Changing minds, saving lives: Franz Kafka as a key industrial reformer.

Abstract

Everyone recognizes Franz Kafka as being one of most significant writers of twentieth century. On this score, poet, W.H. Auden, has stated that Kafka is the author comes nearest to bearing same kind of relation to our age as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe bore to theirs; and French playwright and poet, Paul Claudel, has asserted that who is for me greatest writer, there is one--Franz Kafka--before whom I doff my hat. (1) However, my concern in this article is not so much with Kafka as gifted writer, but with Kafka as dedicated industrial reformer. It will be argued that during Kafka's lifetime his reputation was based just as much, if not more, on reforms he helped to enact as a lawyer with Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for Kingdom of Bohemia, than it did with his importance as author. KAFKA'S SOCIALISM Franz Kafka grew up in a well-to-do household, with his father being proprietor of a thriving textile store in Prague. However, father, in his position as boss, treated employees quite roughly, and Kafka at a very early age developed understanding and a compassion for abused clerical and sales personnel in store since he perceived this group of workers as being deliberately exploited. (2) During years that Kafka went to school, his feelings of sympathy spread to all mistreated workers and he began to profess a great interest in socialism. Despite his shyness, Kafka even took to demonstrating his convictions by wearing traditional red carnation of socialists in his lapel. One of Kafka's close friends, Hugo Bergmann, at time was developing a lifelong interest in Zionism, even complained to Kafka that his commitment to socialism was cooling their relationship. (3) After graduating from law school, Kafka went to Czech political assemblies to hear leaders of socialist movement like Dr. Soukup of Social Democratic Party and Vaclav Klofac of Czech National Socialists. He even joined a group called Young Generation Club whose members were mainly Czech socialists. (4) When Kafka became a lawyer at Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute for Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague, he came into close contact with numerous cases of labor injustice in almost all of industrial towns of region that he supervised. It was through official reports which he wrote for his job that Kafka, firmly and precisely, expressed his socialist views about society's obligation towards its victims. Furthermore, based on his professional experiences with oppressed workers, Kafka eventually wrote novel Amerika, which many critics have viewed as a severe condemnation of capitalism. (5) first chapter of this novel, called The Stoker, was even translated from German into Czech and then published in socialist literary review Kmen. (6) One commentator has gone so far as to bluntly say of The Stoker that we would be hard put to find in literature before World War I a work of a non-proletarian author that views with such deep sympathy, and proclaims rightness of proletarian cause, ... than Kafka's. (7) We get further evidence of Kafka's opposition to capitalism from a series of conversations he had with Gustav Janouch, a young friend of his. In one conversation, Kafka proclaimed that great evil of capitalism is that the luxury of rich is paid for by misery of poor. In another discussion, Kafka said of capitalist factory system that it is merely institution for increasing financial profit and, as a result, workers have a subordinate function, being an old-fashioned instrument of economic growth, a hangover from history, whose ... skills will soon be replaced by frictionless thinking machines. In Kafka's harshest criticism of capitalism, he claimed it was a system of dependencies, containing mutual enslavements from top to bottom. …