In 1917, Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and he battled the disease for the rest of his life. The bulk of his literary productivity was in this period, when writing or creative life and work and everyday life were seen as antagonistic forces for him. Kafka obtained a bureaucratic position with a private insurance company associated with the state, where he served from 1908 until his illness. During this time he participated in the student organization Lese- und Redehalle der deutschen Studenten in Prag, a lecture and reading group that was oriented toward German culture and that attracted assimilated German Jewish students, including Max Brod, Felix Weltsch, and Oskar Baum. He began studying German literature but was disillusioned after one semester and completed a degree in law. Acculturation to the German minority of Prague was identified by Jews of Kafka’s father’s generation with upward mobility, although Hermann had many Czech clients and was not himself identified as a German Jew.įrom 1901 to 1906, after a German university-oriented secondary education, Kafka studied in the German division of the nationally divided Charles University of Prague. Like many Prague Jews of his class, he was educated in German and that was the language chiefly spoken at home, although his father Hermann had been raised in rural Bohemia as a Czech-speaker who also spoke and understood Yiddish. Scholars have struggled with the apparent contradiction of strong Jewish and East European interest in life and lack of explicit reference to these interests in the author’s literary work, and it is a difficult problem to address.įranz Kafka was the only son among four children of a successful middle-class merchant in Prague. The style of much of this work seems deliberately stripped of local flavor or accent, and it is this very nakedness and precision of Kafka’s prose that has assured its place in the modernist canon. Yet he saw his literary contribution as a continuation of the great German cultural tradition, and in all of his creative work (mostly short fiction and fragments, novels, and aphorisms) there is virtually no direct reference to Jews or Judaism as such, nor to the specific locales of Prague, Bohemia, or Eastern Europe. Kafka took an interest in and learned Jewish languages later in life, and his diaries and personal correspondence reveal a sustained reflection on his identity as a Jew and on East European Jewish life. All of his surviving fiction was composed in German, which must be considered his mother tongue, although he was raised in a multicultural environment and had a good command of Czech. ![]() ![]() A Jewish writer who was born and lived most of his life in Prague, Franz Kafka was one of the most important contributors to European modernist prose.
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