His works were banned in Nazi Germany (he was both Jewish and a ‘degenerate’ modernist), and met with official disapproval in post-war Eastern Block countries, including his own country Czechoslovakia. For much Marxist orthodoxy, Kafka was a negative exemplar of self-absorbed bourgeois defeatism, burdening posterity with his own neuroses, unproductive and enfeebling. There have, of course, been dissenting voices. Ironically, for all his own debilitating diffidence and his reported instructions to have all his unpublished works destroyed after his death, Kafka has become established as a towering, ‘iconic’ figure of twentieth-century literature. Kafka appears to have articulated, and indeed to have prefigured, many of the horrors and terrors of twentieth-century existence, the Angst of a post-Nietzschean world in which God is dead, in which there is therefore no ultimate authority, no final arbiter of truth, justice or morality.

Rather like ‘Orwellian’, the term ‘Kafkaesque’ has come to be used, often by those who have not read a word of Kafka, to describe what are perceived as typically or even uniquely modern traumas: existential alienation, isolation and insecurity, the labyrinth of state bureaucracy, the corrupt or whimsical abuse of totalitarian power, the impenetrable tangle of legal systems, the knock on the door in the middle of the night (or, in Josef K.’s case, just before breakfast).

Kafka franz the trial