Theme

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish writer born in Prague, now in the Czech Republic, who is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century. While Kafka is best known for his literary works, including The Metamorphosis and The Trial, his life also had a significant legal dimension.

Kafka studied law at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, earning his Doctor of Law degree in 1906. After completing his studies, Kafka worked for several years at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia in Prague. Here, he specialized in industrial accident insurance, focusing on workers' compensation and legal protections for laborers. His legal work involved assessing claims, drafting reports, and negotiating settlements, tasks that required meticulous attention to detail and a deep understanding of bureaucratic processes.

Kafka’s experiences in the legal field profoundly informed his literary output, particularly his exploration of themes such as alienation, bureaucracy, and the often oppressive nature of legal and administrative systems. These themes are prominently featured in several of his works:

• The Trial (1925): Perhaps Kafka's most famous novel, The Trial tells the story of Josef K., a man who is suddenly arrested by a mysterious authority and subjected to a bewildering legal process without ever being informed of the charges against him. The novel is a powerful critique of the arbitrary and dehumanizing nature of legal and bureaucratic systems.
• The Castle (1926): This novel follows the protagonist, K., as he attempts to gain access to the mysterious and inaccessible authorities of a castle that governs a nearby village. The novel explores themes of bureaucracy, law, and the futility of seeking justice in an incomprehensible and opaque system.
• In the Penal Colony (1919): A short story that delves into the nature of punishment, justice, and the law. It is set in a penal colony where an elaborate and brutal machine is used to execute prisoners, raising questions about the morality of legal systems and the human cost of justice.

Despite Kafka’s dissatisfaction with his legal career, it remained an essential part of his life until his early retirement due to illness in 1922. The legal and bureaucratic themes in his work continue to resonate, offering profound insights into the complexities of human existence and the often “Kafkaesque” nature of legal systems.

Franz Kafka’s legacy endures not only in literature but also as a keen observer of the law's impact on the individual, making his work relevant to both literary scholars and legal theorists alike.

Source: Wikimedia

This roundtable is an encouragement to think through Kafka’s legacy in jurisprudence. Try as we might, we could hardly think of an author with a more profound impact on legal thought than Franz Kafka. What made Kafka more-than-canonical and privileged author in the eyes of legal scholars was his double situatedness in law as a social phenomenon and as a profession. Though a lawyer, Kafka maintained ironic and the same time affirmative stance towards law, accepting its authority as something structurally necessary and all the more grotesque. This highly productive tension between internal position of a practicing lawyer and a staunch critique of the juridical mechanism gave rise to a distinct aesthetic of legal power reified in the epithet of “Kafkaesque”.

Working hypotheses of this roundtable is that Kafka (more often than not, rather, “kafkaesque aesthetic”) is frequently read ahistorically and merely allegorically. Our aim is to re-read Kafka as an author embedded in the age of modernity, who nonetheless sheds critical light on today’s politico-legal predicaments. This serves us as a stepping stone in reconfiguring Kafka’s place in the heterodoxy of legal movements, be it critical legal studies or law and literature.

We welcome interventions into the contemporary configuration – which focuses more on the productive potential of different representations, as opposed to the system with its emphasis on design and function – of Kafka’s contribution. The reconfiguration is thus a deliberate modification in the face of new challenges that force us to read Kafka anew, more politically and historically.