Franz Kafka Is Born in Prague

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the eldest surviving son of a domineering shopkeeper father whose approval he spent his life failing to win. He trained as a lawyer, worked by day at a workers' accident insurance institute, and wrote his fiction at night, publishing only a handful of stories before he died of tuberculosis in 1924 at 40. Around 1911, deep in a period of reading Yiddish literature and rethinking his relationship to his own Jewishness, Kafka became a vegetarian. It stuck for the rest of his life, alongside chronic stomach trouble that the diet seemed to genuinely ease. His closest friend, Max Brod, later described Kafka standing in front of a tank at the Berlin aquarium and speaking to the fish directly, as though an apology were finally in order.