Franz Kafka

A clerk who wrote at night

Kafka was born on 3 July 1883 in the Old Town of Prague, then a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a German-speaking Jewish family. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a wholesaler of haberdashery — buttons, ribbons, trimmings — and a large, overbearing presence his son never got out from under; his mother was Julie, born Löwy. Kafka went to German-language schools, then studied law at the German half of Prague's Karl-Ferdinand University — the old university had been split in 1882 into a German-speaking and a Czech-speaking institution — and took his doctorate in law in 1906. In 1902, at a student debating and reading club, he met Max Brod, a fellow student who became a novelist, critic and eventually his editor. The friendship lasted until Kafka died.

After a compulsory year of court practice and a short spell at an Italian insurance firm, Kafka joined the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in 1908, at its offices on Na Poříčí street. He stayed fourteen years. The job was neither a sinecure — a salaried post with no real work attached — nor a joke: the institute was a state body that insured Bohemian workers against industrial accidents, and Kafka assessed injury claims, wrote reports on factory safety, and rose from articled clerk, a trainee bound to the office by contract, to secretary and finally, in 1922, to chief secretary — after which he asked for early retirement on medical grounds. The literature was written in the hours the office left him, which is why so little of it was finished.

Paris as a holiday

Between 1909 and 1912 Kafka travelled around Europe with Max Brod — northern Italy, Paris, Weimar — and it was on these journeys that he began keeping the diaries he wrote for the rest of his life. This is the whole of his relationship with the city: a well-off young professional using his annual leave, going where a Prague clerk with an interest in literature would go, and writing it down. He did not emigrate to Paris, did not join a literary circle there, and did not set a book there. The atlas would rather say that clearly than inflate a fortnight into a chapter.

What the trips did produce was the travel notebooks. The Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, which hold the majority of Kafka's papers, describe them as showing how his travels in western Europe let him practise descriptive writing — the deliberate, close, faintly absurd noticing that his fiction would later run on. His notebooks were kept in German but also carry Hebrew, Czech, French and Italian; he was a considerable linguist for a man who never settled anywhere but Prague.

Illness had a habit of ending these journeys. The 1911 trip closed not with a return to the desk but with Kafka checking into a sanatorium at Erlenbach, near Zurich — a residential clinic of the natural-healing kind then fashionable across central Europe, which treated patients with diet, fresh air, cold water and exercise rather than medicine, and the first of a series of such cures he took at the end of foreign trips, at Jungborn in Germany in 1912 and at Riva on Lake Garda in 1913. The pattern held for the rest of his life: travel, collapse, sanatorium, Prague.

Three novels, none finished

The breakthrough came in 1912. In a single overnight sitting Kafka wrote The Judgment, and in the same period began his first novel, The Man Who Disappeared — the book Brod later retitled Amerika — and wrote The Metamorphosis, in which a travelling salesman wakes to find he has become an enormous insect and is slowly starved out by his family. A collection of eighteen short pieces, Meditation, appeared that December. In August 1912, at the flat of Max Brod's parents, he met Felice Bauer, a young Berlin office worker at a firm that made dictating machines, to whom he would write more than five hundred letters and to whom he became engaged twice, breaking it off both times.

In 1914 he moved out of his parents' home for the first time and worked on The Trial — a man is arrested one morning, never told the charge, and ground down by a court he can never reach. The Metamorphosis was published in 1915 by Kurt Wolff, the Leipzig publisher who brought out most of the little Kafka printed in his lifetime. In 1916 he wrote the stories collected as A Country Doctor in a rented room on Golden Lane, the alley of tiny cottages built into the wall of Prague Castle. In August 1917 came the first sign of the tuberculosis that killed him, and the rest of his life was a rota of sanatoria broken by short returns to the office. In 1922 he worked on The Castle, in which a man summoned to a village can never gain admission to the authority that summoned him. He finished none of the three novels.

Burn everything

In 1922 Kafka left instructions for Max Brod to burn all his papers and manuscripts after his death; he had written a note to similar effect in late 1921. In 1923 he met Dora Diamant, a young woman who had run away from a strictly observant Hasidic Jewish family in Galicia, then the Austrian province on what is now the Polish-Ukrainian border, and moved with her to Berlin — the only period he lived away from Prague. His health broke down; in March 1924 Brod and Kafka's uncle brought him back to his parents' flat on the Old Town Square, and in April he went with Dora and his doctor friend Robert Klopstock to a sanatorium at Kierling, outside Vienna. He died there in June 1924, of tuberculosis of the larynx, and was buried in the family plot in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.

In 1922, Franz Kafka left instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn all his papers and manuscripts after his death.

Brod ignored him, and published a long justification of the decision. Whether it was a betrayal is still argued: some hold that a dying man's explicit wish was overridden, others that Kafka knew perfectly well he was leaving the papers with the one person certain not to burn them. Between 1924 and 1937 Brod edited and brought out five major works and collections from the manuscripts, among them The Castle, The Trial and Amerika — all the books Kafka is famous for, published after he was dead and against his written instruction.

How the papers reached Oxford

The manuscripts then had a career of their own. In 1939, with the German army about to enter Prague, Brod caught one of the last trains out, carrying Kafka's papers in a suitcase; he crossed the Polish border before it closed, sailed from the Black Sea port of Constanța and reached Tel Aviv with the suitcase still in hand. By 1956 the papers were in the library of the publisher Salman Schocken in Jerusalem, and the Suez Crisis of that year — the war in which Israel, Britain and France attacked Egypt, and which looked from Jerusalem like the start of something worse — sent them on again, to a bank vault in Zurich for safekeeping.

In 1961 Kafka's heirs — the children of his three sisters, all three of whom had been murdered in the Nazi camps — agreed with Malcolm Pasley, a Kafka scholar at Oxford, that the archive should come to him. Pasley got the news while skiing in the Alps, drove to the Zurich bank, collected the papers and brought them back to Oxford in his small Fiat. The Bodleian Libraries have held them since. The manuscripts of The Castle and The Man Who Disappeared are there, along with notebooks, drawings, letters, postcards and photographs, and the university runs an Oxford Kafka Research Centre devoted to them. A writer who asked for his papers to be destroyed is now the best-archived novelist of his generation.