ew writers have depicted 20th-century alienation, isolation, and anxiety more surreally than Czech writer Franz Kafka, who felt like an outsider his entire life. If today Kafkaesque evokes universal alienation nightmarishly and illogically, it also suggests Kafka's attempt to find personal meaning in a world he took to be empty. A Jewish native of Prague for most of his life—and yet a speaker and writer of German with little knowledge of Yiddish—he felt out of place among Prague's minority Jewish population. In addition, he distanced himself from his profession, his lovers, and his father. His deep sense of
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Franz Kafka By Jessica Teisch
"All too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime."
estranaement was insurmountable, and as a result, Kafka never felt at ease with himself, his family, or his culture. He portrayed this disquiet in his diaries, short stories, and novels. His work also illuminated with blinding clarity the growth of Europe's nightmarish totalitarian states, dehumanization, and bureaucracy—universal fears distilled from Prague's tumultuous history. "Of course," writes critic Michael Dirda, "Kafka is, for good or ill, much more than just a writer. He's an emblem, the poster boy of 20th-century alienation" (Washington Post, 1/5/03). Not trained as a philosopher, Kafka never identified himself as an existentialist, though he appreciated the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard. After Kafka's death, however, Jean-Paul Sartre considered him an existentialist, while Albert Camus considered him an absurdist. Kafka's stories—a young man awakes to find himself transformed into a giant bug, a man starves to death because he can't find food
—"A Report to an Academy," 1917
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