![]() ![]() In his literature, Kafka's characters were often coming up against an overbearing power of some kind, one that could easily break the will of men and destroy their sense of self-worth. Much of Kafka's personal struggles, in romance and other relationships, came, he believed, in part from his complicated relationship with his father. He was a tyrant of sorts, with a wicked temper and little appreciation for his son's creative side. Kafka's father had a profound impact on both Kafka's life and writing. He was a success in business, making his living retailing men's and women's clothes. Kafka's father, Hermann, had a forceful personality that often overwhelmed the Kafka home. His mother, Julie, was a devoted homemaker who lacked the intellectual depth to understand her son's dreams to become a writer. Kafka had a difficult relationship with both of his parents. Franz's two younger brothers, Georg and Heinrich, died in infancy by the time Kafka was six, leaving the boy the only son in a family that included three daughters (all of whom would later die in Nazi death camps or a Polish ghetto). ![]() Writer Franz Kafka was the eldest son of an upper middle-class Jewish family who was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, the capital of Bohemia, a kingdom that was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His friend Max Brod published most of his work posthumously, such as Amerika and The Castle. In 1923, he moved to Berlin to focus on writing, but died of tuberculosis shortly after. After studying law at the University of Prague, he worked in insurance and wrote in the evenings. Other traveling salesmen live like harem women.Author Franz Kafka grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family. ‘This getting up early,’ he thought, ‘makes a man quite idiotic. He slid back again into his earlier position. But he retracted it immediately, for the contact felt like a cold shower all over him. He slowly pushed himself on his back closer to the bed post so that he could lift his head more easily, found the itchy part, which was entirely covered with small white spots (he did not know what to make of them), and wanted to feel the place with a leg. To hell with it all!’ He felt a slight itching on the top of his abdomen. The stresses of trade are much greater than the work going on at head office, and, in addition to that, I have to deal with the problems of traveling, the worries about train connections, irregular bad food, temporary and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart. ‘O God,’ he thought, ‘what a demanding job I’ve chosen! Day in, day out on the road. ![]() He must have tried it a hundred times, closing his eyes, so that he would not have to see the wriggling legs, and gave up only when he began to feel a light, dull pain in his side which he had never felt before. No matter how hard he threw himself onto his right side, he always rolled again onto his back. But this was entirely impractical, for he was used to sleeping on his right side, and in his present state he couldn’t get himself into this position. ‘Why don’t I keep sleeping for a little while longer and forget all this foolishness,’ he thought. The dreary weather (the rain drops were falling audibly down on the metal window ledge) made him quite melancholy. Gregor’s glance then turned to the window. She sat erect there, lifting up in the direction of the viewer a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared. It was a picture of a woman with a fur hat and a fur boa. Above the table, on which an unpacked collection of sample cloth goods was spread out (Samsa was a traveling salesman) hung the picture which he had cut out of an illustrated magazine a little while ago and set in a pretty gilt frame. His room, a proper room for a human being, only somewhat too small, lay quietly between the four well-known walls. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. ![]()
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