He felt alienated, firstly as a Jew at a time of rising anti-Semitism, and secondly as a German speaker in a predominantly Czech nation. Kafka’s childhood was a lonely one, he often felt like an outsider. Kafka was a German-speaking novelist born in 1883 into a middle-class Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and today the capital of the Czech Republic. Throughout his works we see the strange dream-like mixture of perplexity and embarrassment play out, such as having some simple task to do that turns out to be so complex that it seems to have no end, and the notion of a grand organisation with its incomprehensible bureaucratic system that hovers invisibly over each individual, and has complete power over one’s life. His work is so original that the term Kafkaesque was coined to describe the atmosphere of his work: the nightmarish, bizarre or illogical situations. The magic of reading Kafka is that we all come up with our own interpretations, and that there is no one definite or true interpretation. Many people have tried to read his work in the lens of psychoanalysis, existentialism, Judaism, Marxism, and so on, but Kafka eschews reduction to one single view. He dealt with existentialist themes such as alienation, anxiety, disorientation and the absurd. Franz Kafka is one of the major figures of 20 th century literature who received little public attention during his lifetime.
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