One hundred years since his death, this author is a must-read more than ever

A century ago this month, Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis at the age of 40. He had published only a handful of stories and novellas in his lifetime, none of them more than 60 pages long. His startling fictions had earned him a small circle of admirers in his native Prague, but had made little splash in the wider world.

When Kafka’s illness became terminal, he made preparations to erase himself from literary history. He left written instructions for all his unpublished papers – including three virtually complete novels – to be “burned unread and to the last page.”

As for his published works, Kafka ordered that they must not be “reprinted and handed down to posterity. On the contrary,” he wrote, “should they disappear altogether that would please me best.”

Franz Kafka died aged 40 on June 3, 1924.Credit: Alamy

Fortunately for the world, Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, disobeyed his late friend’s instructions. Far from disappearing after his death, Kafka became recognised as the 20th century’s most prophetic writer. Indeed, posterity has paid him the greatest tribute a writer can receive. His name has become an adjective. In more than a hundred languages there is a word that corresponds to our word Kafkaesque.

Even people who haven’t read a line of Kafka know what that word means. Modern life is full of Kafkaesque moments. Trying to speak to a live human being on a helpline can be a Kafkaesque experience. The Robodebt affair was deeply Kafkaesque. Arguably, the world is more Kafkaesque now than it was in Kafka’s own day.

The secret of Kafka’s enduring relevance is that his fiction resonates on two levels. First it affects you privately. Kafka taps straight into your unconscious, in a way no other writer does. Reading him, you get the sense that he has eavesdropped on your strangest dreams.

Above and beyond that, Kafka seemed to tap into the unconscious mind of history itself. Somehow, by writing about his own worst dreams, he forecast the great public nightmares of the 20th century – the deranged, murderous bureaucracies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

A Franz Kafka sculpture showing the writer riding a gigantic, empty coat, installed in Prague in 2002.Credit: Getty Images

George Orwell earned his own adjective – Orwellian – for anatomising the methods and psychology of Stalinism. But Orwell made his diagnosis on the basis of historical facts. He wrote 1984 in 1948, when the evidence about Stalinism was largely in.

Kafka achieved a far spookier feat. He described the 20th century’s terror states before they even existed. When Kafka died, Adolf Hitler was still nine years away from becoming chancellor of Germany. Joseph Stalin had only just assumed power in the USSR.

And yet you could swear, when reading Kafka’s eerie fictions, that he had observed the workings of modern totalitarianism from the inside. “His most hallucinatory discoveries,” said the critic George Steiner, “turned out to be the grimmest reportage, but reportage before the facts.”

The Franz Kafka Museum in Prague.Credit: iStock

How did Kafka achieve this feat of clairvoyance? For a start, he wasn’t like everybody else. He was an acutely neurotic man. “He is absolutely incapable of living,” said his lover Milena Jesenska. “He’s exposed to all those things we’re protected against. He’s like a naked man among a multitude who are dressed.”

One thing Kafka was nakedly exposed to was the authority of his domineering father. Hermann Kafka was a sturdy and successful Jewish businessman who found his sickly son a grave disappointment. As a child, Franz bore the brunt of his father’s tyranny. Outside the home, he was subjected to the antisemitism that was ominously routine in Europe at the time.

Trained as a lawyer, Kafka worked as a paper-pushing civil servant by day and pursued his literary ambitions by night. He wrote in German, the official language of Austro-Hungarian Prague.

Franz Kafka in childhood. Credit: Getty Images

Kafka was morbidly self-critical and fanatically choosy about what he published. He wrote the best part of three strikingly original novels – Amerika, The Trial and The Castle – but never finished them to his satisfaction. He considered them “bungled pieces of work”. He threatened to burn the manuscripts, but never got around to it.

Instead he left the task to Brod, who wisely failed to perform it. Soon after Kafka’s death, Brod licked the unfinished novels into shape and had them published in German editions. English translations followed in the 1930s.

Arguably, the world is more Kafkaesque now than it was in Kafka’s own day.

