Franz Kafka wrote that line up there and then continued; this is how it works when searching for God, and on love, it is no different.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about my impressions of him and his works. Of course, I must mention that it does not have to be his specific birthday or the day he died; I never search the web to find out about an event and write about it, as some are doing on WordPress!
The main reason is that I have known him and his works since I was young and always appreciated his solitude before society. Second, I see and hear many documentaries and TV series here in Germany for his anniversary, as the Germans always welcome a genius who writes in their language into their art world. Therefore, to put it bluntly, I had to write this article first in German and translate it into English. Because these days, I hear and read his works all in that language.

Franz Kafka (1883 – 1924), a German-language Bohemian writer, was born in Prague as the son of a middle-class Jewish merchant family.

As per literary scholar Reiner Stach, who studied Franz Kafka for over two decades and published a three-volume Kafka biography with S. Fischer Verlag, Kafka himself was uncertain about his historical classification. Stach quotes Kafka’s famous saying, “I am the end or the beginning.” Kafka intended to express that he may represent the end of a long tradition of classical literature, coming from Goethe, Kleist, and perhaps Flaubert, who was already modern and is an endpoint here. Alternatively, he may start something completely new from the fragments he inherited from tradition instead of falling apart.

Max Brod once said that Kafka was more ambitious than his talent. Maybe he’s right! He helped him, believed in him, and encouraged him to write his thoughts as books.

As one of his numerous lovers, Milena Jesenská, a Czech journalist and writer who was non-Jewish and married, once said to him: I have never met a person like you, and I assume it that’s because there has never existed anyone like you.

He explained it himself:

The enormous world that I have in my head. But how to free me and free them without tearing? And I would rather tear it up a thousand times than hold it back or bury it in me. That’s why I’m here; that’s very clear to me. (Sokel, Walter H. 2001).
Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both that indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain permanently concealed. (Gray, Ronald 1973)

The drama (on stage) is more exhausting than the novel because we see everything that we otherwise only read about. (Source: Kafka, diaries. October 28, 1911)

The fortune that flatters you most is most likely to deceive you.

Franz Kafka was convinced that his writing was inadequate, although he had much more to say. In his short story collection, A Hunger Artist, he wrote:
“Forgive me everything,” whispered the hunger artist. Only the supervisor, pressing his ear against the cage, understood him. “Certainly,” said the supervisor, tapping his forehead with his finger to indicate to the staff the state the hunger artist was in, “we forgive you.” “I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist. “But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly. “But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist. “Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?” “Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist.

He died of Tuberculosis, or better to say, the cause of death seemed to be starvation: the condition of Kafka’s throat made eating too painful for him. By the way, Kafka’s mental health was a topic of debate. Marino Pérez-Álvarez suggests schizophrenia based on his diaries and “The Metamorphosis”. Alessia Coralli and Antonio Perciaccante diagnosed borderline personality disorder, worsened by Kafka’s insomnia complaints. Joan Lachkar developed a model describing Kafka’s fears of abandonment, anxiety, depression, and parasitic dependency needs in “The Metamorphosis“. Meanwhile, Manfred M. Fichter believes Kafka was anorexic.

But in my opinion, it’s all doctors prattling! Kafka had (like a few other known artists and geniuses like Dostoevsky, Mozart, Carl Jung, Van Gogh and…) a sensitive mind and soul who looked immense, broader and more profound in human society and the man itself, so deep that the artist himself cannot discern it. He was a Mozart in the matter of literature! Kafka’s writing, whether a letter or a book, had a wealth of words and topics to recount. In his book  Der Process (The Trial), he doesn’t criticize only the political system; K, the main character, is a victim of not being understood by his population. He writes about the trial of his own solitude, his isolation in society and his strangeness towards others.

He even asked Dora Diamant, his faithful companion in his last days in his dying bed, and wanted her to burn all his works after his death!

He died shortly before his 41st birthday in a private sanatorium outside Vienna. A week later, on June 11, 1924, he was buried in a simple ceremony at Prague’s New Jewish Cemetery.

How profoundly Dr Jung interpret the death;

In his final days, he asked his doctor for a lethal dose of morphine. When the doctor refused, he told his doctor: if you don’t do it, you will be my murderer!