But here, immediately, is another exception of sorts: In Woody Allen’s film Annie Hall, a character named Pam says to the Woody-figure, “Sex with you is really a Kafkaesque experience.” Then, on seeing that her lover Alvy is upset by this remark, she hastens to add: “I mean that as a compliment.” Woody Allen is an accomplished reader of Kafka, as proved by his anthology The Insanity Defense and the certainly Kafkaesque movie Zelig, which has attracted a good deal of scholarly furor. With few exceptions, there is zero correlation between persons who employ the trope ‘Kafkaesque’ and those who have actually read Kafka. But, like ‘Orwellian’, there’s a danger that these terms drift away from their inspiration. Kafka’s work has inspired the now-famous adjective: ‘Kafkaesque’. But if, as it is said, history is a just judge of last resort, then the fame -better, genius-of Kafka’s writings does, indeed, constitute his justification.

To judge from present history, he did not acquire this happiness. “I can still have temporary satisfaction from works like A Country Doctor… But happiness only if I can raise the world into purity, truth, and immutability.” But he was extremely scrupulous about the quality of the work he was prepared to publish, even writing in his Diaries (splendid texts!) this extraordinary entry: He was, again and again, asked for more of his work by leading publishers. In his lifetime he published only a few stories, but they were highly regarded by connoisseurs. He was engaged to be married twice to one woman and once to another but for the rest was consumed by a passion for writing. He had many interests, including gardening and reading Platonic dialogues with friends, but also social work, especially on behalf of war refugees from Eastern Europe. There, he innovated safety devices for Bohemian factories and advocated the founding of a hospital for shell-shocked war veterans, which was a novelty. He spent his mature days as a competent, highly valued in-house lawyer at a partly state-run institute for workmen’s compensation. For many years he visited brothels, swam robustly, climbed steep hills, and rode around the countryside on a motorcycle. Seven years later he died a terrible death from tuberculosis of the larynx. Often suffering from nervous exhaustion, on the verge of an imagined sickness, he realized his worst imaginings in 1917, when he suffered a blood gush from his lungs. He lived and died a bachelor, to his great personal grief, having believed that founding a family was the most important thing one could do on earth. Foreign Policy & International Relationsīefore we get to the books, who was Franz Kafka?įranz Kafka (1883-1924) was born in Prague, the second-largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1883, to a Jewish, German-speaking family.

Kafka books the trial