Kafka’s fiction is synonymous in our times with tales that are as bleak and unsettling as they are entertaining. His literary world is populated by despotic figures and powerless antiheroes. His work has inspired some of the greatest modern writers; he is often imitated and rarely matched. But if Kafka had had his own way at the end of his short life, he would have gone out in even greater obscurity than he came in: unknown, unpublished, unremembered.

Family Life

Franz Kafka was born in Prague, to Jewish parents, at a time of great flux in Europe. Borders were shifting, empires were crumbling, and the alliances and rivalries that would ultimately lead to World War I were growing stronger by the year. Kafka was to die without witnessing the worst horrors of European anti-Semitism, including the deaths of his three sisters during the Holocaust, and he was always at best a token attendee at synagogue, but he nevertheless grew up fundamentally aware of the ‘different’ status of Czechoslovakia’s Jews.

The Kafkas were relatively wealthy, however – the father, Hermann, was a successful retailer – and they could afford to give young Franz a first-rate education. He attended, and excelled at, a prestigious school in the centre of Prague, and then studied law at university. He was, on paper at least, a credit to his family – but his was a difficult family, and one whose influence would shape the fiction he went on to write.

Franz was the eldest child of six, but his two younger brothers both died in infancy. Hermann Kafka was an overbearing father, a man of ‘strength … loudness of voice … self-satisfaction’ and ‘worldly dominance’ of whom Franz had a lifelong fear; the weight of expectation on young Kafka, now the only son in a family of daughters, was considerable. He lived up to it for a while, earning a doctorate in law and a respectable wage, but this profession was never more than a day job for Kafka. His real passion was for writing, and he devoted his free moments to composing short stories. Before long he was choosing jobs based on the amount of writing time they afforded him – to the great disdain of his father.

Two Muses

Kafka’s fiction is notable for its repeated themes of isolation, disorientation, and helplessness at the hands of an authoritarian power. There is no doubt that he wrote his father, or the sense of menace represented by his father, into most, if not all, of his work, and it is little wonder that the protagonists of both Metamorphosis and The Trial (composed in 1914 – 15) are loners to whom frightening things just happen. They are essentially bystanders to their own inevitable downfall.