Person Biography:
Franz Kafka was born in 1883 in Prague, Austrian Empire, to a German-speaking Jewish family. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a business owner and a domestic tyrant who frequently abused his son. Kafka later admitted that his father's behavior broke his will and caused insecurity and guilt, which affected his whole life. His mother, Julie Lowy, came from an intellectual and spiritual family and shared her son's delicate nature. Kafka had a few relationships with women and was engaged, but never made a family.
He finished the German National Gymnasium in 1901 and graduated from the German University in Prague as Doctor of Law in 1906. He worked for insurance companies for the rest of his life, which shaped the formal and cold language of his writings. In 1908, Kafka published eight short stories compiled under the title "Meditation". He became interested in Yiddish theater in 1911 and began writing "The Judgment" and "Metamorphosis" in 1912. In 1914, he wrote "In the Penal Colony" and "The Trial", which is regarded as his best work.
As a Jew, Kafka experienced social tensions and isolation from the German community, and very few of his writings could find readers during his life. His three sisters later died in the Nazi concentration camps. Kafka suffered from clinical depression, social anxiety, insomnia, and tuberculosis, complicated by laryngitis, which caused him to lose his voice before his death in 1924. He was comforted by his girlfriend Dora Diamant, who had broken away from her Hasidic shtetl in Poland.
