One hundred years ago, on June 3 1924, a tuberculosis patient at Dr Hoffmann’s sanatorium near Vienna died exactly a month short of his 41st birthday. Franz Kafka, born in Prague to a German-speaking, Jewish Czech family, was an unlikely candidate for global literary stardom.
But the centenary of his death has sparked multiple celebrations. Oxford’s Bodleian Library will open up Kafka’s diaries and notebooks to the public in an exhibition this May — and a profusion of forthcoming books includes A Cage Went in Search of a Bird, short stories inspired by Kafka and written by authors including Tommy Orange, Helen Oyeyemi, Elif Batuman and Ali Smith.
And that’s only the start. On TikTok, where the hashtag #kafka has had over 1.4bn views, teens swoon over quotes from Kafka’s love letters — “Perhaps love isn’t love when I say you are what I love most — you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love”.
Meanwhile Korean rapper Kim Nam-Joon, lead singer of the wildly popular boy band BTS, recommends that his fans read The Metamorphosis, Kafka’s tale of the transformation of salesman Gregor Samsa into a giant insect (probably a dung beetle, possibly a cockroach — Kafka’s instructions to his publisher were that the insect was never to be drawn, and, if it were illustrated, only to be seen from a distance).
Kafka himself would have been astonished at this celebrity. He spent most of his adult life working as a law clerk and an insurance broker, embraced obscurity, and published sparsely. He also swung between wild despair and a formidable love for writing itself. He was “repulsed” by his stories, as he noted in a diary entry for October 1913: “All things resist being written down.” But as he wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer some years later, “I am made of literature: I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”
Dismissing his “scribblings”, Kafka burnt about 90 per cent of his writings, according to some biographers. Fortunately for us, his friend and literary executor Max Brod ignored his directions to burn the rest, producing the output that we now celebrate.
A century later, readers, rappers, writers and teenagers around the globe have embraced Kafka — the word “Kafkaesque” is, like “Orwellian”, ubiquitous and overused, and has slipped into other languages (kafkask in Norwegian, for example).
On my travels, I’ve encountered him in unexpected ways and places: a fisherman who lives in a hut on Trivandrum beach shows me his favourite book, a Malayalam translation of The Castle, and a quiet professor recently released from a Myanmar jail mentioned The Trial to explain the absurdity of his own legal struggles. I once met two young women reading the manga adaptation of Kafka’s stories by the Japanese siblings Nishioka Kyodai aloud near Hauz Khas lake on a freezing winter day, their breath sending the words out in tiny clouds of vapour.
The Indian theatre director and actor Rama Pandey adapted The Trial into a play, Giraftari (Imprisonment) using Rajasthani folk theatre forms in 2015, partly in response to political repression and unjust arrests, but the pandemic years gave it new depth: “Through the voluntary form of house arrest [during Covid], we can relate to the feeling of being under arrest,” Pandey said in an interview about the project.
Back in 2011, John Banville staked a different national claim: “His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world.” Yet when the Japanese director Koji Yamamura adapted the short story A Country Doctor into an animated film in 2007, he said he believed the author was influenced by Chinese philosophy, that his writing was close cousin to Japanese kyogen. For me, it’s the Hindi writer and translator Ashutosh Bharadwaj who most clearly nails why Kafka feels like he belongs to everybody, everywhere all at once. In a 2023 interview, he refers to Kafka as “a writer of multiple and conflicting and bewildering identities”.
He was the permanent outsider, even in his own land, and writing at a time of world wars, he reflects our age’s insecurities and fearsome choices. Last September, the Ukraine Fringe brought theatre troupes from around the world to Kyiv. The American actor and director Robert McNamara performed Kafka’s 1917 short story “A Report to An Academy” as a monologue, writing in Newsweek: “It is about man’s inhumanity, viciousness and — hatred of freedom . . . An ape is forced to choose between “freedom” or “prison”. A slow lingering death much like what Mr Putin is offering the Ukrainian people.”
One afternoon, idling online, I stumbled across the Kafka AI Project (kafkaaiproject.com/#chapter_one) — a valiant attempt to use GPT-4 to fill narrative gaps in the original, unfinished manuscript of The Trial. Enigmatic figures loom out of the encroaching darkness, smirking officials confront Josef K — GPT-4’s chapters have the sagging earnestness I’ve come to associate with AI imitations of human authors. But then Kafka, so keenly aware of humanity’s ability to trap itself in labyrinths of its own making, would have found fresh, probably terrifying, material in AI’s unreliable promises, its machine hallucinations and arbitrary decisions.
Perhaps it’s in Kafka’s diaries that you understand why his works strike so deep. The mythical Kafka is there, brooding, depressed, the Eeyore of modern writing: “Slept, woke up, slept, woke up, miserable life.” But his entries brim with vivid, slyly comic sketches of friends and strangers; he has moments of effervescent happiness that fill him with “a light, pleasant quiver”; he is in “absolute despair” when the writing goes poorly, but runs across the stone bridges of Prague singing a joyous tune when inspiration returns.
In a January 1922 entry, he is alone, forsaken, convinced that he is incapable of friendship — and yet “the attraction of the human world is so immense, in an instant it can make one forget everything”. From the heights to the depths, full of contradictions, so despairing and so sharply alive — no wonder we still read, and need, Franz Kafka.
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