113 Facts About Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was a Jewish Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague who wrote in German.

Franz Kafka is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature.

Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class German- and Yiddish-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Franz Kafka trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time in various legal and insurance jobs.

Franz Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship.

Franz Kafka became engaged to several women but never married.

Franz Kafka died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40.

Franz Kafka was a prolific writer, but he burned an estimated 90 percent of his total work due to persistent struggles with self-doubt.

Franz Kafka's writings became famous in German-speaking countries after World War II, influencing German literature, and its influence spread elsewhere in the world in the 1960s.

Franz Kafka was born near the Old Town Square in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Hermann and Julie had six children, of whom Franz Kafka was the eldest.

Consequently, Franz Kafka's childhood was somewhat lonely, and the children were reared largely by a series of governesses and servants.

The dominating figure of Franz Kafka's father had a significant influence on Franz Kafka's writing.

The Franz Kafka family had a servant girl living with them in a cramped apartment.

From 1889 to 1893, Franz Kafka attended the German boys' elementary school at the, now known as Masna Street.

Franz Kafka never enjoyed attending the synagogue and went with his father only on four high holidays each year.

German was the language of instruction, but Franz Kafka spoke and wrote in Czech.

Franz Kafka studied the latter at the gymnasium for eight years, achieving good grades.

Franz Kafka received compliments for his Czech, but never considered himself fluent in the language.

Franz Kafka was originally admitted for philosophy, and he had additionally signed up for chemistry.

Franz Kafka began studying chemistry but switched to law after two weeks.

Brod soon noticed that, although Franz Kafka was shy and seldom spoke, what he said was usually profound.

Franz Kafka was awarded the degree of Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as a law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.

On 1 November 1907, Franz Kafka was employed at the, an insurance company, where he worked for nearly a year.

Franz Kafka was rapidly promoted and his duties included processing and investigating compensation claims, writing reports, and handling appeals from businessmen who thought their firms had been placed in too high a risk category, which cost them more in insurance premiums.

Franz Kafka would compile and compose the annual report on the insurance institute for the several years he worked there.

Franz Kafka's father expected him to help out at and take over the family fancy goods store.

Franz Kafka showed a positive attitude at first, dedicating much of his free time to the business, but he later resented the encroachment of this work on his writing time.

Around 1915, Franz Kafka received his draft notice for military service in World WarI, but his employers at the insurance institute arranged for a deferment because his work was considered essential government service.

Franz Kafka later attempted to join the military but was prevented from doing so by medical problems associated with tuberculosis, with which he was diagnosed in 1917.

On 13 August 1912, Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer, a relative of Brod's, who worked in Berlin as a representative of a dictaphone company.

Franz Kafka's father objected to Julie because of her Zionist beliefs.

Stach and Brod state that during the time that Franz Kafka knew Felice Bauer, he had an affair with a friend of hers, Margarethe "Grete" Bloch, a Jewish woman from Berlin.

Stach points out that there is a great deal of contradictory evidence around the claim that Franz Kafka was the father.

Franz Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis in August 1917 and moved for a few months to the Bohemian village of Zurau, where his sister Ottla worked on the farm of her brother-in-law Karl Hermann.

Franz Kafka felt comfortable there and later described this time as perhaps the best period of his life, probably because he had no responsibilities.

Franz Kafka kept diaries and made notes in exercise books.

From those notes, Franz Kafka extracted 109 numbered pieces of text on single pieces of paper ; these were later published as.

In 1920, Franz Kafka began an intense relationship with Milena Jesenska, a Czech journalist and writer who was non-Jewish and who was married, but when she met Franz Kafka, her marriage was a "sham".

Franz Kafka, hoping to escape the influence of his family to concentrate on his writing, moved briefly to Berlin and lived with Diamant.

Franz Kafka became his lover and sparked his interest in the Talmud.

Franz Kafka was known as Elli or Ellie; her married name is variously rendered as Hermann or Hermannova.

Franz Kafka attended a German girls' school in Prague's Reznicka Street and later a private girls' secondary school.

Franz Kafka married Karl Hermann, a salesman, in 1910.

Franz Kafka accompanied her on a 1915 trip to Hungary to visit Hermann, who was stationed there, and spent a summer with her and her children in Muritz the year before he died.

