Kafkaesque: characterized by surreal distortion and a sense of impending danger; "the kafkaesque terror of the endless interrogations". - The Free Dictionary   Franz Kafka Born: 3 July 1883; Prague, Austria-Hungary Middle class Jewish family, retail clothing business Classical education, Altstädter Deutsches Gymnasium - 1893-1901 Friendship with Max Brod - 1902 Law doctorate - 1906 Job w/insurance co., Assicurazioni Generali - 1907 Job w/Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia - 1908 Starts diaries - 1910 Interest in Yiddish theatre - 1911 3 weeks in Jungborn sanitarium - 1912 Engagement to Felice Bauer - 1914 Tuberculosis - 1917 Deals w/domineering father (Hermann) in a letter never sent - 1919 Romance w/Dora Dymant, moves to Berlin - 1923 Eventually declares himself a socialist atheist, Spinoza, Darwin and Nietzsche some of his influences. Sanitarium, Kierling - 1924 From his death bed he makes a request of his executor, Max Brod: "Everything I leave behind me ... in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others'), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread." Brod does not comply. Dies: 3 June 1924: Klosterneuburg, Austria; tuberculosis of the larynx.  "The Judgement" - 1912 Amerika - 1912; pub.1927 " Metamorphosis" - 1912 The Trial - 1912; pub.1925 " In the Penal Colony" - 1914 "A Country Doctor" - 1916 The Castle - 1922 pub. 1926 " A Hunger Artist" - 1922 "Josephene the Singer" - pub.1924 Diaries (ed. Max Brod) - 1948 & 49 Letters (ed. Max Brod) - 1959 Kafka appears to have lost his self-confidence early in life, exchanging for it, as he himself put it, "a boundless sense of guilt." Moods of loss and failure, and the idea of the insolubility even of the most ordinary human problems, depressed his youth and later inspired his art. - Philip Rahv I seek out a good hiding place and keep watch on the entrance of my house - this time from outside - for whole days and nights. Call it foolish if you like; it gives me infinite pleasure and reassures me. At such times it is as if I were not so much looking at my house as at myself sleeping, and had the joy of being in a profound slumber and simultaneously of keeping vigilant guard over myself. I am privileged, as it were, not only to dream about the specters of the night in all the helplessness and blind trust of sleep, but also at the same time to confront them in actuality with the calm judgement of the fully awake. "The Burrow" trans. Willa & Edwin Muir