In The Trial and The Castle, Kafka’s vision received its fullest expression. In both novels, a defenceless individual is progressively crushed by the weight of an irrational, labyrinthine bureaucracy. Here is the famous opening sentence of The Trial: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

In deadpan prose, Kafka plunges you straight into the middle of a living nightmare. The nightmare deepens as the novel proceeds. Since Joseph K. has been arrested, it follows that he must be tried. Everything unfolds with the logic of a bad dream. As K. desperately produces his identity papers, he sees that the arresting officers have sat down and started helping themselves to his uneaten breakfast.

It’s a typically surreal Kafka touch. And yet such surreal scenes soon became the stuff of everyday reality all over Europe. “Give us a man and we’ll make a case,” Stalin’s secret police used to say. When they came to take people away, they would soften the blow by offering them a lolly from a box kept in their pockets.

Is it possible to be so sensitive that you can foretell the future? Not quite. But Kafka’s temperament made him hyper-susceptible to human cruelty and mediocrity and brutality. And those were precisely the elements that Stalinism and Nazism – the systems that were about to immiserate half of Europe – were made of.

In Kafka’s novels the state is always right, the individual always wrong. A similar dynamic had governed Kafka’s childhood. The father, even at his most arbitrary, was always right. The son, by definition, was always in the wrong. Hermann Kafka had zero sympathy for his son’s literary ambitions. He wanted him to marry, work in the family business, and generally behave like a normal bourgeois person.

Max Brod, who chose not to burn Franz Kafka’s fiction.Credit:

Kafka failed on all counts. His father’s disapproval left him with a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority and shame. In 1919, at the age of 36, he itemised his grievances against his father in a long unsent letter, posthumously published as Letter to My Father.

In one telling passage, Kafka described an episode from his childhood. One night, lying in bed, the young Franz had whined for a glass of water. His father’s response was to pull him out of bed, carry him out to the balcony, and lock him outside in his nightshirt.

“I daresay I was quite obedient afterwards,” Kafka wrote. “But it did me inner harm … For years afterward I suffered from the tormenting fancy that a huge man, my father, the ultimate authority, could come, almost for no reason at all, and take me out of bed in the night.”

That primal sense of dread would echo through all Kafka’s fiction. Joseph K. isn’t the only Kafka protagonist to suffer a sudden violation in the privacy of his bed. Gregor Samsa, the unfortunate hero of Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis, wakes up one morning to find himself “transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect”.

A reader once asked Kafka if he’d done “extensive research in a lunatic asylum”. “Just in my own,” Kafka replied. His sense of inner harm enabled him to imagine, and unwittingly predict, the rise of entire states dedicated to the persecution and extermination of the individual.

In a way it’s unfair to Kafka to read his books through the lens of the barbarities that came after him. His best work is touching, funny and humane. To speak of him in the same breath as Hitler and Stalin is to make his stuff sound far grimmer than it really is.

Still, the historical resonances of Kafka’s work can’t be ignored. When the Nazis came to power, they banned and incinerated his books. They would have incinerated Kafka himself, had he still been alive. All three of his sisters were murdered in concentration camps. After the war, his work was banned behind the Iron Curtain, including in his native Prague.

Most writers want their work to be universal. Kafka was terrified by that prospect. In what kind of world would his hellish visions come to seem representative? His friend Gustav Janouch, who wrote the book Conversations with Kafka, once put it to Kafka that his work might be “a mirror of tomorrow”.

Kafka reacted by covering his eyes with both hands, and rocking his whole body back and forth.

“You are right,” he said. “You are certainly right. Probably that’s why I can’t finish anything. I’m afraid of the truth … One must be silent, if one can’t give any help … For that reason, all my scribbling is to be destroyed. I am no light. I’m a dead end.”

As usual, Kafka was selling himself short. It was totalitarianism that was the dead end. But it was a dead end created by human beings, which means it can always happen again. One way of ensuring it won’t is to stay in touch with the legacy of better human beings, like Kafka. He will always be a light, whether he wanted to be one or not.