Kafka's world isn't pleasant. It feels in many ways like a nightmare, and yet it's a place where many of us will, even if only for a time, in the dark periods of our lives, end up.

We're in the world defined by Kafka when we feel powerless in front of authority, judges, aristocrats, industrialists, politicians, and most of all, fathers.

When we feel that our destiny is out of our control, when we're bullied, humiliated, and mocked by society, and especially by our own families. We're in Kafka's orbit when we're ashamed of our bodies, of our sexual urges, and feel that the best thing for us might be to be killed or squashed without mercy, as if we were an inconvenient and rather disgusting bedbug.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, the eldest child of a terrifyingly psychologically abusive father, and a mother who was too weak and in awe of her husband to protect her boy as she should have done. Kafka grew up timid, bookish, meek, and full of self-hatred.

He wanted to become a writer, but it was out of the question in his father's eyes.

So one of the greatest German literary geniuses since Goethe was forced to spend his brief life on earth working in a series of jobs utterly beneath him, in a law office and then an insurance company. He had a number of unsuccessful relationships with women, he couldn't marry or raise a family, and was tormented by the strength of his sex drive, which made him constantly turn to brothels and pornography. Kafka published very little in his lifetime, just three collections of short stories, including his best-known work, The Metamorphosis, and he was entirely obscure and unnoticed. His gigantic posthumous reputation is based on three novels, The Trial, The Castle, and America, which were all unfinished because Kafka was so dissatisfied with them. He gave orders that they be destroyed after his death. Fortunately for humanity, these were disobeyed. It shouldn't sound prurient or reductive to suggest that one of the major keys to understanding Kafka is to fathom the nature of his relationship with his father. Kafka never wrote directly about this man in any of his works, but the psychology of the novels is directly related to the dynamics he endured as the very unfortunate son of Hermann

Kafka. Any boy who was ever felt inadequate in front of or unloved by a powerful father will at once relate to what Kafka went through in his childhood. In November 1919, at the age of 36, five years before his death, Kafka wrote a 47-page letter to Hermann, in which he tried to explain how his childhood had deformed him. Like many victims of abuse, Kafka never stopped hoping for some kind of forgiveness from the person who had so wronged him.

Dearest Father, went the letter. You asked me recently why I maintain that I am so afraid of you. As usual, I was unable to think of any answer to your question, partly for the very reason that

I am afraid of you, and partly because an explanation of the grounds for this fear would mean going into far more details than I could ever keep in mind while talking. The grown Kafka abased himself before this father. What I would have needed was a little encouragement, a little friendliness, but I wasn't fit for that. What was always incomprehensible to me was your total lack of feeling for the suffering and shame you could inflict on me with your words and judgements.

It was as though you had no notion of your power. Kafka complained of one particularly traumatic incident when, as a young boy, he called out for a glass of water and his irritable father pulled the boy out of his bed, carried him out onto the balcony and left him there to freeze in nothing but his nightshirt. Kafka writes, I was quite obedient after that period, but it did me so much incalculable inner harm. Even years afterwards, I suffered from the tormenting fancy that the huge man, my father, the ultimate authority would come almost for no reason at all and take me out of bed in the night and carry me out onto the balcony and that meant I was a mere nothing for him.

Boys need their father's permission to become men and Hermann Kafka didn't give France a chance.

At a very early stage, you forbade me to speak. Your threat, not a word of contradiction, and the raised hand that accompanied it have been with me ever since. France's sense of inadequacy was total.

I was weighed down by your mere physical presence. I remember, for instance, how often we undressed in the same bathing hut. There was I, skinny, weakly, slight. You, strong, tall, broad. I felt a miserable specimen. When we stepped out, you holding me by my hand, a little skeleton, unsteady, frightened of the water, incapable of copying your swimming strokes. I was frantic with desperation. It could hardly have been worse, except it was. Kafka finished the letter, gave it to his mother Julie to pass to Hermann, but, typical of her weakness and cowardice, she didn't. She held onto it for a few days, then returned it to France and advised that it would be better if her busy, hard-working husband never had to read such a thing. The poor son lacked the courage ever to try again.

In The Judgment, Kafka's great short story, written in 1912, a young businessman, Georg, is engaged to be married and lives in a flat with his widowed father. He's about to get away from home. The father is old and frail. Georg tucks him up in bed. But then the father mysteriously regains his strength, springs upright, towers over Georg and denounces him for betraying everyone, his friends, his father and the memory of his mother. Georg can make only feeble protests.

Eventually, the father condemns Georg to death by drowning, and Georg obediently rushes out and plunges into the nearby river. After passing sentence, the father cries out,

You were an innocent child, really, but at heart you were a diabolical human being.

The idea of horrific, arbitrary judgment was to be a constant in Kafka's fiction.

It reappears in the unfinished novel The Trial, written two years later. But now Kafka had developed it away from a father to a vast legal apparatus with judges, lawyers, guards and extensive bureaucratic procedures. When Joseph K. is arrested on the morning of his 30th birthday, he isn't told what he is charged with. He barely makes any attempt to find out. He feels so guilty inside, he just knows that he deserves punishment. He does try to declare in court that he's innocent, still without knowing what the charge is, and hires a lawyer. But the court gradually grinds him down. He becomes unable to think of anything. Words fail him. He can no longer do his job properly and is defeated in the game of office politics. Finally, a year after his arrest, two grotesque-looking officials come to Joseph K.'s flat. They lead him to a quarry outside the city and execute him by plunging a knife into his heart. Between the judgment and the trial,

Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis, a short story in which a travelling salesman,

Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning transformed into an insect akin to a beetle or a bedbug.

It's a story of self-disgust, about the treachery of family and, like The Trial, about terrifying arbitrary power. When Gregor crawls across the floor, he is in danger of being stamped on by his own father. Gregor's family find they manage quite well without him. They confine him to his room and chuck rubbish at him. The family hold a council and decide that the insect in the bedroom can't really be Gregor. They start to refer to the insect as It instead of Him. They decide that somehow the insect has to go. Gregor, listening, agrees and dies quietly. After Gregor's death, the family are slightly ashamed of their behaviour. But only slightly.

Kafka suffered from ill health for a lot of his life. In 1924, when he was 41, he developed laryngeal tuberculosis, which prevented him from eating almost anything without huge pain. He wrote a short story, his last, called The Hunger Artist. It tells the story of a public performer who makes his living undertaking fasts for the pleasure of the public.

One time, he manages to fast for 40 days. But gradually, the Hunger Artist's audience gets bored of his work. However hard he fasts, they're no longer impressed. He gets put in a dirty old cage and weakens terribly. Before he dies, he asks for forgiveness and confesses that he should never have been admired, since the reason he fasted was simply that he couldn't find any food he enjoyed. Shortly after he dies, he is replaced in his cage by a panther, an animal full of vigour, whom the crowd love and who has a voracious appetite. A few days after finishing The

Hunger Artist, Kafka died and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. Within a few years of his death, his reputation began. By the Second World War, he was recognized as one of the greatest writers of the age. Notwithstanding, all his close family were gassed by the Germans in the Holocaust.

He is a monument in German literary history, and at the same time, he is a sad, ashamed, terrified part of us all. Kafka once wrote that the task of literature is to reconnect us with feelings that might otherwise be unbearable to study, but which desperately need our attention.

A book must, he wrote, be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

His books were among the most touching, frightening and accurate axes ever written.

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