Kafka begins publishing

JAN 01 1908 · 12:00

Franz Kafka, 1906, studio portrait Place: Editorial office of Hyperion, Munich (the journal); Assicurazioni Generali, Prague (the day job in spring 1908). Kafka did not join the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia until mid-July 1908, several months after the Hyperion publication. Figures: Franz Kafka, lawyer and clerk · Franz Blei, editor of Hyperion · Max Brod, friend, editor, eventual literary executor (against instruction) In the spring of 1908, the Munich literary review Hyperion publishes eight short prose pieces by Franz Kafka, twenty-four, doctor of laws of the German Charles-Ferdinand University, then employed at Assicurazioni Generali (the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute post he would hold for the rest of his life began in mid-July 1908). The pieces are later collected in his first book, Betrachtung (Contemplation, 1912). They are slight, observational, dreamlike: a passenger looking out a tram window; a man at his desk distrusting his clothes. He has been writing since adolescence and showing his work only to Max Brod, fellow Prague German-Jewish writer, who has been pushing him to publish. The Hyperion appearance is the first time Kafka's prose reaches print under his name.