Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, a Czech city under Austro-Hungarian rule. This piling-up of ethnic particulars right at the outset should suggest some of the complexity of Kafka's predicament, one reflected in his very rich confessional writings–his correspondence and journals–his stories and parables, and his three great unfinished novels America (Amerika, written 1912-14; published in 1927), The Trial (Der Process, written 1914; published as Der Prozess in 1925; trans. Willa and Edwin Muir 1935) and The Castle (Das Schloss, written 1922; published 1926; trans. Willa and Edwin Muir 1930).

Kafka’s situation, like his city, is mazy, disjunct, overly detailed by history; it held exceptional danger and promise: the danger of becoming lost in a lawless complexity that finally flattens out into anxiety, apathy and nothingness, but the promise, too, of a sudden breaking open under great tension into a blinding prospect of truth. At various moments one can see Kafka laying weight on one or the other of his identity elements in an effort to find his way: he studied law at university, then practised it at the partly state-run Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he rose to a position of considerable authority (Obersekretär), though he experienced his ‘work at the office’ mainly as a hindrance to his writing.