Franz Kafka, Die Verwandlung (1915)
Franz Kafka (1883-1924)
Biography
• Born in Prague (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy)
• Czech-Jewish origin
• German-speaking Czech Jew
Hermann Kafka, Julie Löwy
Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918)
Biography
• Studied Law (doctorate 1906)
• Worked in insurance
• Wrote literary texts in spare time
• Literary circle in Prague (Max Brod, Felix
Weltsch)
Biography
• Engaged several times
• Never married
• Tuberculosis diagnosed, 1917
• Death near Vienna, 1924
Kafka as writer
• Great name of literary modernism (Marcel
Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf)
• Short stories, novellas, novels
• Experimental prose style (“personales
Erzählen”)
Kafka as writer
• Tendency towards the fantastic / supernatural
• Motif of metamorphosis: fairytale motif
• Human / animal theme
• Strangeness, alienation, grotesquerie
Kafka as writer
• Relatively unknown during his lifetime
• Posthumous fame (Max Brod; American and
English reception)
• “kafkaesque”
Themes
• Crisis of (masculine) identity in modernity
• The passing of religion / tradition
• The search for meaning
• The body / sexuality
Themes
• Critique of capitalism
• Critique of bourgeois family
• Critique of patriarchal power structures
Oedpius complex
• Power struggle between father and son
– Das Urteil (1912)
– Die Verwandlung (1915)
– Brief an den Vater (1919)
Hermann Kafka (1852-1931)
Sigmund Freud: Oedipus complex
• Desire for the parent of the opposite sex (son
for mother)
• Universal developmental stage for all male
children (ages 3-6)
• Successful resolution of complex results in
identification with same-sex parent
Oedipus complex
• If unresolved – neurosis, “arrested
development”
• Fixation on the father
• Ongoing power struggle
Die Verwandlung
• Father / son (oedipal) struggle?
• Father fixation? Mother fixation? Sister
fixation?
• Son as eternal loser in the oedipal conflict?
Masochism
• Gregor as masochist?
• Masochism as sign of the son’s defeat in
oedipal conflict?
• Family – esp. sister – as sadists?