Franz Kafka and Praha

Franz Kafka was born in Prague on 3 July 1883, died in a sanatorium in Kierling on 3 June 1924, and was buried in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague – Strašnice on 11 June. 

100 years after his death Kafka is one of the most known writers of 20th Century.

From Wikipedia:

He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th Century literature.. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic.It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers.

Kafka was born into a middle-class German-speaking Czech Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today the capital of the Czech Republic). He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in obscurity in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.

Kafka left his work, both published and unpublished, to his friend and literary executor Max Brod  with explicit instructions that it should be destroyed on Kafka's death.But Brod ignored this request and published the novels and collected works between 1925 and 1935.

  Palace Assicurazioni Generali, insurance society  on Wenceslas sq. in Praha where Kafka was employed

He was born in Prague’s Old Town and had exceptionally strong ties with the city throughout his entire life.

Under the pressure of the events of recent years, I feel more and more often that Kafka is returning. More precisely, his vision of the world returns, his almost schizoid view of human life. His complicated books seem to predict today's complicated times. I am not happy about it, but unlike Kafka, I remain optimistic.

             Thanks for reading

                                                             Margaret

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