The term “Kafkaesque” refers to that alternate, strange universe, immersed in mysterious sensations. The restlessness, the lack of hope and a stupor that leaves the same paradoxical and absurd situation.
Franz Kafka, is an exponent of universal literature, essential for anyone curious or learned in the literary subject. His legacy is, just as his being was, a mythical social discontent, an essential and ersatz transcendence through the levels of a life full of voids and enigmas.
Kafka, Jewish and Czech; romantic, melancholic and nostalgic, and in search of himself. In a constant search, which many of his readers feel reflected in themselves. That thirst to live and at the same time perish in the attempt, could turn him into that unpleasant insect, which Gregor Samsa became, in his famous novel: Metamorphosis.
Identity and the lack thereof is a constant in Kafka's work. Being Jewish and being Czech, plus speaking perfect German, seemed to be incompatible concepts for him.
An authoritarian father, also projected by Kafka as the figure of a tyrant, instills in himself a rather particular and tragic way of seeing and reading the world.
Franz, of course, a very sensitive and abstract man, did not affect the figure of power in any way, he was in a constant state of serenity.
Furthermore, he found peace in literature, and his desires were irreprehensible; moreover, he had to study law, after an unlikely attempt at chemistry. Kafka was not a scientist; not a jurist. He was an artist, he was a poet, he was a philosopher, he was a sociologist, he was a writer. Kafka, like the Golem of Rabbi Judah Loew, known as the Maharal of Prague, was a being seeking his own being, although not at all clumsy, Kafka was a strange creation and his creation is like from another universe, perhaps parallel.
Misunderstood and incessant in his search to find himself, his profound works range between the unreal and the real. Between the magical or fantastic, and the insipid and gloomy reality left by the beginning of the 20th century.
Despite being born at the end of the 19th century, and having lived through the end of an era of inspiration, he is nevertheless a man of the next century. From the two World Wars and the Great Depression.
He lived in a Europe at war and the pre-scenario of a harsh economic crisis. His world was truly Kafkaesque. Faced with the universe of love, he was engaged four times, but he never married. He maintained a great correspondence - today of incalculable value for history - with various women, as Kafkaesque as any other, and as brave as that generation.
Being born in beautiful Prague, the most important capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - after Vienna and Budapest - and into a family of the middle bourgeoisie, made him a privileged man. However, his father Herrmann, who with the help of his German-Jewish in-laws, the Löwys, became an important textile merchant.
Franz's father's origins were rural; his father, Jakob Kafka, had been Shojet - a Kosher ritual slaughterer - in Osek, a small Czech village.
Herrmann's life had been hard and was reminiscent of his family, something Franz despised. Unlike his father's family, his mother's family, the Löwys, were wealthy merchants and industrialists. Also, there were artists and intellectuals within the family, something that Franz not only liked more, but could also identify with.
In Letter to the Father, Franz expressed his dissatisfaction with his father, his affection due to the harsh treatment and the insecurity that this gave off in him. A 103-page letter, written in 1919, that he gave to her mother to give to her husband, which she never did.
His relationship with his father was Kafkaesque. He considered that the way his father treated him, in addition to being strong, was hypocritical. Before Franz, two children had been born who did not survive, so he felt a guilt, a weight on his shoulders, just like Salvador Dalí, who had been preceded by another Salvador, but this one had died. And Kafka's three sisters were born several years later.
Kafka's work is a journey, ranging from fiction to the harshest reality. Existentialism is part of his work, as is surrealism.
At certain moments, both physical and psychological severity and the cruelty that this can lead to, ultimately rests on guilt. Anti-bureaucratic, in an incessant struggle against power - represented psychologically by his relationship with his father - he could even be considered an anarchist. He left this phrase in his diary: “God doesn't want me to write, but I have to.” Although after writing, he always wanted to eliminate any evidence of his work. The same one that would become his mythical and invaluable legacy.
Felice Bauer, was his true Kafkaesque love. He met her in 1912, at the home of her best friend, Max Brod, who would also publish much of Kafka's work, between 1925 and 1952.
