In contrast, Kafka himself was a retiring, introspective individual who recoiled at his father's brazen self-confidence. Kafka perceived his father as brash, bombastic and relentlessly critical of a son he did not understand. He felt particularly uneasy in his relationship with his father, about whom he wrote his famous ‘Letter’ ( Brief an den Vater, 1919). Estranged from Prague society, Kafka was also estranged from his own family. The last years of Kafka's life witnessed the emergence of the Nazis three of his sisters were to perish in the concentration camps, and Kafka himself would most probably have died there too, had he not succumbed to tuberculosis in 1924. Anti-Semitism was rife and Jews lived in a circumscribed quarter of the city. His family belonged to the German-speaking minority of a city where the majority spoke Czech, and he was also a Jew.
He was in many ways the archetypal outsider. Born in Prague in 1883, Kafka lived through the declining days of the Habsburg Empire and the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic in 1918 ( Reference HaymanHayman 1981 Reference SalfellnerSalfellner 2005).
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