Why Did Kafka Want His Work Burned? The Friend Who Said No, and the Books We Almost Lost

Franz Kafka left his papers to his closest friend, Max Brod, with instructions that they be burned unread, and he had already destroyed a large share of his own writing himself: by one estimate he burned around 90 percent of his work, and he finished none of his full-length novels. The simplest answer to why is that Kafka was a perfectionist who doubted almost everything he wrote and saw his unfinished manuscripts as private struggles, not books. Brod refused. He later said he had told Kafka plainly, "I shall not carry out your wishes", and argued that if Kafka had really been determined, he "should have appointed another executor". Thanks to that refusal, the world has The Trial, The Castle and the word "Kafkaesque".

A German-speaking Jew in Prague

Kafka was born on 3 July 1883 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary, the eldest of six children in a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family. Two younger brothers died in infancy; three sisters survived. Prague was a city of overlapping languages, and Kafka lived between them. He went to German-language schools, studied Czech for eight years, and wrote in German, but he never considered himself fluent in Czech and spoke German with a Czech accent.

That in-between position, belonging to a German-speaking minority within a Czech city, as a Jew in a largely Christian society, is often read into his fiction, where characters never quite know the rules of the world they live in.

The father who loomed over everything

Kafka's father, Hermann, ran a fancy-goods shop and was, in the words of the scholar Stanley Corngold, a "huge, selfish, overbearing businessman". Kafka later poured his grievances into the Letter to His Father, a document of more than 100 pages complaining of Hermann's authoritarian and demanding character.

Hermann wanted a son with a solid profession, and the shadow of that disapproval is part of why Kafka found it so hard to believe his writing mattered. Even his steady job was dismissed by his father as a mere Brotberuf, a "bread job".

Lawyer by day, writer by afternoon and night

Kafka studied law at the German university in Prague and received his doctorate on 18 June 1906. He first worked for the insurance company Assicurazioni Generali, but quit in 1908 because its 8-to-6 schedule left too little time for writing. He then joined the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, where he handled compensation claims for industrial injuries and could usually leave at 2 p.m. to write.

That job matters for understanding his fiction. Kafka spent his working life inside a bureaucracy, reading files about accidents, forms and appeals. The faceless offices of The Trial and The Castle were not pure fantasy.

The Judgment, The Metamorphosis and a breakthrough

In 1912 something opened up. On the night of 22 September he wrote the story "The Judgment" in a single sitting. That same year he published his first book, Contemplation, and met Felice Bauer in Berlin, the woman he would be engaged to twice over five years of letters without ever marrying.

The Metamorphosis appeared in 1915. Its salesman hero, Gregor Samsa, wakes up transformed into a huge insect, becomes a burden to the family he used to support, and eventually dies neglected. Kafka was so protective of the mystery that he told his publisher the creature should not appear on the cover: "The insect itself is not to be drawn. It is not even to be seen from a distance."

Translators still argue over the opening line. The German ungeheueres Ungeziefer has been rendered at least sixteen ways, from "gigantic insect" to "monstrous vermin". Ungeziefer is closer to "vermin" than to any particular bug: something unwanted, unclean, outside the family.

Love, illness and the last year

Kafka's love life was full of hesitation. After Felice came an engagement to Julie Wohryzek that his father opposed, and an intense correspondence with the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská. In August 1917 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and from 1918 he lived on a disability pension, spending much of his remaining time in sanatoriums.

In 1923 he met Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher, and lived with her in Berlin for several months, perhaps the closest he came to the independent life he longed for. By 1924 the tuberculosis had reached his larynx. He died on 3 June 1924 at a sanatorium in Kierling, near Vienna, aged 40; swallowing had become so painful that the cause seemed to be starvation. There is a terrible echo in his story "A Hunger Artist", published in a periodical that same year.

Why Brod said no

So why did Kafka want his work burned? He judged himself relentlessly, left his novels unfinished, and saw his manuscripts as attempts rather than achievements. Brod, who had known him since their student days, believed the opposite, and published the novels and collected works between 1925 and 1935. The Trial appeared in 1925, The Castle in 1926, and the unfinished novel Kafka called Der Verschollene came out under the title Amerika.

The story did not end there. In 1939 Brod fled to Palestine with suitcases of unpublished papers, and decades later a court battle over them ended only in December 2016, when Israel's Supreme Court upheld that they belonged to the National Library of Israel.

Kafka's family was not so lucky. All three of his sisters are believed to have been murdered in the Holocaust.

Kafkaesque, and Kafka's laughter

Kafka was virtually unknown in his lifetime and became famous after the Second World War. Today "Kafkaesque" describes situations where people are trapped in surreal, illogical systems, usually bureaucratic, with no clear way out, although scholars note that the word is often misused.

One thing the label misses is humour. Brod recalled friends laughing "quite immoderately" when Kafka read The Trial aloud, and Kafka sometimes laughed so hard he could not go on. Read him expecting gloom and you may miss the jokes.

Learn with Kafka: English phrases for absurd situations

Phrase	Meaning	Example
Kafkaesque	absurd and frustrating, like a nightmare of rules	Renewing my visa was a Kafkaesque process.
red tape	excessive official rules and paperwork	We lost a week to red tape.
a day job	the job that pays the bills while you pursue a passion	Writing wasn't his day job.
to go against someone's wishes	to do what someone asked you not to do	Brod went against Kafka's wishes.
to be your own worst critic	to judge yourself too harshly	Kafka was his own worst critic.

Try this: Describe a "Kafkaesque" experience you have had with forms, offices or apps, in four English sentences. Use red tape and one more phrase from the table.