Franz Kafka's name became a word in many languages

Person: Franz Kafka
Lived: 1883–1924
Field: Literature
From: Bohemian (Czech)

The story

Franz Kafka was virtually unknown in his own lifetime. Only a few slim volumes, such as Contemplation and A Country Doctor, appeared before his death in 1924, and they attracted little notice. His three unfinished novels, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, were published by his friend Max Brod between 1925 and 1927.

Recognition came slowly and then all at once. English translations appeared in the 1930s, the Schocken publishing house issued his collected works in Germany in 1935 even as the Nazis banned his name, and after the Second World War his reputation spread rapidly. Albert Camus wrote about hope and the absurd in his work, and critics began linking him to existentialism.

His vision of isolated people facing incomprehensible and unaccountable powers came to seem prophetic in an age of totalitarian states and vast bureaucracies. In The Trial, a man is arrested and prosecuted by a remote authority for a crime that is never named. The word Kafkaesque entered everyday language to describe situations in which institutions overpower individuals in surreal, senseless ways, leaving them confused and helpless. Today it is applied to real life as often as to fiction, and scholars complain that it is used so widely it is often misused.

Writers around the world have acknowledged his influence. The poet W. H. Auden called him the Dante of the twentieth century, and the novelist Vladimir Nabokov placed him among the greatest writers of his era. Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee and José Saramago are among those whose work shows his mark, and Haruki Murakami named a novel, Kafka on the Shore, in his honour. In 1999 a panel of 99 authors and critics ranked The Trial and The Castle among the ten most important German-language novels of the century.

His reach extends well beyond books. Films such as Orson Welles's The Trial and Terry Gilliam's Brazil, operas by Hans Werner Henze and Philip Glass, and many songs and stage plays draw on his work. Brod predicted that the twentieth century would one day be known as the century of Kafka.