by Marsha Brandsdorfer
Franz Kafka stamps contribute to such topical collecting as Famous Jewish People and Famous Authors on Stamps. German author Reiner Stach’s book, Is that Kafka? 99 Finds (translated by Kurt Beals), gives interesting details about the writer.
Kafka lived from July 3, 1883 to June 3, 1924, was a German speaking Jew, and resided in Prague most of his life, except for a few months in 1923, where he lived in Berlin with his girlfriend Dora Diamant. Kafka had several relationships with women, but he never married. After obtaining a legal education, he went to work for The Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, in 1908, an insurance company, and would write on his spare time. He wrote fiction, and communicated by letters to friends and family, including his father, with whom he did not have a good relationship. Kafka’s father was a businessman (a fashion retailer) and he wanted Kafka to take over his business and follow in his footsteps. Kafka’s father did not approve of his son’s writing, which he considered a waste of time. In Kafka’s 1919 Letter to His Father, he accuses his father of being emotionally abusive towards him. Accordingly, he gave the letter to his mother to give to his father, but instead she returned it back to Kafka. The letter was later translated into English and first published in 1966.
Kafka liked to read some of his unfinished stories and novels to his friends and possibly his favorite sister Ottla, but he rarely discussed stories that he hadn’t begun or those that were in their early stages. Most of his writings were published after his death by his good friend Max Brod, despite Kafka’s request in his Will asking Brod to have his writings destroyed and burned. The novella, The Metamorphosis was one of the few works that was published while Kafka was alive and came out in book form in 1915. Also, his book, A Country Doctor: Short Stories was published during his lifetime.
While most of the cities and towns in Kafka’s stories were often ambiguous, Kafka defines locations in his novel, Amerika, edited and published posthumously by Max Brod, in 1927. Since Kafka never traveled to the United States, he relied on his research, but apparently did not keep the best notes or refer back to them, as he got several facts wrong in his novel, including, relocating San Francisco to the wrong continent, as when his protagonist Karl Rossman is urged to move there, he was told that it is because “there are many more ways to earn a living in the east.” And the Statute of Liberty rises into the sky, not with torch, but with a sword.
Kafka died at the age of 40 from tuberculosis in 1924, which spared him the fate of the Holocaust. His three sisters, Ottla, Valli and Elli, were killed during the persecution of the Jewish people by the Nazis. Manuscripts by Kafka left in the hands of Dora Diamant were taken and possibly destroyed by the Gestapo in 1933.