Kafka, Franz (1883-1924)

Austrian novelist. He wrote in German. His three unfinished allegorical novels Der Prozess/The Trial (1925), Das Schloss/The Castle (1926), and Amerika/America (1927) were posthumously published despite his instructions that they should be destroyed. His short stories include ‘Die Verwandlung/The Metamorphosis’ (1915), in which a man turns into a huge insect. His vision of lonely individuals trapped in bureaucratic or legal labyrinths can be seen as a powerful metaphor for modern experience.

Kafka's work has considerably influenced other modern writers, including Samuel Beckett and Albert Camus.

He was born in Prague of Jewish parents. His youth, and indeed his whole life, was overshadowed by the dominant personality of his father, and his work expresses both the conflict with authority and at the same time the urge to receive its recognition. After taking his doctorate in law at the German University of Prague 1906, Kafka became a government clerk in the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute. His first published work was a collection of short stories, Betrachtungen/Observations (1913). The short story ‘Der Heizer/The Stoker’, afterwards the first chapter of Amerika, and ‘Das Urteil/The Sentence’ appeared in periodicals the same year, and were published in Leipzig in 1916. The following year tuberculosis developed, but it was not until the last year of his life that he went into the sanatorium at Kierling, near Vienna, where he died. A posthumous collection of stories, Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer/At the Building of the Great Wall of China, was published in 1931.