The relationship with Felice - who lived in Berlin - was from a distance, through letters of up to one a day. A turbulent relationship, with many ups and downs, at the same time a sincere relationship, a pure relationship, moreover, impossible. They were engaged three times, but never married. Kafka confessed to him from the beginning that he was very sickly. And, a few years later, a major illness would afflict him: tuberculosis. He also confessed to her that he was a being devoid of any hope and referred to himself as nothing. He wrote to her: “The truth is that I am nothing, what is called nothing.”
Kafka's job in Prague was as an insurance broker, a job that did him no good, a job that he hated. He is surely a writer, he just wants to write and in the case of Kafka, he would only want to become absorbed in his personal quest to discover who he really was. And, knowing if he would have a “normal” life one day. Tuberculosis surely led to incoherence and misery. Likewise, like syphilis he did with Nietzsche. In fact, this philosopher, along with Darwin and Haeckel, were part of Kafka's early education. There was within Franz a sympathy for Marx's socialism and atheism as well. Kafka had been interested in literature since he was young, some of the authors who influenced him are: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Goethe, Bataille, Flaubert and Dickens.
Destroying his texts was something recurring in him. From his youth he observed that he wrote differently and rejected that divergence, so he preferred to destroy his writings; to others who saw them or even published them.
He studied law as a last resort, after trying chemistry and German philology. His father encouraged him to study law. He never served as a jurist, however, at the University of Prague where he met Alfred Weber, who, in addition to directing his thesis, encouraged and influenced his theories.
Kafka was a weak man, his health had many problems, he was also very thin and had a childish appearance. He wasn't comfortable with any of this. He felt insecure, shy and withdrawn. Although he also had above-average intelligence and a fine, ironic and mischievous humor. He was sure his desire to eliminate his creation was to escape possible criticism. He was a sociable person perhaps, but never a sociable man.
In his work as an insurance broker he had some success, achieving promotions. Previously he had been doing internships both in courts and in an Italian insurance house -Assicurazioni Generali-, without any relevance or remuneration. His career as a writer, in addition to his countless letters sent to his wives, was between 1918 and 1922, while he was part of the bureaucracy, working in the insurance company - Workplace Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom. of Bohemia-.
Described himself as moody, hypochondriac, taciturn, selfish, unsociable and sickly, in one of his letters to Felice Bauer's father, he revealed an absolute rejection of himself. In addition to his affair with Felice, in 1913, during a stay at the Hartungen sanatorium in Riva del Garda, Trento, he has a small romance with an 18-year-old Swiss girl named Gerti Wasner. This affects his relationship with Felice Bauer, who would maintain his interest in Kafka until 1917.
In 1913 he met Grete Bloch, a German Jew also like Bauer, and her friend. With Grete Bloch, he maintained a special correspondence. Kafka fell in love with Bloch, even though she was Bauer's best friend. The letters he sent to Bloch were more than romantic, erotic. Bloch was the intermediary between Kafka and Bauer, however, this allowed the romance, based on the letters to Grete, to have ended in a son, whom Franz never met, and died at an early age.
Julie Wohryzek, a young woman he met in 1918, in Schelesen, Bohemia - daughter of a Kosher butcher - would be his new love. He became engaged to this young woman, who like Grete Bloch and Franz's three sisters, would all be murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust. Her engagement to Wohryzek did not end in marriage, since Franz's father, who curiously had a very similar origin to the young woman, flatly forbade her son to marry her - this is the origin of Letter to Her Father. -.
Another of the Kafkaesque romances of the author of The Trial was with Milena Jasenská, Czech aristocrat, writer, journalist and translator. She was married, but this did not prevent them from having a relationship for a couple of years. She was disappeared in Ravensbrück in 1944 by the Nazis, despite not being Jewish. She wore the yellow star as a sign of support for the Jews and contempt for the Nazis, and was very active with Dr. von Zadwitzowy in helping Jews and Czech soldiers escape from the Nazi hunt.
He wrote a funeral note for Kafka's death in 1924 that said: "shy, withdrawn, soft and kind, visionary, too wise to live, too weak to fight, one of those who submit to the victor and end up embarrassing him." These beautiful words he wrote in Vienna for the Czech newspaper Narodni Listy, well describe his former lover.
