On this day, 3 July 1883, Franz Kafka was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A German-language Jewish writer whose reputation grew largely after his death, Kafka would become one of the defining literary figures of the 20th century.
Kafka was born into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Hermann and Julie Kafka. His father was a self-made merchant, and their difficult relationship would later become one of the most discussed aspects of Kafka’s life and writing. Growing up in Prague, Kafka lived between cultures: Jewish, German-speaking and Czech. That sense of distance, uncertainty and not fully belonging would echo through much of his fiction.
He studied law at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague and later worked for insurance companies, including the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. Although he was a conscientious employee, writing was his true calling. Much of his literary work was produced late at night, after office hours, in the space between duty and inner necessity.
Kafka published only a limited number of works during his lifetime, but the originality of his writing was extraordinary. His fiction often follows isolated individuals trapped in strange, oppressive and incomprehensible systems. The settings may appear ordinary at first, yet they quickly become unsettling, absurd and nightmarishly logical.
Among his most famous works is The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, in which Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect-like creature. The story remains one of the most powerful explorations of alienation, family duty and human worth in modern literature.
His other major works include The Trial, the story of Josef K., who is arrested and prosecuted by a mysterious authority without ever being told the nature of his crime; The Castle, an unfinished novel about a man’s futile attempt to gain access to a remote and unreachable authority; and Amerika, also known as The Man Who Disappeared, which follows a young European immigrant in a strange and disorientating version of the United States.
Kafka’s short fiction is equally significant. Works such as The Judgement, In the Penal Colony, A Country Doctor and A Hunger Artist helped establish his reputation for creating worlds in which guilt, authority, punishment and helplessness are never fully explained, but are always deeply felt.
One of the most striking facts about Kafka’s legacy is that much of it almost never reached the public. Before his death, Kafka asked his close friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished manuscripts. Brod refused. Instead, he edited and published Kafka’s novels and writings after his death, ensuring that works now regarded as central to world literature survived.
Kafka died of tuberculosis on 3 June 1924, at the age of 40. During his lifetime, he was known only within a relatively small literary circle. In the decades that followed, however, his reputation grew dramatically. Today, he is considered one of the most influential writers of modern literature.
His name has even become an adjective: “Kafkaesque”. The word is used to describe situations that are bizarre, oppressive, illogical or nightmarishly bureaucratic — the kind of world in which an individual is caught inside a system they cannot understand, challenge or escape.
More than a century after his birth, Kafka’s work continues to feel startlingly modern. His writing speaks to the anxieties of contemporary life: bureaucracy, alienation, surveillance, guilt, family pressure, unstable identity and the fear of being judged by forces beyond one’s control.
From literature and theatre to film, television and popular culture, Kafka’s influence remains immense. His world is unsettling, often darkly comic and deeply human. He wrote about fear and powerlessness, but also about the strange absurdity of existence.
Franz Kafka may have lived a short and often troubled life, but his imagination created one of the most recognisable literary universes of the modern age. On his birthday, he is remembered not only as the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial, but as the writer who gave language a new way to describe the bewildering machinery of modern life.
Also read: ON THIS DAY: Remembering Anton Chekhov and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
