Prague and law studies
Born in Prague into a German-speaking Jewish merchant family, he received his doctorate in law from the German university of Prague in 1906.
Literary modernism · Prague German-language literature · 1883–1924
Franz Kafka
Telling of a law no one can reach.
Prague · Berlin · Kierling
Biography
The thread of a life.
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Jewish writer from Prague who spent most of his working life as a legal official at a workers’ accident insurance institute and wrote chiefly at night. His stories, novels, diaries and letters, most of them published after his death, depict individuals facing courts, offices and families whose rules remain opaque, and they have become a touchstone for philosophical reflection on guilt, authority and estrangement.
Insurance office and breakthrough
He joined the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in 1908 and in 1912 wrote The Judgment and The Metamorphosis.
War and The Trial
He began The Trial in August 1914 and left it unfinished; The Metamorphosis was published in 1915.
Illness and letters
Tuberculosis was diagnosed in 1917; he wrote the Letter to His Father in 1919 and began corresponding with Milena Jesenská in 1920.
The Castle and final years
He wrote The Castle and retired in 1922, lived in Berlin with Dora Diamant, and died in Kierling near Vienna in 1924.
Posthumous publication
Disregarding Kafka’s request to destroy his manuscripts, Max Brod published The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926 and Amerika in 1927.
Understanding a life in depth
01Prague, family and the office
Franz Kafka was born on 3 July 1883 in Prague, then a city of Austria-Hungary, the eldest child of Hermann Kafka, a fancy-goods merchant who had risen from poverty, and Julie Löwy. He attended the German gymnasium in the Old Town, studied law at the German university of Prague and took his doctorate in 1906; there he met Max Brod, who became his closest friend. After a year with a private insurer, he joined the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1908, where he drafted reports on accident prevention and the classification of risks. His diaries record the strain between this respected daytime post and the writing he pursued at night.
02The breakthrough of 1912 and the war years
In the night of 22 to 23 September 1912 Kafka wrote The Judgment in a single sitting, and later that autumn The Metamorphosis. That summer he had met Felice Bauer of Berlin; their vast correspondence and two broken engagements, in 1914 and 1917, record his conflict between marriage and a life devoted to writing. His first book, the prose collection Betrachtung, appeared at the end of 1912. In August 1914, as the war began, he started The Trial and soon afterwards wrote In the Penal Colony. The novel remained unfinished, while The Metamorphosis was published in 1915.
03Illness, Zürau and the Letter to His Father
In 1917 Kafka was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He spent several months in the Bohemian village of Zürau with his sister Ottla, where he wrote short aphorisms on truth, evil and hope and read Kierkegaard closely, having discovered him some years earlier. In 1919 he wrote a long Letter to His Father, an analysis of paternal authority and of his own sense of guilt, which was never delivered. From 1920 he corresponded with Milena Jesenská, his Czech translator. In 1922 he wrote most of The Castle, which also broke off unfinished, and retired early from the institute on grounds of ill health.
04Berlin, death and the fate of the manuscripts
In 1923 Kafka moved to Berlin with Dora Diamant, hoping to live independently of Prague despite inflation and his worsening illness. He died on 3 June 1924 at a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, while correcting the proofs of the collection A Hunger Artist. He had asked Max Brod to burn his unpublished papers; Brod instead edited The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, shaping their reception for decades. Critical editions from 1982 onward have restored the wording and fragmentary state of the manuscripts. His three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust, and his name became an adjective far beyond literature.
Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Albert Camus, Theodor W. Adorno, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Derrida read Kafka as a thinker of law, power, hope and modern administration. The adjective “Kafkaesque” has entered many languages, but scholarship warns against reducing his deliberately open texts to a single allegory, whether theological, political or psychological.
Sources & reference points