FRANZ KAFKA: A Conscience Beyond Time

Franz Kafka, that strange and luminous figure of twentieth-century literature, continues to live in the imagination of humanity long after his frail body was consigned to the grave in 1924. He was a man who never saw himself as a prophet, who doubted his own worth, who requested that his writings be destroyed after his death, and yet today he stands like a towering presence across the vast landscape of world literature. Kafka was not just a novelist or a storyteller; he was a revealer of truths hidden beneath the skin of modern existence. To read him is to feel the pulse of absurdity and alienation, to recognize in his parables the very shape of our fractured lives. I had always known Kafka through his works and through the voices of critics who regarded him as the master of the absurd, the poet of alienation, the philosopher of estrangement. But when, this summer, I walked into the quiet Jewish Cemetery of Prague, stood before his tombstone, a strange silence took hold of me. I felt as if all his words, all his restless anxieties, all his fragile dreams had condensed into that small piece of earth where he lay. The stone bore his name without extravagance, yet in its humility it radiated an aura of immense power. At that moment, the frail man who had once scribbled through nights of insomnia seemed not dead but alive in the whispers of the wind that moved through the cemetery.

It is difficult to think of Kafka outside his contradictions. He was born in 1883 into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, a city then under the rule of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where cultures overlapped but seldom merged. He belonged to a minority within a minority, doubly estranged, carrying within him the burden of an identity never at ease with itself. His father, Hermann Kafka, was a man of robust will and practical energy, a successful businessman who believed in worldly achievement and masculine authority. Franz, on the other hand, was fragile, contemplative, burdened by ill health and self-doubt. Their relationship was scarred by conflict, distance, and unspoken wounds. In his famous Letter to His Father, Kafka poured out his sense of smallness before this towering paternal figure whose loud voice, he confessed, could silence him into nothingness. This unbridgeable gap between father and son was not merely a private wound; it became a metaphor for the human condition that runs through his writings: the individual dwarfed before incomprehensible authority, the self lost before faceless power.

His life was not free from tenderness, but even love arrived for him shrouded in hesitations and anxieties. His relationships with women, notably with Felice Bauer and later with Dora Diamant, reflected his yearning for intimacy as well as his inability to reconcile personal ties with the inner compulsion of his writing. His engagement with Felice ended in painful dissolution, haunted by his doubts and fears. With Dora, who remained with him until the end, he found a measure of peace, yet his battle with tuberculosis had already written its verdict. The man who feared commitment, who feared the ordinary responsibilities of family life, perhaps understood that his true marriage was with literature itself. Writing was his breath, his means of survival, the only way he could confront the absurdity of existence.

Yet Kafka was no professional writer in the usual sense. By day he worked in an insurance office, carefully fulfilling his duties as a bureaucrat; by night he wrestled with sentences that would one day shake the literary world. His life, outwardly uneventful, was a battlefield of the soul. Out of that battle emerged some of the most profound works of modern literature.
The legacy of Kafka goes far beyond the boundaries of literature. The very word “Kafkaesque” has entered our vocabulary to describe the absurd, nightmarish, and incomprehensible situations that define so much of contemporary life. Bureaucratic mazes, faceless institutions, laws that entangle rather than liberate, the suffocating sensation of being reduced to a number in a system—all this is Kafkaesque. His influence can be seen in writers across continents: in Camus, who saw in Kafka a prophet of the absurd; in Sartre, who read him as a precursor of existentialist thought; in Borges, who admired his metaphysical imagination; in Márquez and Murakami, who absorbed his surreal logic into their magical worlds. Even beyond literature, Kafka has left his imprint on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, and political thought. Some interpret him as a mystic struggling with the silence of God, others as a prophet who foresaw the rise of totalitarianism, still others as a psychologist of the subconscious fears that modernity breeds. Each generation returns to him and discovers anew that his works are inexhaustible mirrors reflecting different facets of human anxiety.

