K

The timid, reticent son of a robust self-made

businessman, Kafka was born in Prague, and

educated at the German Gymnasium and

then the German University, where he read

law. After receiving his doctorate he worked

from 1908 until 1922 for the Workers’

Accident Insurance Institute, where his duties

were to write reports concerning the dangers

of various trades and recommending methods

of accident-prevention. Until 1915 Kafka

lived with his parents, helping in their shop

during his spare time, a fact which, combined

with the exigencies of his profession, left him

with little time for writing. He was thus com-

pelled, to the eventual detriment of his health,

to do his writing at night, and in 1909 and

1910 published a number of short prose pieces

in literary journals. Through his close lifelong

friend the writer Max Brod, in August 1912

Kafka met Felice Bauer, a young woman from

Berlin with whom, for the next five years, he

pursued a troubled relationship involving him

in profound vacillation. Twice engaged to

Felice, Kafka found himself torn between

reluctance to bear life alone and the fear that

marriage would involve a threat to the solitude

which he saw as a necessary precondition of his

art. In the event, Kafka never married,

although in addition to Felice a number of

women played an important part in his emo-

tional life, including Dora Dymant with

whom, towards the end of his life, he lived for

a short time in Berlin. But the quickened

development of tuberculosis, which had been

diagnosed in 1917, caused him to return to

Prague and thence to a sanatorium in Vienna

where he died in 1924, leaving instructions to

Max Brod that his unpublished writings should

be burned. Brod disobeyed, thus rescuing from

oblivion the three unfinished novels, America

(Amerika, largely written 1911-14, trans. 1949),

The Trial (Der Prozess, 1914-15, trans. 1937),

and The Castle (Das Schloss, 1922, trans. 1930,

rev. 1969).