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IMG]http://www.artekculturelab.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/03/kafka1.jpg[/IMG]Kafka Biography
A Little Fable
Franz Kafka was born into the flux of social discord and bureaucratic dead weight that was otherwise known as Prague. With both God and father wielding hammers above his head, Kafka came of age in a city which had, under the assault of the modern world, ceased to make any sense. It was a city that had lost its own cultural identity. Burdened with administrating an empire whose lifeblood circulated in reams of paper, the crushing weight of bureaucracy belied a maze of crooked byways and dark coffeehouses, thrumming with the clash of volatile ethnicities. The contrast between the two worlds threatened with every step to cross the quiet line into absurdity. As if he had no choice, as if the metropolis clung to him madly, Kafka took it all in, made it his own, and found that he could never leave for long. He hovered around Prague all his life, and just as Joyce did with Dublin, just as Thoreau did with Concord, Kafka took his city and built for it a mythology of stories, constructed as meticulously and haphazardly as a filing cabinet of administrative documents. In the works of Franz Kafka, Prague is every city touched by brutal industrial efficiency, where humans slip quietly into the fatal gears of a vast, unreal machinery. But if Kafka’s collected works form a private dream portrait of Prague, they also reveal a portrait of the dreamer, struggling to write his internal world into being – a mythic world, where every man working silently at an overburdened desk is stripped of identity, where the conflict between fathers and sons is enacted in Eden, and where the act of writing possesses the beautiful terror of birth. To better understand this world, we must look at the landscapes absorbed by Kafka’s creative imagination, from the dynamics of culture, community, and family to the cramped stairways over which he scurried.
As Kafka always suspected, we must begin with his father.Comment
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