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Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.

Franz was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers who died in infancy and three younger sisters, all of whom perished in concentration camps.

His father, Hermann Kafka was described as a huge ill-tempered domestic tyrant, who on many occasions directed his anger towards his son and was disrespectful towards his escape into literature. All his life Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father.

Franz did well in school, taking classes like Latin, Greek and history. He obtained the degree of Doctor of Law in 1906. In 1907 Kafka started working in a huge Italian insurance company, where he stayed for nearly a year. He was unhappy with his working time schedule as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On July 15, 1908, he resigned, and a few weeks later found more suitable employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He worked there until July 1922 when he retired for reasons of ill health.

It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life. He also suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He died of tuberculosis on June 3, 1924.

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Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.

Franz at the age of 5

Franz was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers who died in infancy and three younger sisters (Gabriele (1889-1941), Valerie (1890-1942), Ottilie (1892-1943), all of whom perished in concentration camps.

His father, Hermann Kafka (1852-1931), was described as a huge ill-tempered domestic tyrant, who on many occasions directed his anger towards his son and was disrespectful towards his escape into literature.

Kafka's father was a businessman who established himself as an independent retailer of men's and women's fancy goods and accessories, employing up to 15 people.

All his life Kafka struggled to come to terms with his domineering father.

Kafka's mother, Julie (1856-1934), was the daughter of a prosperous brewer and was better educated than her husband. She helped to manage her husband's business and worked in it as much as 12 hours a day. The children were largely raised by a series of governesses and servants.

Education

From 1889 to 1893, Franz attended the Deutsche Knabenschule, the boys elementary school in Prague. He was sent to German schools, not Czech, which demonstrates his father's desire for social advancement. His Jewish upbringing was limited mostly to his bar mitzvah and going to the synagogue four times a year with his father, which didn't give him much to go on.

In 1901 he graduated from the Altstädter Gymnasium, the rigorous classics-oriented secondary school with eight grade levels. He did well in school, taking classes like Latin, Greek and history.

Dr. of Law, age 23

After secondary school he went on to Charles Ferdinand University, where at first he decided to study chemistry, but switched after two weeks to law. In the end of his first year, he met another student a year younger than he was, Max Brod, who would become a close friend of his throughout his life, together with the journalist Felix Weltsch, who also studied law.

Kafka obtained the degree of Doctor of Law on June 18, 1906 and performed an obligatory year of unpaid service as law clerk for the civil and criminal courts.

Work

At the end of 1907 Kafka started working in a huge Italian insurance company, where he stayed for nearly a year. His correspondence during that period witnesses that he was unhappy with his working time schedule - from 8 p.m (20:00) until 6 a.m (06:00) - as it made it extremely difficult for him to concentrate on his writing. On July 15, 1908, he resigned, and few weeks later found more suitable employment with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. He worked there until July 1922 when he retired for reasons of ill health.

He often referred to his job as insurance officer as a "bread job", a job done only to pay the bills. However, he did not show any signs of indifference towards his job, as the several promotions that he received during his career prove that he was a hardworking employee. In parallel, Kafka was also committed to his literary work.

Later Years

In 1912, at the home of his lifelong friend Max Brod, Kafka met Felice Bauer, who lived in Berlin. Over the next five years they corresponded a great deal, met occasionally, and twice were engaged to be married. Their relationship finally ended in 1917.

In 1917, Kafka began to suffer from tuberculosis, which would require frequent convalescence during which he was supported by his family, most notably his sister Ottla. In the early 1920s he developed an intense relationship with Czech journalist and writer Milena Jesenská.

In 1923, he briefly moved to Berlin in the hope of distancing himself from his family's influence to concentrate on his writing. In Berlin, he lived with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family, who was independent enough to have escaped her past in the ghetto. Dora became his lover, and influenced Kafka's interest in the Talmud - a book of Jewish law.

It is generally agreed that Kafka suffered from clinical depression and social anxiety throughout his entire life. He also suffered from migraines, insomnia, constipation, boils, and other ailments, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by a regimen of naturopathic treatments, such as a vegetarian diet and the consumption of large quantities of unpasteurized milk.

Despite all that, his tuberculosis worsened; he returned to Prague, then went to Dr. Hoffmann sanatorium for treatment, where he died on June 3, 1924. His remains are buried alongside his parent's under a two-meter obelisk in Prague's New Jewish Cemetery in Olsanske.

Kafka's resting place, Prague

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Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family on July 3, 1883 in Prague, Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. Franz was the eldest of six children. He had two younger brothers who died in infancy and three younger sisters (Gabriele (1889-1941), Valerie (1890-1942), Ottilie (1892-1943), all of whom perished in concentration camps.

