‘My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential’: therefore it would seem the best route to knowing Franz Kafka is through his writings, yet his instruction to his friend and executor Max Brod was to burn everything and suppress the stories that had already been published. Luckily, Brod disobeyed and saw into print three of the greatest novels of the twentieth century – The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) – and the earlier novella, Metamorphosis (1915), is still in print today. If the ‘dreamlike inner life’ shares the novels’ perpetual anxiety, faceless authorities and labyrinthine bureaucracy, how awful was the reality of Kafka’s life?
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Born in 1883, the eldest son of a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Franz Kafka was well educated in prestigious schools and went on to study law, graduating in 1906. Following his father’s wishes, he began working in the government-sponsored Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, interviewing the victims of factory accidents. In government offices the working day ended at 2pm, which suited Kafka, leaving him time to mix in literary circles and to write.
In 1912, through his closest friend, Max Brod, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived and worked in Berlin. They met only occasionally, wrote frequently – almost daily at times – and became engaged twice but never married. However fraught with anxieties about women, sex, overbearing family and his freedom to write, it was during his time with Felice that Kafka wrote Metamorphosis, and some critics have seen their relationship as crucial to the creation of The Trial.
Kafka’s overwhelming desire to write, along with his introspection, fears and depressions, would make it hard, if not impossible, to commit to another person. Many liaisons with women were to follow the departure of Felice in 1917, including casual encounters with prostitutes as well as more serious affairs with a married woman, Milena Jesenská, and his final lover, Dora Diamant.
In 1919 it had become apparent that Kakfa was ill with tuberculosis and his time was limited, yet he continued to work on his novels and moved to Berlin to be with Dora who, along with one of his sisters, looked after him. In a sanatorium near Vienna, unable to eat due to the disease but still committed to writing, Kafka corrected the proofs of A Hunger Artist before he died in June 1924.
