Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3rd 1883, a German-speaking Jew.

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Created by Daniel Alsop

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Franz Kafka was born in Prague on July 3rd 1883, a German-speaking Jew.  His father was a large, dominating man named Hermann.  A lot of his work reflected his hatred for his father, in the play Metamorphosis and also in Letter to His Father, which reflects his feelings of inferiority and paternal rejection.  His work was not of one specific genre.  His work was of fantasies, dreams and human suffering.  It was eclectic.  Dying of Tuberculosis after the First World War, he wanted his work to be burnt upon his death, but his friend, Max Brod realised their potential and published them contrary to his wishes.  His three most renowned pieces of work were The Trial, The Castle and Amerika.  Kafka’s three sisters all perished in German concentration camps.

The themes of Kafka's work are the loneliness, frustration, and oppressive guilt of an individual threatened by anonymous forces beyond his comprehension or control.  In literary technique, his work has the qualities both of expressionism and of surrealism. Kafka’s lucid style, blending reality with fantasy and tinged with ironic humour, contributes to the nightmarish, claustrophobic effect of his work.  Like in his famous long short story “Metamorphosis” where Gregor Samsa, a hardworking insurance agent, awakens to find that he has turned into an enormous insect.  Rejected by his family, he is left to die alone.  Simulating the situation in his own home, it seems that Kafka based Gregor around himself.  Mr. Samsa also seems to be represented as Hermann Kafka, Franz’s own dominating father.

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Kafka was heavily influenced by religion.  As a Jew in his time, there were huge effects of anti-Semitism on their race, although Hitler’s rule over Germany and his terror-regime over the Jewish at the time was later on in the 1930’s, Kafka probably would have faced racist remarks and cruelty towards him and his work. As the son of an assimilated Jew who held only perfunctorily to the religious practices and social formalities of the Jewish community, Kafka was German both in language and culture. The absurdity of this social and cultural position created an ambiguous reality for Kafka, ...

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