If you’ve ever suffered from anxiety, you’ll know that “suffering” is the exact right term to use.
One that made Kafka constantly feel like there was a ball of wire at the center of his body, winding ever tighter. That parasite was what we’d today call a serious anxiety disorder. It was around this time that a black parasite first began to tunnel its way into the boy’s brain. While he did well academically, he found the place authoritarian, dehumanizing, alienating. For the working class Jew, it must’ve been a whole peacock’s worth of feathers in his cap to send his boy somewhere so prestigious.īut for his shy, miserable son, it was simply Hell. As Hermann’s business boomed, he began sending Kafka to the elite Altstädter Staatsgymnasium, having one of the family’s Czech servants walk the lad there every morning. That meant making sure that, outwardly, Kafka appeared to have every advantage in life. Still, while he may have done everything in his power to destroy his son’s confidence at home, Hermann was still, at heart, a social climber. Perhaps its not surprising that, by the time Kafka started school, his self-esteem was in the gutter. Belittle him endlessly for being useless, pathetic, a failure of a human. He would explode at young Kafka for no reason.
Hermann was an angry man at the best of times, but something about his ineffectual son seems to have actively offended him. From Hermann’s perspective, this was a little like opening a box you think is going to contain a delicious cake, only to discover it instead contains bitter disappointment.īut from Franz Kafka’s perspective, it was like being born into a world where everything you did was doomed to end in humiliation. He was troubled by boils, and afflicted with melancholy. From the earliest age, it was obvious that Franz Kafka was not the stout, hearty man Hermann wanted him to be. If he did, it was the last time he ever felt anything but contempt for his son. It’s likely that, as Hermann took baby Franz Kafka into his arms for the first time, he felt a rush of pride. The son who was going to be as sporty, as commanding, as powerful, and as straightforwardly Germanic as his old man affected to be. He’d bought a fancy house, found an educated wife, even broken into the closed world of the German elites. Through the sheer force of his gigantic, volatile personality, Hermann had managed to take a little clothing shop and turn it into a bustling store. 1883 was the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, when Prague was dominated by Germans, and Jews were at a constant disadvantage. A Prague shopkeeper from a working class Jewish family, Hermann was a man who’d fought all his life to get where he was. It was a hot July day in 1883 when Hermann Kafka became a father for the first time. Join us as we delve inside the work of Franz Kafka, and the awful life that made it all possible. Yet he made up for this by having a mind so strange, so inventive that today he’s arguably Europe’s most famous author.
He was miserable at home, unlucky in love, and too depressed to function anywhere but in his insurance office. And his work would shape the entire 20th Century.īorn into a German-speaking family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka spent his whole life suffering from illness and anxiety.
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