Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (1883–1924), born into a middle-class German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, worked by day as an unassuming claims lawyer at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, writing his haunting fiction late into the night. Dominated by a strained, terrifying relationship with his authoritarian father Hermann Kafka (*Letter to His Father*), Kafka channeled his profound alienation into literature's most unsettling allegories.

In Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis, 1915), traveling salesman Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into a monstrous verminous insect (*ungeheuren Ungeziefer*). In Der Process (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle), faceless bureaucracies convict and exclude ordinary citizens without ever explaining their crime, terrifyingly anticipating the totalitarian nightmare states of the 20th century. Dying of laryngeal tuberculosis at forty, Kafka instructed his executor Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts; Brod heroically defied him, gifting humanity a cornerstone of world literature.