Franz Kafka worked to compensate injured factory workers

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

The story

Franz Kafka earned his doctorate in law at the German university in Prague on 18 June 1906 and spent a year as an unpaid clerk in the courts. In November 1907 he took a job with the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, but its working hours, from eight in the morning until six at night, left him almost no time to write, and he resigned in July 1908.

Two weeks later, he joined the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, where the shorter hours suited a writer far better. His job was to investigate and assess compensation for those who had been injured on the job. Accidents such as lost fingers or limbs were common at the time, especially in factories with lathes, drills, planing machines and rotary saws that were rarely fitted with safety guards.

Kafka proved conscientious and capable and was promoted rapidly. His duties included processing and investigating compensation claims, writing reports and handling appeals from businesses that disputed the risk category, and therefore the insurance premiums, assigned to their firms. For several years he compiled and wrote the institute's annual report, which was well received by his superiors. His office day usually ended at 2 p.m., leaving afternoons and nights for the fiction he cared about most.

His work was considered so important that around 1915, when he received his draft notice during the First World War, his employers arranged for his military service to be deferred as essential government service. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1917, and in 1918 the institute placed him on a pension because of his illness. He spent much of the rest of his life in sanatoriums.

Kafka often complained that the office stole time from his writing, and his father dismissed it as a mere bread job. Yet critics have noted that his legal training informed The Trial, whose bewildering court proceedings closely reflect the criminal procedure of his day. Before he was a famous novelist, he was a careful public servant whose reports affected the lives of injured working people.

Why it matters

Kafka spent years helping injured workers obtain compensation at a time when factory safety was poor, and that experience of bureaucracy from the inside fed his most famous novels.