kafka and prague

At the Office

In July of 1908 Kafka found a job at the Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt (Workmen's Accident Insurance Company) that was "without" an afternoon shift, meaning he got off work at 2:00 and so could better dedicate himself to writing. And it was to be for this company, and in this building (built in 1896), that he was to work until his early retirement, putting in some 30 hours a week for another 14 years, doing statistical analyses, processing insurance claims, and representing his firm in court. In this building he also developed another facet of his writing: thus, to works such as "The Trial" we might add his many reports, such as the 1915 "Accident Prevention in Stone Quarries," and the fact that he was the first specialist in the Kingdom of Bohemia to write insurance policies for private automobile owners. So important is Franz Kafka to literature that even this facet of his writing has received considerable attention from Kafka scholars, especially recently. Thus, "Kafka, the Premier Practitioner of Labor Law in Central Europe" was a topic at the 2008 meeting of the Kafka Society of America and Franz Kafka: The Office Writings (Princeton University Press) was also published this year. As the blurb for the book states: "Kafka's legal briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night."