Franz Kafka | Origin of Street Names

František "Franz" Kafka (1883 - 1924) was a Czech lawyer, writer, and one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century. During his lifetime, he was largely unknown, and his works were mostly published posthumously, gaining recognition only after his death.

He was born in Prague into a mixed Czech-German Jewish family. Biographers note that his father was an extremely cold, proud, and selfish man who would have a decisive influence on Kafka's personality and his future writing style, characterized by the depiction of heavy psychological and internal states of characters, alienation, despair, and absurdity.

Although Kafka was devoted to literature and reading from an early age, his parents directed him towards studying law and receiving education in the German language for a more promising future. Following his parents' wishes and advice, he completed his studies and even obtained a doctorate in law, but writing remained his inner and true calling. He chose all his jobs in life in a way that allowed him time for writing at the end of the day.

Frail in health, introverted, and often feeling misunderstood, Franz Kafka largely portrayed himself and his own psychological states in his works, often highly complex (the so-called "Kafkaesque atmosphere"). His communication with friends and women primarily revolved around written words, making writing his main "channel." In literary terms, his influences were Fyodor Dostoevsky and the German writer Heinrich von Kleist.

Interestingly, Kafka burned and destroyed many of his manuscripts soon after writing them, dissatisfied with the results. He preserved only a few works that were first published posthumously, thanks to his best friend.

It's not surprising, then, that Franz Kafka's literary output is quite modest and consists of only about ten titles. Among them are certainly the novels The Trial, The Castle, The Metamorphosis, as well as his letters and diary. Therefore, Kafka can be classified among those artists whose name is more famous than their works, primarily due to the unique Trial.

The relatively limited bibliography of Franz Kafka was undoubtedly influenced by tuberculosis, the disease the writer battled for a full 7 years and eventually succumbed to at the age of 41.

According to testimonies, Franz Kafka loved women (some biographers even considered him a ladies' man), but he never married nor had any heirs. His family, due to their Jewish heritage, tragically perished in the Holocaust.

Although Kafka left instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn all his manuscripts after his death, fortunately, that did not happen. In the following decades, Europe and the world recognized the literary and artistic value of Kafka's works and realized the exceptional importance of the Czech writer in world literature.

In his hometown of Prague, one of the major attractions is the Franz Kafka Museum, dedicated to the writer's life and work.

Today, symbolically, a street in the Belgrade neighborhood of Kotež bears the name of the Czech writer.