Kafka, Franz

Czech, German-speaking author, born in Prague where he grew up in a relatively wealthy Jewish merchant family. Franz Kafka went to a German gymnasium and next studied law at the university in Prague. After becoming a doctor of law in 1906, he worked as an employee at an insurance company in Prague in 1908-22. Already early on he contracted tuberculosis, and from 1917 he spent long periods of time at health resorts, among other things in Italy and France in 1910-12 and by the Baltic Sea in the 1920’s. Kafka died at the Kierling sanatorium outside Vienna in June, 1924. During his last few years he lived together with Dora Diamant. Earlier he had twice been engaged to Felice Bauer, who worked as an employee at a gramophone and dictaphone company in Berlin.