49 Fun Facts About Franz Kafka

Which empire ruled Prague when Kafka was born there in 1883?

Austria-Hungary. Kafka was born an Austrian subject and became a citizen of the new Czechoslovakia only when the empire collapsed in 1918.

In which language did Kafka write?

German. It was the language of advancement in the Prague of his day, so the family mostly spoke it at home and sent Franz only to German schools.

In The Metamorphosis, what does the travelling salesman wake up to find he has become?

A monstrous vermin. Kafka's original word names no particular creature, and he told his publisher that the insect itself was not to be drawn on the cover.

What is the name of the transformed protagonist of The Metamorphosis?

Gregor Samsa. Haruki Murakami turned the story inside out in Samsa in Love, whose hero wakes to find that he has become Gregor Samsa.

The word Kafkaesque is most often used to describe what kind of situation?

A nightmarish, senseless bureaucracy. The word is now used so freely, for any odd mishap, that Kafka scholars complain it has been watered down.

Which Kafka novel follows a man arrested and prosecuted without ever learning his crime?

The Trial. Kafka finished the last chapter but left others incomplete and unnumbered, so their order had to be settled by his editor after his death.

What is the profession of K., the protagonist of The Castle?

Land surveyor. K. claims the castle has hired him, yet he never manages to reach its officials, and the unfinished novel stops in the middle of a sentence.

Which physicist, then a professor in Prague, attended the same salon as Kafka before the First World War?

Albert Einstein. He joined the evenings at Berta Fanta's home, where university professors and young writers like Kafka gathered to debate philosophy.

What did Kafka ask Brod to do with his diaries, manuscripts and letters?

Burn them unread. Brod ignored the request and had all three unfinished novels in print within three years of Kafka's death.

What disease killed Kafka in 1924?

Tuberculosis. Diagnosed in 1917, it forced him to retire on a pension and spend much of his last years in sanatoriums, the final one just outside Vienna.

What story was Kafka editing on his deathbed?

A Hunger Artist. Gravely weakened, Kafka kept correcting the proofs of the collection named after it into his last days, and it came out two months after his death.

Kafka's surname echoes the Czech word kavka, the name of which bird?

A jackdaw. Kafka's father is said to have used the bird as the emblem of his fancy-goods shop in Prague.

What became of Kafka's 1919 letter to his father?

It never reached him. By Max Brod's account Kafka asked his mother to pass it on and she never did; it was published only after both men were dead.

What happened to Kafka's three sisters?

They were murdered in the Holocaust. Two died after deportation to the Lodz ghetto, and the youngest was killed at Auschwitz after escorting a transport of children there.

Which of his sisters was Kafka's favourite?

Ottla. By far the closest to him of the three, she married a Czech Catholic over their father's objections, and it was she who bargained with Franz's employers when he fell ill.

What did Kafka study at university after briefly trying chemistry?

Law. Kafka had tried chemistry as a route into industry, but the legal course promised a wider choice of careers and pleased his father.

What did Kafka travel to Brescia to watch in 1909, then describe in a newspaper article?

An air show. Kafka saw the Channel-crossing pilot Louis Blériot fly there, and his report was among the first of his pieces ever to reach print.

Which employer did Kafka serve from 1908 until illness forced him to retire?

The Worker's Accident Insurance Institute. Kafka claimed to despise the job, yet he was promoted quickly and became his boss's right-hand man.

Which economic crisis made Kafka's last winter, spent in Berlin in 1923-24, a struggle?

Hyperinflation. Kafka and his companion lived hand to mouth in three different rented flats within six months, until his health gave way and he went home.

Kafka became a partner in his home city's first factory making what?

Asbestos. His brother-in-law ran the factory, and Kafka came to resent the hours it stole from his writing.

Which kind of performing troupe fascinated Kafka from October 1911?

Yiddish players. Kafka went to one performance after another by a visiting troupe, befriended its actor Yitzhak Löwy and even organised a recital evening for him.

Who was Felice Bauer in Kafka's life?

The fiancée he never married. Kafka was engaged to her twice in five years, and his hundreds of letters to her survive, though hers to him do not.

Which story, about a son and his father, did Kafka write in a single night in 1912?

The Judgment. Kafka wrote it without a break on the night of 22 September, and he kept seeking that kind of unbroken sitting as the ideal way to work.

Which journalist, who translated his work, did Kafka have an intense relationship with from 1920?

Milena Jesenská. What began as letters about her translations of his stories became a love affair, though she was married and living in Vienna.

Who was Kafka's last companion, with whom he lived in Berlin in 1923-24?

Dora Diamant. He met her at a Baltic resort where she was looking after children at a holiday camp, and within weeks had left home to live with her.

Josephine, the singer in one of Kafka's final stories, performs for a nation of which animals?

