Happy Birthday, Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born the eldest of six children on July 3, 1883, in Prague, which was then considered part of Bohemia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His family spoke German; Franz also learned Czech (primarily from governesses as Kafka’s parents worked long hours at the family haberdasher store) and later, some French. His two brothers died when Kafka was only 6 and his three younger sisters outlived him but are thought to have perished in concentration camps.

Franz Kafka enrolled at Charles Ferdinand University to study chemistry but soon switched to law. This made his father happy, but Kafka did it primarily, he said, so that it wouldn’t interfere with this mental life. While at school, he met fellow student Max Brod, already a writer of some note, and the two formed a strong friendship that would last a lifetime.

Kafka and Brod, along with Brod’s friend Felix Weltsch, were what became known as the “close Prague circle,” a subset of a larger Prague Circle, which was a group of German-Jewish writers.

Kafka took a series of jobs in insurance companies so that he could concentrate on his writing.  He did, however, invent the first civilian hard hat, significantly reducing steel mill deaths in Bohemia. He was awarded a medal in 1912 in recognition. 

Although Kafka was committed to his writing, he was plagued by doubts and insecurities. Brod tried to encouraged him, but Kafka was reticent to publish in his lifetime, only allowing “Meditation,” a collection of sketches and short stories, to be printed in 1913. He often suffered from ill health and spent numerous stints in sanatoriums to regain his strength. He lived with his parents throughout his life, but he did have a series of romantic attachments which fueled his writing. But these letters, stories and diaries were also not published until after his death, and only came to light because Max Brod acted as executor of Kafka’s material and ignored the writer’s will to have his material burned, calling Kafka as “the greatest poet of our time,” on a par with Goethe and Tolstoy.

To view all things Kafka, including pictures, writing samples and critical examinations of his work, visit Daniel Hornek’s Franz Kafka site.

In his final months, Kafka lived with his last girlfriend, Dora Diamant; he asked her father for permission to marry her, but was denied. He died of acute tuberculosis on June 3, 1924, in a sanatorium near Vienna, and was buried in the New Jewish cemetery in Prague. His parents died in the early 1930s and were later buried with him.

In a biography of Dora Diamant, entitled “Kafka’s Last Love,” her daughter Kathi claims that Dora kept Kafka’s last diaries until the Gestapo seized them, and an ongoing search for them continues to this day.

Explore the relationship between the writer’s work and his home city at the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague.