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Franz Kafka

Born on this day, July 3 in 1883, in Prague, Czech Republic, Franz Kafka was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Kafka’s incomplete body of work was published posthumously by his dear Friend, Max Brod.

From an early age, tragedy influenced the Kafka home. Born into a well-to-do Jewish family, at the age of 6, both Kafka’s younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich died in infancy. This was a chain reaction propelling the complicated history between Kafka and his parents. His mother never understood his ambitions to be a writer, while his father had a vicious temper and rejected his son’s creativity. His father saw no honor in writing, but rather in a practical career.

For much of his life Kafka believed his struggles in love and relationships were hindered and stemmed from the complicated relationship with his father. His work often reflected this dynamic, the protagonists of his stories must overcome an overbearing situation with the possibility that it will puncture their self-worth.

Plagued with self-doubt, prior to his death, Kafka requested that Max Brod to never publish his work. In a letter he wrote:

“Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”

Brod dismissed Kafka’s wishes and published every piece of literature he possessed from his friend after his death. Although his work is unfinished, the nature of his profundity has led the English lexicon to adopt a word for his style of writing: Kafkaesque. Frederick R. Karl author of a critical biography of Franz Kafka described Kafkaesuqe in the NYT as entering a surreal world

“…in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world.You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.”

Franz Kafka’s literature was straightforward, strange, metaphorical and deeply philosophical about the human psyche. His expression of words converted into a bittersweet art; he was a master of diction. Although his talent remained undiscovered during his lifetime, Kafka’s prose and themes of existentialism, absurdity, despair, and solitude inspired modern writers, such as Haruki Murakami into the exploration of the self in the darkest nature.

When one picks up Kafka to read, one is absorbed by a melancholic, sugary trance. Without a doubt, Kafka was dark, romantic and thought-provoking; his prose is an acquired taste, but one of the most refined and chilling in literature. Franz Kafka died on June 3, 1924 in Kierling, Austria. He was buried alongside his parents in Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery in Olsanske.

NOTABLE WORKS:

Metamorphosis (1915)
The Trial (1925)
The Castle (1926)
Amerika (1927)
The Diaries

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Hermann Hesse

Born on this date, July 2 in 1877, Hermann Hesse was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and poet who wrote classics like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf and Narcissus and Goldmund.

Hermann Hesse published his debut novel in 1904, Peter Camenzind. Focusing on characters’ quests for actualization in a world that imposes conformity, Hesse won eventual acclaim with other books like Beneath the Wheel, Siddhartha and Steppenwolf. Adopting Swizz citizenship, he also won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on August 9, 1962.

Notable Works

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Franz Kafka

Hermann Hesse