KAFKA, FRANZ. — Born in Prague on 3 July 1882 into a Jewish family, died of tuberculosis in Kierling (Vienna) on 3 June 1924. He graduated in law in 1906 at his hometown university. Some of his most significant stories date to 1912, the year of a trip 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 “Fontancreis.”
The anxious and pessimistic life experience of K., which is reflected in his work with the monomaniacal force of a nightmare, is continually explored both in the stories he himself saw published (the aforementioned ones, plus: *Betrachtung* [1913], *Ein Landarzt* and *In der Strafkolonie* [1919], *Der Hungerkünstler* [1924]) and in the three major novel fragments published posthumously. The grimly hostile world of *Amerika*, the mysterious tribunal of *Der Prozess*, the suffocating bureaucracy of *Das Schloss* represent one pole of K.’s poetic world, with a protagonist who, alone before an unknown and elusive enemy, ends up being suppressed along with his vital problems. The other pole is represented by a faith that, sometimes accompanied by hope, has led some to imprudently discern in K. a progressive movement toward Catholic positions, but which, far more often desperate, recalls existentialist stances, both through direct influence of Kierkegaard and, more so, through a kinship of temperament.
Indeed, the problem that most of all can bring the reader 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 a poetic myth in the fragment *Vor dem Gesetz*, published in 1919, in *Ein Landarzt*, and reworked in *Der Prozess*, ch. 9. The relationship of man to supernatural law is here felt and fixed in terms of a hallucinated vision, with sharply defined contours, leaving no room for hope. Every man has his own door, his own gatekeeper; entry into the realm of the law is barred, and when the man dies after years of waiting, the gatekeeper shuts the door through which no one else will ever pass. Never, perhaps, as in this brief parable, has K. succeeded in synthesizing the drama of the human soul in search of the divine and of a reason for living: the imperative necessity of positing a law on the one hand, and on the other the profound and vital sense of the need for an inner and individual conquest of the law itself.
This is the drama of all of K.’s heroes, and it is this passionate defense of the category of the individual and the singular that can bring him close to Kierkegaard, among the precursors of modern existentialism, while from the Jewish-Talmudic tradition one can derive the gloomy fatalism and the taste for mercilessly exact analyses, subtle and exhausting arguments.