Franz Kafka
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49 free Franz Kafka trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Franz Kafka spent his days assessing industrial accidents for a Prague insurance institute and his nights writing stories he mostly wanted burned. He finished none of his novels, published a handful of slim collections, died of tuberculosis at 40 and became one of the defining writers of the century only because his friend Max Brod refused to light the match. These 49 questions cover the life and the afterlife: the German-speaking Jewish family and the jackdaw on the shop sign, the 100-page letter to his father, the switch from chemistry to law, the bread job and the asbestos factory, Felice Bauer and the night he wrote The Judgment, Milena and Dora, the Zürau aphorisms, Gregor Samsa's vermin, Josef K. and the land surveyor, the title Brod invented for Amerika, the suitcases carried to Palestine, the Gestapo seizure, the $2 million manuscript and the Israeli Supreme Court. Easy questions stick to the famous books and the word Kafkaesque; the expert tier asks about Kinský Palace, Brotberuf and the red carnation. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book-club night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which empire ruled Prague when Kafka was born there in 1883?
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary. Kafka was born an Austrian subject and became a citizen of the new Czechoslovakia only when the empire collapsed in 1918.
Q 02In which language did Kafka write?
German
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.
Q 03In The Metamorphosis, what does the travelling salesman wake up to find he has become?
A monstrous vermin
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.
Q 04What is the name of the transformed protagonist of The Metamorphosis?
Gregor Samsa
Gregor Samsa. Haruki Murakami turned the story inside out in Samsa in Love, whose hero wakes to find that he has become Gregor Samsa.
Q 05The word Kafkaesque is most often used to describe what kind of situation?
A nightmarish, senseless bureaucracy
A nightmarish, senseless bureaucracy. The word is now used so freely, for any odd mishap, that Kafka scholars complain it has been watered down.
Q 06Which Kafka novel follows a man arrested and prosecuted without ever learning his crime?
The Trial
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.
Q 07What is the profession of K., the protagonist of The Castle?
Land surveyor
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.
Q 08Which physicist, then a professor in Prague, attended the same salon as Kafka before the First World War?
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein. He joined the evenings at Berta Fanta's home, where university professors and young writers like Kafka gathered to debate philosophy.
Q 09What did Kafka ask Brod to do with his diaries, manuscripts and letters?
Burn them unread
Burn them unread. Brod ignored the request and had all three unfinished novels in print within three years of Kafka's death.
Q 10What disease killed Kafka in 1924?
Tuberculosis
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.
Q 11What story was Kafka editing on his deathbed?
A Hunger Artist
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.
Q 12Kafka's surname echoes the Czech word kavka, the name of which bird?
A jackdaw
A jackdaw. Kafka's father is said to have used the bird as the emblem of his fancy-goods shop in Prague.
Q 13What became of Kafka's 1919 letter to his father?
It never reached him
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.
Q 21Which kind of performing troupe fascinated Kafka from October 1911?
Yiddish players
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.
Q 22Who was Felice Bauer in Kafka's life?
The fiancée he never married
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.
Q 23Which story, about a son and his father, did Kafka write in a single night in 1912?
The Judgment
Q 14What happened to Kafka's three sisters?
They were murdered in the Holocaust
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.
Q 15Which of his sisters was Kafka's favourite?
Ottla
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.
Q 16What did Kafka study at university after briefly trying chemistry?
Law
Law. Kafka had tried chemistry as a route into industry, but the legal course promised a wider choice of careers and pleased his father.
Q 17What did Kafka travel to Brescia to watch in 1909, then describe in a newspaper article?
An air show
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.
Q 18Which employer did Kafka serve from 1908 until illness forced him to retire?
The Worker's Accident Insurance Institute
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.
Q 19Which economic crisis made Kafka's last winter, spent in Berlin in 1923-24, a struggle?
Hyperinflation
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.
Q 20Kafka became a partner in his home city's first factory making what?
Asbestos
Asbestos. His brother-in-law ran the factory, and Kafka came to resent the hours it stole from his writing.
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.
Q 24Which journalist, who translated his work, did Kafka have an intense relationship with from 1920?
Milena Jesenská
Milena Jesenská. What began as letters about her translations of his stories became a love affair, though she was married and living in Vienna.
Q 25Who was Kafka's last companion, with whom he lived in Berlin in 1923-24?
Dora Diamant
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.
Q 26Josephine, the singer in one of Kafka's final stories, performs for a nation of which animals?
Mice
Mice. Kafka wrote Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk, in March 1924, weeks before his own illness left him barely able to speak.
Q 27Where did Kafka retreat for a winter after falling ill in 1917, and write his numbered aphorisms?
His sister's farm
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.
Q 28Kafka described writing as a form of what?
Prayer
Prayer. His office job left him only the late-night hours for it, and he wanted absolute quiet while he worked.
Q 29What kind of eater and drinker was Kafka for most of his adult life?
Vegetarian teetotaller
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.
Q 30What did Kafka reportedly wear to school to show his socialist sympathies?
A red carnation
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.