Mice. Kafka wrote Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, in March 1924, weeks before his own illness left him barely able to speak.

Where did Kafka retreat for a winter after falling ill in 1917, and write his numbered aphorisms?

His sister's farm. In the Bohemian village of Zürau he read, studied Hebrew and jotted down the short reflections that were published after his death.

Kafka described writing as a form of what?

Prayer. His office job left him only the late-night hours for it, and he wanted absolute quiet while he worked.

What kind of eater and drinker was Kafka for most of his adult life?

Vegetarian teetotaller. He also chewed every mouthful for minutes on end, a health fad known as Fletcherizing, and kept to a strict daily exercise routine.

What did Kafka reportedly wear to school to show his socialist sympathies?

A red carnation. He is said to have kept the socialist emblem in his buttonhole even after an older schoolmate who had inspired him was expelled for his politics.

What happened to Kafka's two younger brothers?

Died as infants. That left Franz the only son among three sisters, with the schooling and the paternal expectations that came with the role.

Which animal addresses the scholars in Kafka's A Report to an Academy?

An ape. Captured in West Africa and caged aboard a ship, Red Peter decides that copying his captors is the only way out of the cage.

Which publisher brought out most of Kafka's work in his lifetime?

Kurt Wolff. The young Leipzig publisher met Kafka in 1912 and had to ask him to send a manuscript; The Stoker, The Metamorphosis and A Country Doctor followed as slim volumes.

Kafka called his first novel The Man Who Disappeared; under what title did Brod publish it?

Amerika. Kafka never set foot there, and in his opening scene the Statue of Liberty raises a sword instead of a torch.

Kafka wrote through the winter of 1916-17 in a tiny house on which lane inside Prague Castle?

Golden Lane. His sister had rented the one-room cottage at number 22 for herself and lent it to him as a quiet place to write; it is now a tourist attraction.

Which Kafka story deals with an elaborate torture and execution device?

In the Penal Colony. Its machine slowly carves the broken law into the prisoner's skin, and Kafka chose the story for his only public reading outside Prague.

Which Nobel laureate titled his book on the Felice letters Kafka's Other Trial?

Elias Canetti. He read the novel as an echo of a scene in a Berlin hotel in 1914 that Kafka called the tribunal, where he sat facing witnesses ranged like a jury.

Which writer said Kafka stood to the modern age as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe stood to theirs?

W. H. Auden. He was writing about an author who had seen only a handful of slim books into print before dying at 40, with all three novels still unpublished.

Who said The Metamorphosis showed him "it was possible to write in a different way"?

Gabriel García Márquez. A friend lent him the book as a student in Bogotá; he said the first line almost knocked him off the bed, and he began writing stories at once.

Where did Brod take Kafka's unpublished papers when he fled in 1939?

Palestine. Brod carried the papers in a suitcase on the last train out of Prague, minutes before the Nazis closed the border.

Who took possession of Kafka's unpublished papers when Brod died in 1968?

His secretary Esther Hoffe. She kept them in bank vaults and at home for forty years, and her daughters fought in court to hold on to them until 2016.

Which university's library has held most of Kafka's surviving manuscripts since 1961?

Oxford. Kafka's nieces, his legal heirs, chose the Bodleian Library after the papers had been moved to a Swiss vault for safety in the 1950s.

Who confiscated 20 Kafka notebooks kept by his last companion in 1933?

The Gestapo. They took the notebooks and dozens of letters in raids aimed at her husband, and decades of searching through surviving files have not turned them up.

Why did Kafka, though passed fit in 1915, never serve in the First World War?

His employer called him indispensable. Kafka asked, in person and in writing, for the exemption to be lifted, but his bosses renewed it year after year.

Which side of Kafka's creative work filled a 2022 Yale book, after decades locked in a bank vault?

Drawings. About 150 sketches came to light; Kafka once told his fiancée he had been a great draughtsman until lessons from a bad painter spoiled his talent.

Which Terry Gilliam film is often described as Kafkaesque?

Brazil. Critics trace the ordeal of its office-worker hero to Kafka and to George Orwell's 1984 in equal measure.

Kafka lies in Prague's New Jewish Cemetery in a grave he shares with whom?

His parents. The son who wrote a long letter of grievance to his father ended up under the same headstone as him; a plaque nearby remembers his sisters.

The Franz Kafka Prize, first awarded in 2001, required winners to have a work published in which language?

Czech. Laureates such as Philip Roth and Haruki Murakami qualified through translations, and two winners went on to take the Nobel Prize in the same year.

What is 3412 Kafka?

An asteroid. Two astronomers found it in January 1983, the centenary year of the birth of a writer whose name became known to the wider public only after his death, and named it in his memory.