Franz Kafka

1883–1924 · Prague-born, German-language novelist & story writer

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a German-language writer from Prague whose fiction — The Trial, The Metamorphosis, The Castle — gave the word “Kafkaesque” to the language. The axe line comes not from his fiction but from a letter written at age twenty to his close friend, the art historian Oskar Pollak, after Kafka had been reading Hebbel’s diaries. Much of what survives of Kafka’s thought is in his letters and diaries, which he asked Max Brod to burn after his death.

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“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us”

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