so. His powers of observation, which often seem visionary, were by no means oblivious to the bloodthirsty period that was brewing around him. The war affected him in any case: through mutilated people returning from the battlefront, whom he dealt with every day at work, mail censorship, travel controls, rationing, the dissolution of publishing projects, the loss of savings, and the death of loved ones such as his friend Oskar Pollak, who died while fighting at the battlefront. After Kafka’s death, his three sisters were murdered in the Nazi gas chambers. His beloved Milena Jesenská also died in the Rabensbrük concentration camp.