Hover a line for its translation; hover a word for its meaning. Tap 🔊 to hear it.
Generate a brand-new dialog on any topic, using this lesson's 0 vocab words — plus any words you add below.
Sign in to generate dialogues. It needs a pass — the first ten lessons of every course are free either way.
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family and died in 1924. He worked for most of his adult life as a lawyer for a workers' accident insurance institute and wrote in the evenings and at night. Only a small part of his work appeared in his lifetime; his friend Max Brod published the novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Der Verschollene after Kafka's death, against his explicit wish that they be burned. Die Verwandlung, The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, opens with one of the most famous sentences in German literature: the traveling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect. The story follows his family's reactions with a sober, almost bureaucratic precision, and the adjective kafkaesk, Kafkaesque, has entered German and many other languages to describe nightmarish, absurd situations, especially involving bureaucracy. Kafka's long sentences are a classic challenge for readers of German, but his vocabulary is often simple. According to Max Brod, Kafka laughed so hard when reading the first chapter of Der Process aloud to friends that he could hardly continue.