Franz Kafka

Since we're starting Franz Kafka some time this semester, I thought I'd put up some background info about him. Most of this information came from a bunch of different sources including Wiki and kafka-franz.com/kafka-Biography.htm


Franz Kafka was born July 3, 1883 to a upper middle class Jewish family in Prague. Both his parents worked full time at their family store and Franz and his three sisters (who were later killed at concentration camps) were raised by governesses. "Franz's relationship with his father was severely troubled as explained in the Letter to His Father in which he complained of being profoundly affected by father's authoritative and demanding character,"(wiki). We read a lot of negative depictions of fathers in Benjamin's essay on Kafka, likely from this relationship.

Franz went to a private German school growing up and then went to the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague. He began studying chemistry but after two weeks switched to law. After graduating, he worked for insurance agencies for the rest of his life. These had flexible hours that enabled him to write but most of his work was published after his death.

The most interesting biography I found was on kafka-franz.com. According to this, Franz was a playboy and out of his mind most of his life.

"Throughout his college days and well into adulthood, Franz was definitely not living the life of a monk. He had numerous affairs and one-night stands with barmaids, waitresses, and shopgirls, not to mention his visits to the whorehouses, activities that most men in Prague at the time also indulged in. However, these relations with women were entirely sexual. They didn't mean anything to him beyond immediate sexual gratification. The most bizarre aspect of his sex life, though, was that sex was absolutely repulsive and disgusting to him. Hence, the very idea of "normal married life" with a respectable woman was too much for him. "Coitus as the punishment for the happiness of being together," he wrote in his diary, when faced with the prospect of marriage and what that would entail. He would time and again break off engagements, sometimes nearly at the last minute, in order to escape it. Franz seems to have suffered from the malady common to many at that place and time: namely, the virgin/whore complex, where every woman is either a "nice girl" or a slut, with no room in between. So a normal, adult affair with a woman he liked and respected would prove all but impossible, as Felice Bauer soon found out. Felice On the evening of August 13, 1912, Franz met Felice Bauer, born November 18, 1887 and living in Berlin, at Brod's house and soon became enamored of her?at least of the image of her he had in his mind. He began writing her long letters about everything, although mostly about himself and his feelings of inadequacy. In this first flush of love he wrote "The Judgment" on the night of 22-23 September, which he dedicated to her. He considered it his first mature work, and proudly read it to his family and friends. In November and December he wrote "The Metamorphosis." He also worked at Amerika, or Der Verschollene (The Stoker, the first chapter, appeared separately in book form in 1913); work on it continued sporadically until 1914. During this time, in September 1913 he went to a sanatorium in Riva, Italy for his health, which had never been extrordinarily good, and there met an 18-year-old Swiss girl, Gerti Wasner, whom he liked very much. He would do cute things like knock on the ceiling (their rooms were directly on top of each other) and go to the window to talk to her at night, or write fairy tales to read her over breakfast. Although this affair only lasted the ten days they were there together, it seems to have made a deep impression on him. Meanwhile the courship by letter of Felice continued. He would write her every day, sometimes even more often, frequently complaining about how bad or dirty he was, but confident that she would listen to it all. Eventually he proposed to her in 1913, and she accepted, although in the same letter Franz wrote asking her he also went on and on as to why he would be bad for her.

Although Franz proposed again to Felice in July 1917 after actually spending a week with her at Marienbad, and later taking a trip with her to Budapest, he began coughing up blood and in August was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Always fearful of marriage and sex, this spelled the end of his relationship with Felice, who had had about enough of his crap. She married another man in 1919 but kept his letters " (kafka-franz.com)

He died June 3, 1928 of TB.