For me, however, Kafka became real not just in books but in that cemetery in Prague (Now called Praha). To stand before his grave was to feel both humility and awe. I wrote there only a note in Kashmiri, my mother tongue, and on it I had written words of homage from Adbi Markaz Kamraz Jammu and Kashmir, and from the Kashmiri people. I placed it on his grave and felt as though a bridge had been built across time and geography. The man who wrote in German, who lived in Praha, Prague a century ago, seemed to belong to my land, to my people, to the Kashmiri nation as much as to Europe. Our own experiences of alienation, displacement, and the silent torment of being caught in systems beyond our control resonated deeply with his words. Kafka’s alienation was not only his own; it became universal. His anxieties became ours. His parables spoke in a language beyond language, crossing borders and centuries to touch the collective soul of humanity.

My journey through Prague, Praha, led me also to Café Louvre, where Kafka is believed to have written some of his works. The café, with its high ceilings, old-world charm, and literary aura, seemed to breathe with history. I imagined Kafka sitting in a corner, scribbling notes late into the night, perhaps pausing to sip coffee, perhaps looking around with his inward, restless eyes. The walls of such places become silent witnesses to creation, holding the echoes of conversations, the birth of ideas that one day shake the world. Café Louvre was frequented not only by Kafka but also by Einstein and Rilke; it was a crucible where thought and art mingled freely. Being there reminded me how creativity thrives in the ordinary spaces of life, how genius does not descend in splendid palaces but is born in the humble corners of cafés, in the sleepless hours of night, in the solitary struggle of pen against paper.

As I reflected on Kafka’s presence in our world today, I realized his relevance has only intensified. In our age of digital surveillance, of faceless algorithms making decisions about our lives, of governments and corporations extending their control in invisible yet suffocating ways, the Kafkaesque is not confined to literature—it has become the very texture of our lives. Every time one is lost in endless paperwork, every time one feels reduced to data, every time truth becomes inaccessible and authority impenetrable, one is living in Kafka’s universe. He is the writer who predicted not only the twentieth century but also the twenty-first.

And yet, Kafka does not merely leave us in despair. His greatness lies in the way he compels us to recognize absurdity, to confront our estrangement, to wrestle with questions of meaning. He never gave answers, for perhaps there are none, but he gave us images and parables that continue to disturb us into awareness. His stories awaken us from complacency. They whisper: this is the truth of your condition, do not turn away. In this sense Kafka is not a pessimist but a moral awakener, a man who turned his own anxieties into universal parables so that humanity might see itself more clearly.

As I departed from Prague, now Praha, carrying with me the silence of his grave and the hum of Café Louvre, I thought of his brief life—forty years only. A man who doubted himself, who feared his father, who longed for love but fled from its responsibilities, who worked in an insurance office by day and wrote in sleepless nights. And yet this fragile life created an earthquake in literature, an impact that continues to reverberate across the world. If forty years were enough to produce such a seismic shift, what would another forty have brought? Perhaps whole new continents of literature, perhaps a complete transformation of modern criticism and philosophy. Yet perhaps the brevity of his life itself was necessary, for it compressed into that short span an intensity that has made him eternal.

Kafka remains with us not in monuments or ceremonies but in the living fiber of literature, in the anxieties of modern man, in the questions that disturb us still. He belongs as much to Prague as to every city where alienation resides, as much to German literature as to Kashmiri sensibility, as much to the past as to the future. When I wrote in Kashmiri on his grave, I felt I was not only offering homage but also claiming kinship—our sorrows, our estrangements, our search for meaning are the same. Kafka lives wherever the human soul wrestles with the absurd, wherever man feels small before faceless power, wherever the search for meaning continues against the silence of the universe. His name endures, not as an ornament of literary history, but as a living conscience. May he rest in peace, and may his words never cease to trouble, awaken, and inspire humanity.

Rafeeq Masoodi, former Secretary Culture Academy & ADG Doordarshan