Kafka's last lover, Dora Diamant, a young 25-year-old Polish Jew, with whom he would spend the last moments of his illness in Berlin. Unlike Kafka and his previous muses, she came from a very religious family. She spared no resources to marry him - who was almost twice her age - but the young woman's father did not accept the eventual marriage.
He met Dora in 1923, in Graal-Müritz, on the Baltic Sea. This young woman was her companion until the end of her life a year later. Coming from such a religious family, she brought him closer to Judaism. Although Kafka in his youth had been interested in Yiddish and Hasidic theater. Now with Dora, Kafka would become more interested in the Talmud, even in Kabbalah. In Berlin he attends the Hochschule for Jewish Studies. There he attends Talmud classes from Professor Harry Torczyner. His work the Mouse Town, where he expresses a persecution, which would be interpreted as the anti-Semitism that was already ravaging Europe and of which he could have been another victim, if his disappearance due to tuberculosis had not occurred before. .
Kafka thought about moving to Palestine, with the only woman he lived with, Dora Diamant. Although they did not do it that way, it was not the first time that he had planned it, since he had proposed to Felice Bauer to go to Jerusalem. Franz's Hebrew name was Amschel, like that of his mother's grandfather. That made him feel proud, because he described this ancestor as someone who was learned and very devout, who had been prominent in his time. But, at the same time he felt a lack of identity as a Jew.
I knew that being Jewish was related to having to face threats. Furthermore, he considered himself the “most Western of the Jews”, he shunned the communal and religious idea. In Letter to His Father, he blames his father for his lack of Jewish identity. In his father he only saw selfishness and attachment to material things, as well as social careerism. His father did not agree with Franz's interest in Judaism and literature, he never did.
Works such as The Castle and The Trial are interpreted as allegorical works of Judaism by authorities of the stature of Gershom Scholem, who finds in the second relationship with Kabbalah. Thomas Mann interprets the “loneliness and helplessness of the artist” that Kafka narrates in the prologue to The Castle, as an allusion to the Jew. Walter Benjamin compares the Hasidic parable with the Kafkaesque work. Some see in The Trial and The Penitentiary Colony a prediction of what would later become the Jewish Holocaust.
Max Brod would say that “Kafka has been, of all believers, the least deluded; and among all those who see the world without illusions, the most unbreakable believer.” Thus concluding magical realism and surrealism; along with expressionism and existentialism that Kafka's work relegates to the history of universal literature. He dies at only 40 years old, old enough to be wise and have lived. Vladimir Nabokov said that Kafka was the best German-language writer of his time.
Thanks to the fact that Max Brod, his best friend, and Dora Diamont, his last wife, decide to ignore his desire to eliminate all of his work, history owes them the fact of knowing Franz Kafka. Furthermore, both Brod and Diamant escaped from the Nazis, taking the important work with them. Although the Gestapo managed to confiscate a good part of Kafka's letters and unpublished works from Dora in 1939.
Kafka's work influenced great writers. Camus, Sartre, Borges, Garcia-Márquez, some of them. His work has been analyzed by dozens of intellectuals and writers, such as Hannah Arendt, John Maxwell Coetzee and Elias Canetti. Kafka died in Dr. Hoffmann's sanatorium in Kierling, near Klostenburg, and just outside Vienna. He died of starvation because tuberculosis had reached a point where he could not eat food. He died writing, since it was no longer possible for him to speak. He died of hunger as the protagonist of his penultimate work: An Artist of Hunger. His remains lie in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague-Žižko.
Perhaps, it was written that he should die writing. The Lair, this is his last work, metaphorical of human reality, society and man's problems. His works are of vast existentialist depth. Kafka is a man who did not want to write, but he needed it. His interest was not in being read; much less fame.
He is a pure, authentic author, and his work is so universal that no one should miss reading it. Read this mystical and enigmatic author, who is Gregor Samsa and Joseph K, immersed in the Kafkaesque nightmare, in the dystopia that apparently is much more real than utopia. And the absurdity and paradoxical reality of everyday life. Kafka is nothing more than a naive narrator and a protagonist of his stories, moreover, he is a genius.
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David A. Rosenthal