“Our art consists of being dazzled by the Truth.”
I. Life and Work
“His books are amazing. He himself is far more amazing.”
—Milena Jisenská
A sensitive soul concerned for the weak, Kafka often depicted vulnerable characters overpowered by elusive impersonal authority, famously penning the Kafkaesque. Almost invariably, his stories conjure complex narratives, unexpected detail, and haunting metaphysical mystery. Traces of the Kafkaesque can be found in Kafka’s own life and city, if you look. The text and images below seek to prop open a window to peek back in time at the world of Kafka and the Kafkaesque in Prague.
As one must recall, Franz Kafka was a Jewish author writing in German shortly before Germany embraced totalitarianism and genocide. Ironically, his untimely death at the age of 40, in 1924, would spare him from the holocaust. His three sisters, however, were not spared.
Kafka existed in the shadow of power, fearing its arbitrary abuse, but mocking it too. His own experience grew out of a conflicted relationship with a domineering father. His unpublished (in his lifetime) work Dearest Father (or Letter to My Father) opens with an expression of this ever-present fear of his father: “You asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you. I did not know, as usual, how to answer, partly for the very reason that I am afraid of you, partly because an explanation of my fear would require more details than I could even begin to make coherent in speech.” He would go on to write, “You took on, for me, that enigmatic quality of all tyrants whose right to rule is founded on their identity rather than on reason.”
Yet he maintained a distinct sense of humor. His friend and literary executor, Max Brod, called him one of the most amusing people he had ever met. When reading to friends from his own work, he would laugh aloud at the macabre, comic silliness of his own narratives, laughing “so much that there were moments when he couldn’t read any further.” The foibles of the world amused him, as did his own writing, which he could treat lightly, as well as seriously. He balanced, according to Brod, “on the line between seriousness and the comic” so that “[i]t was often impossible to tell whether he meant what he said seriously or as a joke.”
Kafka’s background, perhaps, gave him unique perceptive powers. In his writing, he seemed to perceive marginal modern man’s precarious position in the face of shadowy state or institutional power. In The Trial, his protagonist wakes to find himself inexplicably under arrest, subject to some mysterious all-encompassing judicial process, powerless to extricate himself. A warder enigmatically explains, “Our officials . . . never go hunting for crime in the populace, but, as the Law decrees, are drawn toward the guilty and must then send out us warders. That is the Law. How could there be a mistake in that?”
So too his narratives suggest spiritual unease before intimations of an all-powerful divine force, evoking a humanity helpless and without a spiritual homeland. In his parable “Before the Law,” a dying supplicant on the threshold of the gateway to the Law desires entry through the gateway, through which he perceives “a radiance that streams inextinguishably.” In answer to his dying question, the doorkeeper responds, “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”
Kafka was engaged three times to two women but never married. He feared being alone, writing in his diary on July 21, 1913, “Inability to bear living alone, not any inability to live, quite the contrary . . . but to bear the onslaught of my own life, the onset of time and old age, the vague pressure of the itch to write, my sleeplessness, the near approach of madness—I am unable to bear all this alone.” Yet marriage, too, caused fear. Only a few lines later he writes, “I must be alone a great deal. All that I have accomplished is the result of being alone.”
Late in his short life, Kafka dreamed of traveling to Palestine (this was before the formation of modern Israel), even of settling there perhaps. He began studying Hebrew. But this too, like much of his writing, was finally an unfinished journey, pointing to longed for knowledge and experience, but just over the horizon, beyond reach. He never reached Palestine. He died from tuberculosis in 1924, having suffered from the disease for at least seven years.
He did not die alone, in the end. In April 1924, as his health deteriorated, he was taken to a sanatorium outside Vienna. He was accompanied by Dr. Robert Klopstock and by Dora Diamant, Kafka’s final partner, whom he had hoped to marry but whose father opposed. The three friends came to refer to themselves as “Franz’s little family.” This familial arrangement would last less than two months. Kafka died on June 3, 1924.
II. Literary Afterlife
“Man cannot live without a permanent faith in something indestructible in himself.”
—Kafka
“A century after his birth, he seems the last holy writer.”
—John Updike
Remarkably, Kafka’s writing has been saved time and again. His friend and literary executor, Max Brod, rejected Kafka’s instruction to burn his unpublished writing after his death. In short order, he published, The Trial, The Castle, and America, or The Man Who Disappeared, among other works, sharing Kafka’s singular stories with the world.
Then in the next decade, a second rescue followed. In March 1939, Nazi Germany stormed into Prague and annexed Czechoslovakia. Brod, who was also Jewish, fled Prague on the last train out of the city with two suitcases full of Kafka’s papers, reportedly escaping five minutes before the Nazis closed the border.
Finally, in 2019, Kafka’s remaining unpublished papers, stashed away in safe deposit boxes in Zurich during a protracted legal contest over Brod’s estate, were saved from obscurity and legal limbo when a Zurich court upheld an earlier ruling by the Supreme Court of Israel. The papers will be preserved (and digitized) by the National Library of Israel.
In his diary, Kafka wrote the following poignant prayer: “Have mercy on me, I am sinful in every corner of my being. But I had not entirely despicable talents, little, tender capabilities, dissipated them, ill-advised person that I was, am now ready at the last gasp, at a time when outwardly everything might take a turn for the good for me. Don’t thrust me among the lost souls.”
There remains one last, ongoing rescue of Kafka, “the 20th-century Job.” As we say a Kaddish prayer for Kafka. As we read his words and his singular spirit abides. As we peer through his penetrating window on the world, moved maybe by compassion or awe, laughter or illumination, perhaps then we may remember and render him (and others) some portion of love and compassion he missed in life.
The images that follow seek to illuminate Kafka’s Prague, the city that, he said, “doesn’t let go.” May they help facilitate a double journey—ushering the reader across that unique, invisible threshold into the uncanny realm of the Kafkaesque, as manifested in Kafka’s hometown of Prague, and scattering Kafka’s flashes of insight abroad like seed to take root, grow, and bear fruit in time.
Now, in our own time, as totalitarian power renews its siren song again, Kafka’s writing remains ever-relevant, a timeless exploration of universal victimhood in the face of mysterious, opaque machinations of fallen human power. A confession of human frailty, a glimpse of dark truths, a call to compassion.