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Kafka’s celebrated novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) was written a century ago, in late 1912, during a period in which he was having difficulty making progress on his first novel. On November 17, 1912, Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer that he was working on a story that “came to me in my misery lying in bed” and now was haunting him. He hoped to get it written down quickly—he hadn’t yet realized how long it would be—as he felt it would turn out best if he could write it in just one or two long sittings. But there were many interruptions, and he complained to Felice several times that the delays were damaging the story. Three weeks later, on December 7, it was finished, though it would be another three years before the story saw print.

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This essay is adapted from the afterword to the author's new translation of "The Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka.
Kafka's celebrated novella The Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung) was written a century ago, in late 1912, during a period in which he was having difficulty making progress on his first novel. On November 17, 1912, Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer that he was working on a story that "came to me in my misery lying in bed" and now was haunting him. He hoped to get it written down quickly-he hadn't yet realized how long it would be-as he felt it would turn out best if he could write it in just one or two long sittings. But there were many interruptions, and he complained to Felice several times that the delays were damaging the story. Three weeks later, on December 7, it was finished, though it would be another three years before the story saw print.

As we know from Max Brod's diary, Kafka read the first section of his "bug piece" ( Wanzensache) aloud to friends on November 24, 1912, and again on December 15. People started talking about it, and Kafka received a query from publisher Kurt Wolff in March 1913 on the recommendation of Kafka's friend Franz Werfel. Franz Blei, the literary editor of the new avant-garde journal Die weissen Blätter, expressed interest, and Robert Musil wrote as well, soliciting the novella for the more established Die neue Rundschau. But months passed before Kafka had a clean manuscript ready for submission, and then World War I intervened, causing further delays (Musil was called up to serve, and because of the war Blei decided to stop printing literary texts). In the spring of 1915, René Schickele took over as editor-in-chief of Die weissen Blätter, and with Max Brod's help, Kafka placed the story there. It came out in October 1915, and then appeared in December 1915 (though dated 1916) as a slender volume published by Kurt Wolff Verlag in Leipzig.

The story's protagonist, Gregor Samsa, is the quintessential Kafka anti-hero. He has worked himself to the point of utter exhaustion to pay off his parents' debts, and his grotesque metamorphosis is the physical manifestation of his abasement. What exactly is he transformed into? In Kafka's correspondence with his publisher, he was adamant that the "insect" ( Insekt) not be depicted on the jacket of the book. And although he and his friends used the word "bug" ( Wanze) when referring casually to the story, the language that appears in the novella itself is carefully chosen to avoid specificity.

The epithet ungeheueres Ungeziefer in the opening sentence poses one of the greatest challenges to the translator. Both the adjective ungeheuer (meaning "monstrous" or "huge") and the noun Ungeziefer are negations- virtual nonentities-prefixed by un. Ungeziefer comes from the Middle High German ungezibere, a negation of the Old High German zebar (related to the Old English ti'ber), meaning "sacrifice" or "sacrificial animal." An ungezibere, then, is an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice, and Ungeziefer describes the class of nasty creepy-crawly things. The word in German suggests primarily six-legged critters, though it otherwise resembles the English word "vermin" (which refers primarily to rodents). Ungeziefer is also used informally as the equivalent of "bug," though the connotation is "dirty, nasty bug"-you wouldn't apply the word to cute, helpful creatures like ladybugs. In my translation, Gregor is transformed into "some sort of monstrous insect" with "some sort of" added to blur the borders of the somewhat too specific "insect"; I think Kafka wanted us to see Gregor's new body and condition with the same hazy focus with which Gregor himself discovers them.

That same blurred focus applies to other aspects of the story. Although Vladimir Nabokov-with his penchant for exactitude-has mapped out the Samsa flat in some detail, I am far from certain that Kafka himself-with his penchant for the blurred perceptions of bewilderment-was much concerned with the apartment's precise geography. How many rooms does this apartment have? Many, too many; just as Gregor, lying on his back in the story's opening sentences, discovers he has "these many little legs" waving in the air above him. Both are physical correlatives of a life that has gotten out of hand. Kafka is not even particularly attentive to the continuity of his cast of characters. Early on in the story we see the maid give notice and flee, only to find her still working in the household several pages later and in fact doing all the cooking, since now it is the cook who quit. Except for the charwoman who plays a starring role in the penultimate scenes, the household help is just part of the furniture of the story, like the cabinet that gets shifted to another room.

