Birth of Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka was born on 3 July 1883 in Prague. A German-language writer from Prague, Kafka was a Jewish insurance clerk who wrote in his spare time and published only a few stories during his lifetime. His fiction, such as The Metamorphosis, in which a man wakes up as an insect, and the novels The Trial and The Castle, portrays individuals trapped in incomprehensible bureaucracies and facing guilt and alienation. He died of tuberculosis at the age of forty. Before his death he asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts, but Brod published them, and the term Kafkaesque entered the language to describe such nightmarish situations.

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