KAFKA, FRANZ. — Born in Prague on 3 July 1882 into a Jewish family, he died of tuberculosis at Kierling (Vienna) on 3 June 1924. He obtained a degree in law in 1906 from the University of his native city. Some of his most significant stories date from 1912, the year of a journey to Weimar: Das Urteil and Die Verwandlung; it seems that the novel Amerika also dates from this period. In 1915 he was awarded a literary prize, the “Fontanepreis.”
K.’s bitter and pessimistic experience of life, which is reflected in his work with the monotonous force of a nightmare, is constantly explored both in the stories whose publication the author himself supervised (those already mentioned, together with Betrachtung [1913], Ein Landarzt and In der Strafkolonie [1919], Der Hungerbünstler [1924]), and in the three extensive novel drafts published posthumously. The sullenly hostile world of Amerika, the mysterious tribunal of Der Prozess, and the suffocating bureaucracy of Das Schloss represent one pole of K.’s poetic world, with a protagonist who, solitary before an unknown and elusive enemy, ends by being suppressed together with his vital problems. The other pole is represented by a faith which, sometimes accompanied by hope, has led some imprudently to discern in K. a progressive approach to Catholic positions, but which, much more often despairing, recalls existentialist positions, both through the influence of Kierkegaard and, even more, through an affinity of temperament.
Indeed, the problem that more than any other can bring the reader closer to a deeper understanding of K.’s world and thought is that of the relationship between man and the law. This problem is transfigured into poetic myth in the fragment Vor dem Gesetz, published in 1919 in Ein Landarzt and reworked in Der Prozess, chapter 9. Man’s relationship with the supernatural law is here felt and fixed in the terms of a hallucinated vision, with sharply defined contours that leave no room for hope. Every man has his own door and his own guardian; entry into the kingdom of the law is barred and, when the man dies after years of waiting, the guardian closes the door through which no one else will be able to pass. Perhaps never, as in this brief parable, did K. succeed in synthesizing so fully the drama of the human soul in search of the divine and of a reason for living: on the one hand, the imperative necessity of postulating a law and, on the other, the profound and living awareness of the necessity of an inner and individual conquest of that very law.
This is the drama of all K.’s heroes, and it is this passionate defense of the category of the individual and the singular person that can bring him close to Kierkegaard, one of the precursors of modern existentialism; while the somber fatalism and the taste for ruthlessly exact analyses and subtle, exhausting arguments may be derived from the Judaeo-Talmudic tradition.
Giulio de Angelis