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Everything about Kafka totally explained

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 - 3 June 1924) was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. He was born to a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic). His unique body of writing—much of which is incomplete and was published posthumously—is among the most influential in Western literature.
   His stories, such as The Metamorphosis (1915), and novels, including The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal and bureaucratic world.

Family

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia. His father, Hermann Kafka (1852–1931), was described as a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman" and by Kafka himself as "a true Kafka in strength, health, appetite, loudness of voice, eloquence, self-satisfaction, worldly dominance, endurance, presence of mind, [and] knowledge of human nature". Hermann was the fourth child of Jacob Kafka, a shochet, and came to Prague from Osek, a Czech-speaking Jewish village near Písek in southern Bohemia. After working as a traveling sales representative, he established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people and using a jackdaw (kavka in Czech) as his business logo. Kafka's mother, Julie (1856—1934), was the daughter of Jakob Löwy, a prosperous brewer in Poděbrady, and was better educated than her husband.
   Kafka was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, who died at the ages of fifteen months and six months, respectively, before Kafka was seven, and three younger sisters, Gabriele ("Elli") (1889–1941), Valerie ("Valli") (1890–1942), and Ottilie ("Ottla") (1891–1943). On business days, both parents were absent from the home. His mother helped to manage her husband's business and worked in it as much as 12 hours a day. The children were largely reared by a series of governesses and servants.
   Kafka's sisters were sent with their families to the Łódź Ghetto and died there or in concentration camps. Ottla was sent to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and then on October 7, 1943 to the death camp at Auschwitz, where 1267 children and 51 guardians, including Ottla, were gassed to death on their arrival.

Education

Kafka learned German as his first language, but he was also fluent in Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of French language and culture; one of his favorite authors was Flaubert. From 1889 to 1893, he attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys' elementary school at the Masný trh/Fleischmarkt (meat market), the street now known as Masná street. His Jewish education was limited to his Bar Mitzvah celebration at 13 and going to the synagogue four times a year with his father. After elementary school, he was admitted to the rigorous classics-oriented state gymnasium, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium, an academic secondary school with eight grade levels, where German was also the language of instruction, at Old Town Square, within the Kinsky Palace. He completed his Maturita exams in 1901.
   Admitted to the German Charles-Ferdinand University of Prague, Kafka first studied chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. This offered a range of career possibilities, which pleased his father, and required a longer course of study that gave Kafka time to take classes in German studies and art history. At the university, he joined a student club, named Lese- und Redehalle der Deutschen Studenten, which organized literary events, readings and other activities. In the end of his first year of studies, he met Max Brod, who would become a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law. Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.
   In 1911, Karl Hermann, spouse of his sister Elli, proposed Kafka collaborate in the operation of an asbestos factory known as Prager Asbestwerke Hermann and Co. Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business. During that period, he also found interest and entertainment in the performances of Yiddish theatre, despite the misgivings of even close friends such as Max Brod, who usually supported him in everything else. Those performances also served as a starting point for his growing relationship with Judaism.

Later years

In 1912, at Max Brod's home, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin and worked as a representative for a dictaphone company. Over the next five years they corresponded a great deal, met occasionally, and twice were engaged to be married. Their relationship finally ended in 1917.
   In 1917, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla. Despite his fear of being perceived as both physically and mentally repulsive, he impressed others with his boyish, neat, and austere good looks, a quiet and cool demeanor, obvious intelligence and dry sense of humor.
   In 1921 he developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská. In 1923, he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud.
   It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life . He also suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk. However, Kafka's tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, then went to Dr. Hoffmann sanatorium in Kierling near Vienna for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924, apparently from starvation. The condition of Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since intravenous therapy hadn't been developed, there was no way to feed him (a fate resembling that of Gregor in the Metamorphosis and the main character of A Hunger Artist). His body was ultimately brought back to Prague where he was interred on June 11, 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery (sector 21, row 14, plot 33) in Prague-Žižkov.

Personal views

Kafka wasn't formally involved in Jewish religious life, but he showed a great interest in Jewish culture and spirituality. He was deeply fascinated by the Jews of Eastern Europe who he regarded as having an intensity of spiritual life Western Jews didn't have. Kafka at the same time had at times an alienation from Judaism and Jewish life: "What have I in common with Jews? I've hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe." During the later years of his life, Kafka suggested an interest in moving to Palestine. He dreamed of going with Dora Diamant who herself came from a Hasidic family to create a new kind of life in the land of Israel. Here he perhaps too was influenced by his Zionist friends Hugo Bergmann and Max Brod. Tragically Kafka's tuberculosis was too advanced and he wasn't able to realize this dream of his final years.

Literary work

Kafka published only a few short stories during his lifetime, a small part of his work, and never finished any of his novels (with the possible exception of The Metamorphosis, which some consider to be a short novel). His writing attracted little attention until after his death. Prior to his death, he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all of his manuscripts. His lover, Dora Diamant, partially executed his wishes, secretly keeping up to 20 notebooks and 35 letters until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. An ongoing international search is being conducted for these missing Kafka papers. Brod overrode Kafka's instructions and instead oversaw the publication of most of the work in his possession, which soon began to attract attention and high critical regard. All of Kafka's published works, except several letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German.

Style of writing

Kafka often made extensive use of a trait special to the German language allowing for long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page. Kafka's sentences then deliver an unexpected impact just before the full stop - that being the finalizing meaning and focus. This is achieved due to the construction of certain sentences in German which require that the verb be positioned at the end of the sentence. Such constructions can't be duplicated in English, so it's up to the translator to provide the reader with the same effect found in the original text. One such instance of a Kafka translator's quandary is demonstrated in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis.
   Another virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. An example is Kafka's use of the German noun   in the final sentence of The Judgment. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge." What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr  is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation." In the English translation, of course, what can Verkehr  be but "traffic"?

Critical interpretation

Critics have interpreted Kafka's works in the context of a variety of literary schools, such as modernism, magical realism, and so on. The apparent hopelessness and absurdity that seem to permeate his works are considered emblematic of existentialism. Others have tried to locate a Marxist influence in his satirization of bureaucracy in pieces such as In the Penal Colony, The Trial, and The Castle, for The Castle, Malcolm Pasley was able to get most of Kafka's original handwritten work into the Oxford Bodleian Library in 1961. The text for The Trial was later acquired through auction and is stored at the German literary archives at Marbach, Germany.
   Subsequently, Pasley headed a team (including Gerhard Neumann, Jost Schillemeit, and Jürgen Born) in reconstructing the German novels and S. Fischer Verlag republished them. Pasley was the editor for Das Schloß (The Castle), published in 1982, and Der Prozeß (The Trial), published in 1990. Jost Schillemeit was the editor of Der Verschollene (Amerika) published in 1983. These are all called the 'Critical Editions' or the 'Fischer Editions'. The German critical text of these, and Kafka's other works, may be found online at The Kafka Project.
   There is another Kafka Project based at San Diego State University, which began in 1998 as the official international search for Kafka's last writings. Consisting of 20 notebooks and 35 letters to Kafka's last companion, Dora Diamant (later, Dymant-Lask), this missing literary treasure was confiscated from her by the Gestapo in Berlin 1933. The Kafka Project's four-month search of government archives in Berlin in 1998 uncovered the confiscation order and other significant documents. In 2003, the Kafka Project discovered three original Kafka letters, written in 1923. Building on the search conducted by Max Brod and Klaus Wagenbach in the mid-1950s, the Kafka Project at SDSU has an advisory committee of international scholars and researchers, and is calling for volunteers who want to help solve a literary mystery.

Translations

There are two primary sources for the translations based on the two German editions. The earliest English translations were by Edwin and Willa Muir and published by Alfred A. Knopf. These editions were widely published and spurred the late-1940's surge in Kafka's popularity in the United States. Later editions (notably the 1954 editions) had the addition of the deleted text translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. These are known 'Definitive Editions'. They translated both The Trial, Definitive and The Castle, Definitive among other writings. Definitive Editions are generally accepted to have a number of biases and to be dated in interpretation.
   After Pasley and Schillemeit completed their recompilation of the German text, the new translations were completed and published -- The Castle, Critical by Mark Harman (Schocken Books, 1998), The Trial, Critical by Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) and Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared by Michael Hoffman (New Directions Publishing, 2004). These editions are often noted as being based on the restored text.

Bibliography

Short stories

Novellas

  • The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung - November-December 1915)

    Novels

  • The Trial (Der Prozeß - 1925) (includes short story Before the Law)
  • The Castle (Das Schloß - 1926)
  • Amerika (Amerika or Der Verschollene - 1927)

    Diaries and notebooks

  • Diaries 1910-1923 (External Link)
  • The Blue Octavo Notebooks

    Letters

  • Letter to His Father
  • Letters to Felice
  • Letters to Ottla
  • Letters to Milena
  • Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors

    Works about Kafka

  • Brod, Max. Franz Kafka: A Biography. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. ISBN 0-306-80670-3
  • Brod, Max. The Biography of Franz Kafka, tr. from the German by G. Humphreys Roberts. London: Secker & Warburg, 1947.
  • Calasso, Roberto. K. Knopf, 2005. ISBN 1-4000-4189-9
  • Citati, Pietro, Kafka, 1987. ISBN 0-7859-2173-7
  • Coots, Steve. Franz Kafka (Beginner's Guide). Headway, 2002, ISBN 0-340-84648-8
  • Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1986. ISBN 0-8166-1515-2
  • Glatzer, Nahum N., The Loves of Franz Kafka. New York: Schocken Books, 1986. ISBN 0-8052-4001-2
  • Greenberg, Martin, The Terror of Art: Kafka and Modern Literature. New York, Basic Books, 1968. ISBN 0-465-08415-X
  • Gordimer, Nadine (1984). "Letter from His Father" in Something Out There, London, Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-007711-1
  • Hayman, Ronald. K, a Biography of Kafka. London: Phoenix Press, 2001.ISBN 1-84212-415-3
  • Janouch, Gustav. Conversations with Kafka. New York: New Directions Books, second edition 1971. (Translated by Goronwy Rees.)ISBN 0-8112-0071-X
  • Kwinter, Sanford. Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002. ISBN 0-262-11260-4
  • Murray, Nicholas. Kafka. New Haven: Yale, 2004.
  • Pawel, Ernst. The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. ISBN 0-374-52335-5
  • Thiher, Allen (ed.). Franz Kafka: A Study of the Short Fiction (Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction, No. 12). ISBN 0-8057-8323-7

    Legacy

    Franz Kafka has a museum dedicated to his work in Prague, Czech Republic. The term "Kafkaesque" is widely used and misused to describe concepts, situations, and ideas which are reminiscent of Kafka's works, particularly The Trial and "The Metamorphosis".
       In Mexico, the phrase "Si Franz Kafka fuera mexicano, sería costumbrista" (If Franz Kafka were Mexican, he'd be a Costumbrista writer) is commonly used in newspapers, blogs, and online forums to tell how hopeless and absurd the situation in the country is.
       It has been noted that "from the Czech point of view, Kafka was German, and from the German point of view he was, above all, Jewish" and that this was a common "fate of much of Western Jewry."
  • Kafka Americana by Jonathan Lethem and Carter Scholz is a collection of stories based on Kafka's life and works.
  • Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  • Kafka was the Rage, a Greenwich Village Memoir by Anatole Broyard
  • Kafka's Curse by Achmat Dangor
  • The Kafka Effekt by American bizarro author D. Harlan Wilson, who relates his take on the irrealism genre of literature to that of Franz Kafka, and to that of William S. Burroughs.

    Film

    For a full list of films The IMDb filmography

    Kafka's Life

  • Kafka (1990) Jeremy Irons stars as the eponymous author. Written by Lem Dobbs and directed by Steven Soderbergh, the movie mixes his life and fiction providing a semi-biographical presentation of Kafka's life and works. The story concerns Kafka investigating the disappearance of one of his work colleagues. The plot takes Kafka through many of the writer's own works, most notably The Castle and The Trial.
  • : an animated film by Piotr Dumała

    Novels

  • The Trial (1962) Orson Welles wrote and directed this adaptation of the novel starring Anthony Perkins. In a 1962 BBC Interview with Huw Wheldon, Orson Welles noted, "Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I've ever made".
  • Klassenverhältnisse Class Relations (1984) Directed by the experimental filmmaking duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet based on Kafka's novel Amerika.
  • The Trial (1993) Starring Kyle MacLachlan as Joseph K. with Anthony Hopkins in a cameo role as the priest as a strictly faithful adaptation with a screenplay by playwright Harold Pinter.
  • by Michael Haneke

    Metamorphosis

  • : an animated short by Caroline Leaf
  • Franz Kafka's 'It's a Wonderful Life' (1993) is an Oscar-winning short film written and directed by Peter Capaldi and starring Richard E. Grant as Kafka. The film blends "Metamorphosis" with Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life.
  • The Metamorphosis of Franz Kafka (1993) by Carlos Atanes, at YouTube.

  • Short stories

  • Zoetrope : an experimental avant-garde short film by Charlie Deaux, . Adaptation of "In the Penal Colony".
  • : an animated feature by Tom Gibbons
  • Adaptation of "A Country Doctor".

    Theatre

  • Alan Bennett, Kafka's Dick, 1986, a play in which the ghosts of Kafka, his father Hermann, and Max Brod arrive at the home of an English insurance clerk (and Kafka aficionado) and his wife.
  • Milan Richter, Kafka's Hell-Paradise, 2006, a play with 5 characters, using Kafka's aphorisms, dreams and re-telling his relations to his father and to the women. Translated from the Slovak by Ewald Osers.
  • Milan Richter, Kafka's Second Life, 2007, a play with 17 characters, starting in Kierling where Kafka is dying and ending in Prague in 1961. Translated from the Slovak by Ewald Osers.
  • Tadeusz Różewicz, Pułapka (The Trap), 1982, a play loosely based on Kafka's diaries and lettersFurther Information

    Get more info on 'Kafka'.


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