Franz Kafka was probably killed in the Kulmhof extermination camp in the fall of 1942.

Franz Kafka had a lifelong suspicion that people found him mentally and physically repulsive.

Brod thought Franz Kafka was one of the most entertaining people he had met; Franz Kafka enjoyed sharing his humour with his friends but helped them in difficult situations with good advice.

Brod felt that two of Franz Kafka's most distinguishing traits were "absolute truthfulness" and "precise conscientiousness".

Franz Kafka explored inconspicuous details in depth and with such precision and love that unforeseen things surfaced that seemed strange but absolutely true.

Franz Kafka was highly sensitive to noise and preferred absolute quiet when writing.

Perez-Alvarez has claimed that Franz Kafka had symptomatology consistent with schizoid personality disorder.

The Italian medical researchers Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante have posited in a 2016 article that Franz Kafka may have had borderline personality disorder with co-occurring psychophysiological insomnia.

Franz Kafka had several girlfriends and lovers during his life.

Doctor Manfred M Fichter of the Psychiatric Clinic, University of Munich, presented "evidence for the hypothesis that the writer Franz Kafka had suffered from an atypical anorexia nervosa", and that Kafka was not just lonely and depressed but "occasionally suicidal".

Whether Franz Kafka was a political writer is still an issue of debate.

Franz Kafka was deeply fascinated by the Jews of Eastern Europe, who he thought possessed an intensity of spiritual life that was absent from Jews in the West.

Lothar Kahn is likewise unequivocal: "The presence of Jewishness in Franz Kafka's is no longer subject to doubt".

Franz Kafka studied Hebrew while living in Berlin, hiring a friend of Brod's from Palestine, Pua Bat-Tovim, to tutor him and attending Rabbi Julius Grunthal and Rabbi Julius Guttmann's classes in the Berlin, where he studied Talmud.

Franz Kafka's contemporaries included numerous Jewish, Czech, and German writers who were sensitive to Jewish, Czech, and German culture.

Towards the end of his life Franz Kafka sent a postcard to his friend Hugo Bergmann in Tel Aviv, announcing his intention to emigrate to Palestine.

Franz Kafka went to Hugo Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling just outside Vienna for treatment on 10 April, and died there on 3 June 1924.

The cause of death seemed to be starvation: the condition of Franz Kafka's throat made eating too painful for him, and since parenteral nutrition had not yet been developed, there was no way to feed him.

Franz Kafka was editing "A Hunger Artist" on his deathbed, a story whose composition he had begun before his throat closed to the point that he could not take any nourishment.

Franz Kafka's body was brought back to Prague where he was buried on 11 June 1924, in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Zizkov.

Franz Kafka's obituary appeared in the Prager Presse and the Berliner Tageblatt.

Franz Kafka was virtually unknown during his own lifetime, but he did not consider fame important.

Franz Kafka rose to fame rapidly after his death, particularly after World War II.

Franz Kafka finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work, much of it during the period he lived in Berlin with Diamant, who helped him burn the drafts.

The first mention of Franz Kafka's work was in an article by Max Brod on February 9,1907 in the Berlin weekly Die Gegenwart, two years prior to his first publication.

Franz Kafka's earliest published works were eight stories that appeared in 1908 in the first issue of the literary journal Hyperion under the title.

Franz Kafka wrote the story "" in 1904; in 1905 he showed it to Brod, who advised him to continue writing and convinced him to submit it to Hyperion.

Franz Kafka published a fragment in 1908 and two sections in the spring of 1909, all in Munich.

Franz Kafka later described writing it as "a complete opening of body and soul", a story that "evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime".

In 1912, Franz Kafka wrote Die Verwandlung, published in 1915 in Leipzig.

Franz Kafka began his first novel in 1912; its first chapter is the story "Der Heizer".

The inspiration for the novel was the time Franz Kafka spent in the audience of Yiddish theatre the previous year, bringing him to a new awareness of his heritage, which led to the thought that an innate appreciation for one's heritage lives deep within each person.

In 1914 Franz Kafka began the novel, the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.

Franz Kafka did not complete the novel, although he finished the final chapter.

Franz Kafka "practiced drawing, took drawing classes, attended art history lectures, and sought to establish a connection to Prague's artistic circles".

