Hard upon this he wrote the story “The Judgment” in a single night, and followed it within a month with “The Stoker” and “The Metamorphosis.” But within five years-a last evasion of that marriage which he still continued to desire so passionately-he had contracted his deadly illness, which he penetratingly greeted with these words: “My head got together with my lungs behind my back.” In August 1912 he met his future fiancée. In trying to do this he made himself a writer first of all, but then came to grief because of his failure to accomplish his original aim. He died before his parents, and it is a symbol of his ultimate failure to escape from them that even in death he shares his grave with them.įor Kafka the only real proof of independence would have been to found a family of his own. Not until the last year of his life did Kafka venture to move from Prague to Berlin, and then it was only to be brought back home mortally ill in the spring. The consequence was that he remained dependent on his father to the end, and in a state of painful subjection to him. So strong was the father’s influence, particularly on the son, that Kafka had not only to fight continually for his own existence, but even wanted his father to give him approval for it. It was not until six years after his birth that the first of his three sisters was born. Franz, too-the only son, after the death in infancy of two brothers-was called on to help out in the business. Hermann Kafka kept his home and his business-a store selling to retailers-as close together as possible, claiming his wife, who was a woman of deep feeling, wholly for himself. Kafka’s family was ruled by his father, who had risen to the status of a wholesale dealer in fancy goods. He died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-one, on June 3, 1924. He chose to study law, in which he felt no great interest, because he thought it would distract him least from his “one desire and one calling, which is literature.” At twenty-five he became an officer of the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute of Prague nine years later, upon his suddenly falling ill with tuberculosis, he was given a leave of absence and shortly thereafter was retired. Let us look at some of these interpretations, and at the evidence to be found in Kafka’s life and work itself.įranz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3, 1883. The character and direction of his genius has been endlessly debated, and every year sees new interpretations of his works. Withal, it has still not been settled in which realm his true significance lies. The forced exile of the German Jews, hardly ten years after Kafka’s death, carried his reputation to the four corners of the earth and humanity in its period of uprooting during and after the Second World War has increasingly discovered its dilemmas and its fate expressed in his unique works. The name of Franz Kafka, scarcely known twenty-five years ago when he died with his most important works still unpublished, today echoes round the world. The article is translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. This article grew out of a speech delivered in Zurich on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Kafka’s death. Goldschmidt here attempts to give us a key to Kafka calculated not so much to supplant the other interpretations as to provide a common underpinning for them all. One explanation for this paradox may lie in the fact that the literal surface of Kafka’s writing has been made the base for a mountain of confusing and contradictory interpretations. In some ways Kafka is the clearest of modern writers, and yet in the mind of the general reading public he is classed among the “difficult” writers who can be read only by the specialist. Though Franz Kafka is now recognized as one of the greatest writers of our century, enthusiasm for his work is still confined to relatively restricted circles.
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