Franz Kafka (3 July, 1883-3 June, 1924) was a Czech writer known for his stories dealing with the absurdities of life and government.
Fun Facts about Franz Kafka:
1. Franz Kafka was born in the middle class Czech Jewish family in Prague. His mother’s tongue was German, At the time, Prague was the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
2. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a successful businessman that employed up to 15 people in his store. He used an image of a jackdaw bird for the logo of his business since in Czech it is kavka, pronounced kafka. His mother Julie was the daughter of a cloth-maker from eastern Bohemia. Hermann was very imposing person, and his overbearing relationship with his son caused him lifelong trauma which he channeled into his work and a 100-page letter he wrote to his father but never sent.
3. Franz Kafka was not a starving artist; he was a well-respected lawyer at Prague’s Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. He specialized in industrial injuries due to machines in factories and was assessed hazards in the workplace for his employer’s coverage. Mr. Kafka helped popularize or develop the civilian hard hat for factory workers. He even won a gold medal from the American Safety Society for his contributions to accident prevention.
4. Mr. Kafka saw his job strictly as an opportunity to put bread on the table (Brotberuf-bread job). He worked one shift, 8:00 AM-2:00 PM and not a minute more. That left him able to write about events. But it wasn’t a life of wine and roses, he worked hard and was often exhausted and unable to sleep.
Even though he was fluent in both Czech and German, he exclusively wrote in German.
5. Despite is work schedule, Franz Kafka was what we would call today a “health nut”. He was a strict vegetarian and advocated for “natural health movements”. He was an avowed believer in “Fletcherism”-the fad of the time which required its practitioners to chew food up to 32 times before swallowing.
Frankly, not a bad advice especially if you find yourself eating fast.
6. Reading Kafka would live one with the impression that he was a melancholy, frail and weak guy. Nothing could be further from the truth though. As an avid outdoorsman, Franz Kafka was very physically fit, he enjoyed rowing and was known as an excellent long-distance swimmer.
7. There’s a huge misconception about Kafka’s most known novellas, The Metamorphosis. The original German does not describe Gregor Samsa as a beetle, or a cockroach. Instead, it should be translated as a “monstrous unclean vermin” or “unfit for sacrifice.”
8. While Franz Kafka’s The Trial is viewed as a dark and profound bureaucratic nightmare, he wrote it as a dark comedy. In fact, when reading it to his friends he couldn’t finish sentences because he was laughing so hard.
9. Franz Kafka, of course, never heard the term “Kafkaesque” as it entered our lexicon decades after his death.
10. On his deathbed, Franz Kafka told Max Brod, his closes friend and literary executor, to burn each and every single unpublished manuscripts, diaries, and letters without reading them. Mr. Brod promptly ignored his friend’s dying with and published the works such as The Trial, The Castle, and America which brought his friend’s genius to the public eye.
Zohar — Man of la Book
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Sources:
Franz Kafka | Wikipedia
Franz Kafka | Biography, Books, The Metamorphosis, The Trial | Britannica
