Kafka is studying at the German School and can also speak Czech. For this reason, Germans do not accept full Germans and Czechs as full Czechs. Kafka grows up in this dilemma, estranged from society.
Kafka was born in Prague in 1883. The son of a rich and enlightened German-Jewish mother, Franz Kafka is said to owe much of his introverted and restless personality to his mother. The two brothers of Kafka, the eldest child of the family, died at a young age. His sisters Elli, Valli, and Ottla died 19 years after Kafka's death, in Nazi Germany's Jewish massacre.
Kafka's relationship with his dominant father forms the basis of all his relationships and works. The 100-page Letter to Father he wrote to his father will never reach his address. This letter is proof that Kafka both despised and admired his father. It is a masterpiece that carries the essence of all the works of Franz Kafka. The pages of the letter are full of descriptions that will open new sub-topics for psychiatrists, pedagogues, literati, and readers that will be discussed for years to come. It is equipped with a perspective that concerns anyone who has ever had a father or a child.
Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
“In order to resist you even a little bit, partly as a kind of revenge, I soon began to observe and collect the ridiculous little things that I noticed in you, exaggerating. It would upset me, for instance, that you could easily admire people who were only seemingly superior to you most of the time, and that you could constantly talk about them, say an imperial counselor or something like that, while you, my father, needed and bragged about such worthless affirmations for his own worth." (Letter to Father)
Kafka is studying at the German School and can also speak Czech. For this reason, Germans do not accept full Germans and Czechs as full Czechs. Kafka grows up in this dilemma, estranged from society. Kafka is a Jew among Christians. He comes from an art-loving family. These contradictions affected Kafka badly and made him the author of Lostness.
In The Trial, which he wrote in 1925, he tells the personal adventure and experiences of Joseph K, a hardworking and single banker in his thirties. The first sentence of the novel is quite striking. “Someone must have slandered Joseph K; because he was arrested one morning even though he had done nothing wrong.”
Kafka summed up his works as dark and pessimistic as he was, by saying, “Life is a battle lost at the very beginning”. There are also great parallels between Kafka's autobiography and the heroes of the novels he created in his works and their lives. It can be thought that the heroes named K in most of the works represent Kafka. In the Castle novel, K is in a village where he is a stranger, and he has to struggle with foreign people to reach the Castle, which he is also unfamiliar with.
In the story called Transformation, the theme of which is alienation, there are many elements parallel to Kafka's own life. The Metamorphosis is Kafka's own narrative, undoubtedly an assertive one. Gregor Samsa's relationship with his father also has many similarities that describe Kafka's relationship with his father.
The way he shapes the ordinariness of daily life with surreal events and this special way of presentation in his works has ensured the establishment of his unique Kafkaesque concept. This style of expression and Kafkaesque expression have found a place in many fields of cinema, literature, and fine arts.
Kafka wrote Aphorisms between October 1917 and February 1920. At that time, Kafka's inner world was turned upside down. He has just learned that he has tuberculosis; separated from his long-term fiancee Felice Bauer; had taken a long-term leave from the Workers' Accident Insurance Company, where he worked from 1908 to 1922, due to illness, and had now accepted that he could bring his family to enjoy neither his marriage nor the happiness of being recognized as a famous writer.
After meeting Czech journalist and translator Milena Jesenska-Polak, who started with the desire to translate all of Kafka's works written in German into Czech, the two corresponded constantly between 1920 and 1923. Milena is married to a writer. Kafka corresponded for years even though he knew their relationship was hopeless.
This novel, which tells the life of Karl, a young Prague boy who left his family at the age of 16 and went to America to live with his rich uncle, in Kafka's America, differs significantly from Kafka's other two novels, The Trial and the Castle, with its optimistic attitude.
Kafka contracted tuberculosis in 1917. In the spring of 1922, his health deteriorated. After being treated in a sanatorium several times, he was admitted to a sanatorium in Lower Austria at the beginning of April 1924. He died on June 3, 1924, at the age of 41. Kafka asked his best friend Max Brod to burn all these works when he died, but luckily Max Brod could not stay on this request.