German-language Jewish writer from Prague whose three unfinished novels and his short fiction are, with Joyce and Proust, one of the three central bodies of European literary modernism — and the one most directly taken up by 20th-century philosophy, theology, and social theory as something more than literature. Kafka trained in law, worked his adult life at a workers' accident insurance institute in Prague, lived in the apartment of his overbearing father for most of his thirty years there, was engaged three times without marrying, and died of tuberculosis at forty. He asked his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts; Brod disobeyed, and published The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927) posthumously.
The work proceeds by a single recognizable method: an ordinary protagonist is placed inside a system whose rules are real, consequential, and finally unknowable. Joseph K. is arrested one morning without charge and is executed a year later still not knowing what for. The land-surveyor K. is summoned to the Castle by an authority that will neither refuse nor acknowledge him. Gregor Samsa wakes as a giant insect and the family adjusts. The administrative machinery of the penal colony inscribes each prisoner's sentence into his body with a needle. In each case what Kafka describes is not surrealism — the events are presented with scrupulous realist detail — but the experience of a modern administrative order from the standpoint of the person caught in it. That the order might be legal, religious, familial, imperial, or bureaucratic is part of the point; all of them rhyme.
His readers have claimed him variously. Walter Benjamin's 1934 essay — still the indispensable theoretical reading — refused both the religious-allegorical and the psychoanalytic interpretations and insisted on Kafka as the writer who had registered, before anyone else, the "prehistory" of the coming century. Camus's "Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka" (1943) took him as an existentialist avant la lettre. Adorno and the Frankfurt School read him as the first clear-eyed registry of the totally administered world. Hannah Arendt's 1944 essay claimed him for a distinctively Jewish political modernism. The theological readers (Brod, Robert Alter, Harold Bloom) have insisted on the Jewish mystical and midrashic background without which none of the work makes full sense. That all of these readings are partial and none exhausts him is itself testimony to the work's depth.