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      By Roya Ireland 

    Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 to Jewish parents. His father sent him to German language schools and he received a doctorate in law from the German University in 1906. He then went on to work as an official in a state insurance company. He hated his job and wrote in his spare time.

As a German-Austrian he had to contend with the resentment of the Czech population. As a Jew he encountered anti-Semitism and as the son of a wealthy businessman he was subject to class hatred. In an environment of such hostility, it is no surprise that his writing expressed the anxieties and alienation that he must have felt.

He lived in his father’s house for fourteen years, a man he blamed for stripping him of all self-confidence and developing in him “a boundless feeling of guilt.” In his stories he often explores the ambivalence of family relationships, and his novels are filled with father figures or authorities that misunderstand, misjudge and even kill the young heroes.

His father was an overbearing and ill-tempered man, who could not comprehend his son’s unprofitable dedication to the literary recording of his “dreamlike inner life.” He valued only material success and social advancement.

During his lifetime Kafka published a few of his writings. He became ill with tuberculosis in 1917 and was forced to retire in 1922. In 1923 he went to Berlin and met Dora Dymant, a young Jewish socialist whose companionship gave him new hope.

He died in Prague in 1924 and left his unfinished writings to his friend Max Brod with the instructions that they be burned. Instead of burning them Max edited and published them, along with his diaries.