Franz Kafka Blei published two dialogues in 1909 which became part of "Beschreibung eines Kampfes".

Franz Kafka dedicated it to Brod, "", and added in the personal copy given to his friend "".

Franz Kafka's novella Die Verwandlung was first printed in the October 1915 issue of, a monthly edition of expressionist literature, edited by Rene Schickele.

At the time of his death, Franz Kafka's works were probably known only to a small circle of Czech and German writers.

One problem was that Franz Kafka often began writing in different parts of the book; sometimes in the middle, sometimes working backwards from the end.

For example, Franz Kafka left with unnumbered and incomplete chapters and with incomplete sentences and ambiguous content; Brod rearranged chapters, copy-edited the text, and changed the punctuation.

Franz Kafka released or sold some, but left most to her daughters, Eva and Ruth, who refused to release the papers.

Examples include Heinrich Jacob's "Franz Kafka oder die Wahrhaftigke" for Der Feuerreiter in 1924 and Brod's "Infantilismus Kleist und Franz Kafka" in 1927.

Franz Kafka's work was translated to English in the 1930s, and American journals and magazines such as The New Yorker, The Nation and Athenaeum, The Nation, Scribners, New York Tribune, and The Bookman, wrote reviews about his books.

In Nazi Germany, between 1933 and 1937, only 11 articles about Franz Kafka were published, mostly by Jews in periodical such as Der Morgen, Frankfurter Zeitung, Judische Rundschau, and Hochland.

The reviews were mixed, with The New York Times reviewer stating that "it is beyond me" and other reviewers stating that Franz Kafka was "one of the most extraordinary writers of our time".

In 1939, Franz Kafka's work was reviewed in many countries, including in the periodicals The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review and Expressionism in German Life.

In 1946, Franz Kafka's work was popular, with 21 articles on it written that year.

Franz Kafka's style has been compared to that of Kleist as early as 1916, in a review of "Die Verwandlung" and "Der Heizer" by Oscar Walzel in Berliner Beitrage.

The nature of Franz Kafka's prose allows for varied interpretations and critics have placed his writing into a variety of literary schools.

Some of Franz Kafka's books are influenced by the expressionist movement, though the majority of his literary output was associated with the experimental modernist genre.

Franz Kafka read drafts of his works to his friends, typically concentrating on his humorous prose.

Critics who support this absurdist interpretation cite instances where Franz Kafka describes himself in conflict with an absurd universe, such as the following entry from his diary:.

The first instance of Kafka being translated into English was in 1925, when William A Drake published "A Report for an Academy" in the New York Herald Tribune.

Franz Kafka often made extensive use of a characteristic particular to German, which permits long sentences that sometimes can span an entire page.

Franz Kafka had no intention of labeling Gregor, the protagonist of the story, as any specific thing but instead wanted to convey Gregor's disgust at his transformation.

Unlike many famous writers, Franz Kafka is rarely quoted by others.

Franz Kafka had a strong influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Milan Kundera and the novel The Palace of Dreams by Ismail Kadare.

The Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu said "Franz Kafka is the author I love the most and who means, for me, the gate to literature"; he described Franz Kafka as "the saint of literature".

Harold Bloom said "when he is most himself, Franz Kafka gives us a continuous inventiveness and originality that rivals Dante and truly challenges Proust and Joyce as that of the dominant Western author of our century".

Neil Christian Pages, a professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University who specialises in Franz Kafka's works, says Franz Kafka's influence transcends literature and literary scholarship; it impacts visual arts, music, and popular culture.

Harry Steinhauer, a professor of German and Jewish literature, says that Franz Kafka "has made a more powerful impact on literate society than any other writer of the twentieth century".

Michel-Andre Bossy writes that Franz Kafka created a rigidly inflexible and sterile bureaucratic universe.

Franz Kafka wrote in an aloof manner full of legal and scientific terms.

Franz Kafka's characters are trapped, confused, full of guilt, frustrated, and lacking understanding of their surreal world.

However, with common usage, the term has become so ubiquitous that Franz Kafka scholars note it is often misused.

The museum aims with this exhibit to immerse the visitor into the world in which Franz Kafka lived and about which he wrote.

The Franz Kafka Prize, established in 2001, is an annual literary award of the Franz Kafka Society and the City of Prague.