One hundred years ago, Franz Kafka died — not that he ever liked being here among the living. He raced to an early death, aged 40, having spent all his life kvetching about it or escaping from it into the phantasmagoria of his fiction.
For a writer of such morbidity, it’s fitting to commemorate not a birthday, but a death anniversary, as we do with Christian martyrs. Other writers, such as Shakespeare, we can imagine wearing a party hat, cutting a cake. Not Kafka. His monumental diaries record no birthday celebrations. Not one.
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