Just when he's about to disembark, he realizes that he has forgotten his Karl is a 16-year-old who has been sent by his parents to the United StatesĪfter getting a housemaid pregnant. Note that Kafka had never been anywhere in America. And wherever he goes, his destiny is to be treated like a slave. Karl travels not because he dreams of new horizons but because, wherever he goes, he is expelled. On the other hand this boy is an immigrant in the "land of opportunities" and his misadventures become a pilgrimage through the wonders and the magic of this vast land, moving from the busiest city of the country to the vast open territories of the Far West. On one hand Kafka describes the misadventures of a lonely penniless boy abandoned by everybody. (the orphan Therese, the naive protagonist abused by the older tramps) "Der Verschollene/ The Man who Disappeared",īegun in 1912 but abandoned in 1914 and never completed, After Kafka's death, Brod instead published one after the other the three unfinished novels: "The Trial", "The Castle" and "Amerika". Kafka, as he was dying of tuberculosis, asked his publisher Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts. Work was changing too with the appearance ofįrederick Winslow Taylor's "scientific management" (1911) and Kafka grew up at a time when society was being turned upside down by new technologies: the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the phonograph, cinema, the car, the airplane, and so on. The art movement "Der Blaue Reiter" (1911)Īnd in 1916 Hugo Ball launched the Dada movement in Switzerland. Herwath Walden's magazine "Der Sturm" (1910) and Philosophy was leaving behind Kant's idealism withįriedrich Nietzsche's "will to power" and Edmund Husserl's phenomenology Įrnst Ludwig Kirchner's manifesto of "Die Bruecke" (1905), Gottlob Frege and David Hilbert revolutionized Mathematical Logic Max Planck discovered Quantum Mechanics in 1900Īnd Einstein discovered Relativity in 1905 In the German world Freud published the "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900Ĭarl Jung his "Psychology of the Unconscious" in 1912 Luigi Pirandello's novel "Il Fu Mattia Pascal" (1904)įilippo Tommaso Marinetti's "Manifesto of Futurism" (1909). Stephane Mallarme's poem "Un Coup de Des Jamais N'Abolira le Hasard" (1897). Joris Huysmans' novel "A Rebours/ Against the Grain" (1884), Influences in France, Tolstoy and Cechov towered in Russia, Ibsen and Strindberg in Scandinavia.Ī rebellion against traditional literary forms was brewing in France, as exemplified by Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke (born in Prague like Kafka) in poetry, Wedekind and Hugo von Hofmannsthal in theater, Haptmann, Fontane, Thomas Mann and Hesse in fiction, Kafka grew up when the leading literary masters of the German-speaking world Henri Bergson's anti-rationalist and anti-reductionist philosophy. Kafka was born when new intellectual disciplines were shaking the foundations of Western culture, from William James' psychology (1890) to He died in 1924, when Mussolini had just seized power in Italy and Hitler had been arrested after an attempted coup in Germany, a few years after Lenin had created the Soviet Union. Of Czechoslovakia at the end of World War I. Lived through the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth Franz Kafka: biography, bibliography, reviews, best booksįranz Kafka (Austria, 1883), a German-speaking Jew of Prague,
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