Even the main characters tend to appear categorically, named only by their functions: "father," "mother," "sister." Only one of them gets a name, Grete (rhymes with beta), but even she is usually referred to only as "sister" throughout, until the decisive moment near the end when she becomes instead a "daughter." By defining all these characters through their relationship to Gregor, Kafka slyly allows Gregor's point of view to dominate the story even when he is not actually present in the scene being described.

One leitmotif I was unable to preserve in translation is the theme of ruhig/unruhig. Ruhig denotes "calm," "peaceful," "quiet," "tranquil," "at ease," and unruhig its opposite. Starting with the unruhigen Träumen ("troubled dreams") in the first sentence, the narrative oscillates between untroubled and troubled, tranquil and harried, peaceful and unsettled. Since no one word in English fits well enough in all the contexts Kafka presents, I decided to translate the word in many different ways; but note when you are reading all these synonyms that you are watching a motif unfold.

The post-metamorphosis activity that gives Gregor the greatest sense of freedom appears in my translation as "crawling": he enjoys crawling around the walls and ceiling of his room. Ironically, the German verb kriechen (which also translates as "to creep") has the additional meaning of "to cower." To kriechen before someone is to act sycophantically toward him. In this sense, too, Gregor's new physical state appears as a representation of his long-standing spiritual abjectness.

Finally Gregor has only himself to blame for the wretchedness of his situation, since he has willingly accepted wretchedness as it was thrust upon him. Like other of Kafka's doomed protagonists, he errs by failing to act, instead allowing himself to be acted upon. Gregor Samsa, giant bug, is a cartoon of the subaltern, a human being turned inside out. He has traded in his spine for an exoskeleton, but even this armorlike shell ("carapace" and "armor" are the same word in German, Panzer) is no defense once his suddenly powerful father starts pelting him with apples-an ironically biblical choice of weapon.

Gregor is a salesman, but what he's sold is himself: his own agency and dignity, making him a sellout through and through. For this reason I occasionally use the word "drummer" (commercial traveler) to describe his profession, referring back to another of his ilk, "a hardworking drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them." That's Willy Loman as described by Arthur Miller in Death of a Salesman (1949). The Metamorphosis is Kafka's own Death of a Salesman, with all the sad, grubby tragedy, all the squalor. Like Willy Loman, Gregor is a suicide, though of a different sort: he dies a hunger artist, perishing of starvation because nothing tastes good to him anymore. And like Willy's, Gregor's death is the final service he performs for the benefit of his family.

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On Translating Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

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This essay is adapted from the afterword to the author's new translation of "The Metamorphosis," by Franz Kafka. Kafka's celebrated novella The Metamorphosis ( Die Verwandlung) was written a century ago, in late 1912, during a period in which he was having difficulty making progress on his first novel.

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(Non-Fiction Connection) Agassi's childhood misery the real shock

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(Non-Fiction Connection) Agassi's childhood misery the real shock

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“I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.” Day in and day out, Andre Agassi’s father ran his son mercilessly through his own brand of tennis boot camp. Daddy’s constant tennis hard-lining did have the expected result, in that it turned Andre into a kind of tennis-playing superhero. But in the process he also cultivated a deep, dark hatred of the sport. His miserable childhood led him to develop an addiction for crystal meth.

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Agassi's childhood misery the real shock

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Title: Family Story 07-11

Creator: Yim, Man Hyeok

Date Created: 2007

Yim, Man Hyeok shows us a seeming indifference, primal anxiety, and isolation of the individual in the framework of the family spirit of blood relatives. He forbids himself to send a careless message of omnipotent hope that could save the people in his work. Like the small lighthouse hardly visible in the distance, everything is too far away and weak. Almost everything depends on the free will of the protagonists.

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Family Story 07-11 - Yim, Man Hyeok - Google Arts & Culture

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The artist's actual family is the model of this work. He observed their relationship and the tension and expressed it on the paper.

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A Broken Family Tree

© Lori McBride More By Lori McBride

Published: February 2006

I am one of many

Small branches of a broken tree,

Always looking to the ones above

For guidance, strength and security.

One little branch trying

To keep the others from breaking away.

Who will fall?

And who will stay?

Now I stand alone,

Looking at the earth through the rain,

And I see the broken branches I knew

Scattered about me in pain.

There are those who have taken an ax

To the root of our very foundation

And who have passed this destruction

Down to every new generation.

If I could take that ax,

I would toss it deep into the sea,

Never to return again

To harm the generations that follow me.

I am one of many,

But alone I will go

And plant the new seeds

Where a beautiful tree will grow.

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A metaphor of a family to a tree, each branch integral to the whole. I am one of many
Small branches of a broken tree,
Always looking to the ones above
For guidance, strength and security.