The life of Franz Kafka

By Serkan PİŞKİN Literature September 3, 2020

Franz Kafka lived his life always immersed in overwhelming dreams and nightmares, and reflected this in his works. You will definitely get your share of those overwhelming dreams from Franz Kafka’s stories.

Franz Kafka begins The Metamorphosis, one of the most beautiful long stories in the world, with the following sentence.

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections.”

This sentence is one of the most important sentences in the history of world literature and the owner of this sentence is the subject of our article today.

It is possible that you have reached different information about the life of Franz Kafka in many different fields, and we thought of adding a new link to this Kafka chain. But a colorful ring…

If you are someone whose name has been a verb in the history of world literature, it cannot be denied that you are an important person for that world literary history. I don’t know if you’ve heard it before, but there is a word derived from the last name of such a person.

Biography of Franz Kafka

The life of Franz Kafka

Kafkaesque

It is an adjective derived from the surname of Franz Kafka and, like Kafka’s descriptions, can mean threatening or frightening. Specific to Kafka’s style, it is a word known as a natural part of the narrative flow in his stories and expressing the state of breaking away from the perceived reality.

Franz Kafka was born to a family that owned a haberdashery shop in Prague.

Franz Kafka caught the pulse of society and a sense of universal alienation very well, and while he was in these troubles, he managed to turn this situation into great texts.

It can be said that these troubles, these feelings, took an important place in Kafka’s life, thanks to his father, who was very oppressive.

His father thought that Kafka was not as elegant and noble as himself, but that Kafka was incompetent, scrawny, and inept. For this reason, his behavior towards Kafka caused Franz Kafka to withdraw. Despite this, Franz Kafka continued to do his best. He could be considered a successful student at school. School life went better than expected and graduated from law.

But he had already discovered that it was reading and writing that took the real burden on him and lightened his soul. These were at the top of a bulky list of pursuits that his father Hermann Kafka deemed unimportant.

Business and Franz Kafka

Kafka, who failed as a lawyer, also tried insurance. He took a job at The Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia. This job did not satisfy Kafka as expected. Working conditions were very harsh, working hours were too long.

In addition, Kafka had to scratch the parts of the hands and fingers that were stuck in the machines almost all day.

Biography and Literary Works of Franz Kafka | The life of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka‘s private life was not that different from his life outside, either. So a depressing life. Franz Kafka regularly goes to the brothels in Prague. He also supported his private life with one-night stands. Kafka was disgusted with sex. She was in an imbalance of treating every woman she came across as either a virgin or a slut.

Sexually, he apparently oscillated between an ascetic aversion to intercourse, which he called “the punishment for being together,” and an attraction to prostitutes. Sex in Franz Kafka’s writings is frequently connected with dirt or guilt and treated as an attractive abomination.

Franz Kafka’s Muses

Despite all this, Franz Kafka surprisingly managed to fit a few long relationships during this period.

Kafka met Felice Bauer while staying at Brod’s house in Berlin in 1912. He wrote long letters to the girl in which he poured out his physical deficiencies. Felice Bauer inspired the author’s “The Judgment” and “The Metamorphosis”.

Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis | The life of Franz Kafka

Kafka cheated on this muse with another muse candidate. And these muses were friends. The name of the muse candidate is Grete Bloch. After years Grete Bloch claimed that her child’s father was Kafka.

Franz Kafka’s relationship with Felice ended very tragically. Felice ended up reading Franz’s love letters to Grete out loud again.

Kafka established a relationship with Milena Jesenka-Poliak, wife of his friend Ernst Poliak, by mail. This relationship ended in 1923 at Kafka’s insistence. The author was later inspired by Milena in a character for the novel “The Castle”.

How did Franz Kafka die?

Kafka last met Dora in 1923, from an Orthodox Polish family. They had dreams of emigrating to Palestine and opening a restaurant together, but this dream was cut short by the death of Franz Kafka in 1924. Kafka’s cause of death was tuberculosis.

Hypochondriac Franz Kafka

It didn’t surprise anyone that Kafka died young. His friends used to know him as a hypochondriac. All his life, he would complain about migraines, insomnia, constipation, shortness of breath, rheumatism, acne, hair loss, fatigue, some imagined, some real diseases at the same time.

Franz Kafka tried to overcome these problems with strict diets and natural remedies.

In 1917, he contracted tuberculosis, possibly because of the milk he drank. At the end of his life, he spent seven years trying to overcome this illness, trying to find the medicine and the fresh air that would be good for his lungs. To Brod, who was his friend while he died; He asked him to burn all his works, except for The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, In The Penal Colony, and A Country Doctor.

Of course, as we know, Brod did not comply with this request.

Kafka may have invented the hard hat

A professor named Peter Drucker puts forward this thesis in his book “Managing in the next society”, but this issue is uncertain, what is certain is that Franz Kafka was a security and insurance manager good enough to be awarded a medal by the American Security Association.