More in ‘work’

The panic probably came on slowly, but, as one fails to notice the gradual death of a light bulb, I somehow missed its approach. By early last fall, I found myself in a state of acute anxiety in which everything in my life—from my friendships to my magazine subscriptions to the city I live in—became subject to relentless questioning. Of the various irritants, though, none was perhaps as troubling as the growing ambivalence I felt about working for a Jewish publication.

In 1924, an ailing, depressed Kafka asked his friend the author Max Brod to burn his notebooks after his death, and, if Brod had complied, the world—already lacking in eloquence—would have had to have found other and probably lesser ways to artistically express its dissolution amid technology, and mass organization.
Asking a fan to burn your ...

Throughout the 1960s, when Kafka’s work was circulating in Czech in samizdat editions, Prague’s dissident writers would call the Prague castle, throne of the immemorial Czech kings, Das Schloß—”The Castle”—in reference to the circuitous delays, follies, and bureaucratic oppressions, of the communist period. While The Trial found its ending in officework, The Castle began in ...

Kafka began his career with an Italian company, Assicurazioni Generali, with offices in Prague. That company, formally known as Imperial Regia Privilegiata Compagnia di Assicurazioni Generali Austro-Italiche (the name should give an indication of its operation), was closely associated with the port of Trieste, in Italy, the largest, busiest port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In 1908, ...

Before we arrive at the Office—Franz Kafka’s, or anyone’s—we first have to make a survey of the origins of that institution. We first have to make a working genesis, a hypothetical creation myth for our cubicle. How did we get to Kafka? How was he—Franz Kafka, l’artiste bourgeois—arrived at? What was the process that resulted ...

A man knocks at the door to a flat and another man—let’s call him G.S.—opens it. Both men are dressed conservatively, in suit and tie, and, why not, in bowler hats.
G.S., because these are his rooms, says, “Good day, sir. What can I do for you?” He says this in German, or maybe in ...