Franz Kafka

My coles notes:

Kafka was a privileged child and probably a little bit too coddled. He was unprepared for the realities of adult life in his time and was grandiose, existential, and basically dramatic in his reflection of his experience.

He rebelled against his father and his heritage, hated his 9-5 job, and as he matured into his 30’s he began to revisit and appreciate his family and his culture…. All normal. Throughout his life, he was self-absorbed by his writing and art, and did not get married. I think if I were to meet Kafka today and have to listen to him drone on I might roll my eyes.

Kafka led a double life because of his drive to create and loathing of his profession as an insurance lawyer. He worked a 9-5 job and spent his evenings and weekends in existential thought and creation. He talked about atrophy-ing all of his other senses because he felt he needed to focus on writing and put all of his energy in that endeavor. When he contracted TB, his existential reflection went into overdrive and this combination of focus and depravity became especially thematic. The perspective he lived in eventually drove him insane and he died as a recluse in a sanitarium at 40 years old having refused to publish most of his work. It was only after his death that we really got to read Kafka.

I have always thought of Kafka’s work as a little disturbing and surreal. I thought that this may have been the translation. Knowing his history helps me understand what it is all about. His work is a commentary on an oppressed society and the monotony of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in the newly industrialized world. His work is surreal because the world that he lived in felt surreal to him… as it sometimes does to all of us. This is what makes Kafka appealing to me; the unconscious comfort and familiarity which satisfies my secret existential wonderings.

“When I wanted to get out of bed this morning I simply folded up. This has a very simple cause, I am completely overworked. Not by the office, but by my other work. The office has an innocent share in it only to the extent that, if I did not have to go there I could live calmly for my own work and not have to waste these 6 hours a day which have tormented me to a degree that you cannot imagine, especially on Friday and Saturday, because I was full of my own things. In the final analysis; I know, that is just talk, the fault is mine and the office has the right to make the most definite and justified demands on me. But for me in particular it is a horrible double life from which there is probably no escape but insanity.”

-Franz Kafka, Bohemian Library, University of Oxford