A German-speaking Jewish insurance clerk in Prague who wrote at night and published almost nothing, Kafka turned his private dread into stories where ordinary men are arrested without charge, transformed into insects, and ground down by courts and offices that never explain themselves. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, unknown outside a small circle, after asking his friend Max Brod to burn every unfinished manuscript. Brod refused, and the world received The Trial and The Castle. His name became an adjective for the nightmare of faceless, incomprehensible authority.
A man wakes one morning to find he has turned into a monstrous insect. His first worry is not the horror of his new body. It is that he has missed his train and his boss will be angry. That joke, terror and bureaucracy in the same breath, is the heart of Franz Kafka. By day he was a German-speaking Jewish lawyer in Prague, processing insurance claims for injured factory workers. By night, exhausted, he wrote stories of ordinary men arrested for crimes never named, summoned by courts that never explain, crushed by powers no one can see or argue with. He published only a handful of short works and died in 1924, at forty, of tuberculosis, often convinced he had failed. He had asked his closest friend to burn every unfinished page. We have The Trial and The Castle only because that friend refused. And the name Kafka left behind became a word for a feeling the rest of the century would learn by heart.