The Office as Inspiration
How Kafka's work speaks to our own anxieties in an increasingly impersonal world
Kafka. The name is often evocative of shadowy tribunals, inscrutable judgments, nightmarish bureaucracies, endless paperwork, illogical or menacing situations. But, as we saw last time, Franz Kafka didn’t just conjure these scenarios out of thin air. For fourteen years, he worked as a lawyer at the AUVA in Prague (aka Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute), negotiating the labyrinthine Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy and writing dry, technical reports on workplace safety, risk classification, and legal disputes.
These office writings were not a separate entity from his fictional world. They were the very ground from which his literary breakthrough sprang, bringing him “into direct contact with industrialisation, mechanisation, and bureaucracy, as well as with the struggle between capital and labour.”1 So, to understand Kafka, the author, we must also grasp Kafka, the insurance lawyer, and explore, if only momentarily, his Office Writings to see what they reveal about the man, his stories, and novels.
In a sense, Kafka’s office writings feel like going to work ourselves: they do not positively sparkle with their captivating prose (they are admittedly dry!). The titles alone—“Fixed-Rate Insurance Premiums for Small Farms Using Machinery” (1909), “Petition of the Toy Producers’ Association in Katharinaberg, Erzgebirge” (1912), “Criminal Charge against Josef Renelt for the Illegal Withholding of Insurance Fees” (1913), “Help Disabled Veterans! An Urgent Appeal to the Public” (1916-17)—are enough to make your eyes glaze over. Yet, hidden within these seemingly dated papers lie traces of the motifs and obsessions that would underpin Kafka’s literary oeuvre. How, then, did this banal office labour influence and shape Kafka’s creative output? A close examination may uncover some fascinating correlations between his everyday responsibilities and his fiction. For the sake of argument, I’ll now jump ahead to various stages of Kafka’s career, which we’ll explore in more detail in forthcoming posts.
Traces of his professional life can be found scattered throughout his novels and stories. Compare, for example, his legal report on hotel elevator machinery in “Risk Classification Appeal by Norbert Hochsieder, Boarding House Owner in Marienbad” (1912) and the descriptions of hotel staff and elevator operators in Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared, ch. 5 “In the Hotel Occidental”). The latter clearly draws upon the former.
Another example is Kafka’s 1910 report, “Measures for Preventing Accidents from Wood-Planing Machines.” In it, he meticulously examines the risks inherent in factory machinery with square shafts and how these might trap and sever a worker’s finger (bear in mind that these machines operated at 3800-4000 revolutions per minute!), resulting in horrific mutilations. Superficially, this appears to be just another tedious (admittedly creepy) technical report on industrial machinery, workplace accidents and safety measures. But let’s look closer.
The meticulous depiction and drawings of mutilated hands and limbs, the dispassionate analysis of risk and injury, the relentless motion of the machinery—it all eerily evokes the story “In the Penal Colony,” where an intricate and harrowing torture/writing apparatus literally and brutally inscribes a condemned man’s crime and sentence onto his flesh. In Kafka’s story, the human body is akin to a punch card (a crude precursor to the computer), at the mercy of industry, technology, and bureaucracy. Kafka came close to foreseeing that the body would become, less than a century later, a biometric data repository, constantly under surveillance for health, fitness, identification, and sundry other monitoring devices.
Then there’s Kafka’s 1914 report, “Accident Prevention in Quarries.” Here, he addresses the issue of quarry owners compensating their employees with alcohol, resulting in accidents caused by drunkenness. He criticises inadequate safety protocols, the ineffectiveness of regulatory oversight, and the perpetual challenge of adapting to “ever-changing soil conditions.” Note that 1914 marked the beginning of Kafka’s work on The Trial. His intricate depiction of a quarry, including a “loose stone block, 1 cubic metre in size,”2 prefigures the unsettling final episode of the novel, in which Josef K. is put to death in a comparable quarry, next to a similar “loose stone block.” Jack Greenberg notes: “It is not difficult to surmise that the loose 1m3 block of stone of the quarry report prompted Kafka’s imagination of the loose block of stone of The Trial.”3 This insignificant yet telling detail suggests how Kafka transformed his mundane office duties into the core substance of his fiction.
The connection between Kafka’s professional and creative endeavours is particularly evident in his last novel, The Castle, which is widely regarded as the epitome of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The presence of the land surveyor in both contexts indicates a direct correlation between Kafka’s office work and this novel. In 1909, at the start of his career, Kafka initiated a project to set standard insurance rates for small farms, which required land surveying to determine acreage.
Years later, The Castle centres on a protagonist named K., who arrives in a snowstorm at a village, announcing he has been appointed by the castle authorities to take up his position as a land surveyor. Yet his claim is met with confusion, and he finds himself trapped in a seemingly endless web of bureaucratic obfuscation, unable to access the elusive Castle to verify his position. Literary critic Benno Wagner sees K.’s predicament as mirroring “young Kafka’s campaign for a land survey enabling fixed-rate insurance on Bohemian farms,” noting that “Clerk and poet define the two genealogical lines of the land surveyor.”4
One could argue that The Castle mirrors Kafka’s own tribulations with the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. The Institute where Kafka worked was caught in a constant tug-of-war between local and central control, wrestling with questions of language, ethnicity, and administrative reform. The novel’s universe—with its labyrinthine paper trails, its indistinct power structures, its bureaucrats preoccupied with procedures—strikingly reflects Kafka’s professional milieu.
These instances are merely the tip of the iceberg, but they reveal a fundamental insight: Kafka’s job entangled him in a realm of files, forms, paperwork, legal documents—a depersonalised conveyor belt of written symbols that later became a central motif in his fiction. The deluge of bureaucratic red tape, the perplexing maze of administrative procedures, the notion of individuals trapped and overwhelmed by colossal, invisible mechanisms—that’s the essence of the “Kafkaesque,” and it all originated from Kafka’s firsthand experience with the Austro-Hungarian administration.
Side note: the advice to “write what you know” is often bandied about as a prerequisite for those new to writing. This advice doesn't resonate with me. How could one possibly do otherwise? At the core, Kafka, hailed for crafting fantastical narratives, was articulating tangible experiences within an office setting—transfiguring mundane details into emotive visions. As Ursula K. Le Guin insightfully observed in a different context:
Kafka’s relationship with bureaucracy went beyond mere opposition, however. He didn’t merely condemn the system; it was as though he was drawn to it, even entwined with it! In a fascinating letter to Milena Jesenská, he compared his ambivalent feelings towards the workplace to those one might harbour for a parent (was this a veiled reference to his own father?):
it is possible that I’m [like someone who]—like most clerical workers—considers himself a constant victim of injustice, who is convinced he’s overworked—for me that thought would be tantamount to an express train to Vienna—someone who views the office as a stupidly run machine—he would run it much better—a machine in which he is in the wrong place precisely as a result of this stupidity. According to his abilities he should be a big-big-wheel and yet he is condemned to being a little-little-wheel, etc. To me, however, the office is a human being—just like elementary school, high school, university, family, everything—watching me with innocent eyes wherever I am, a living person to whom I have become attached in some way unknown to me.5
It’s as if he viewed bureaucracy as a reflection of his inner self, a distorted manifestation of his concerns about identity, belonging, and control.
These preoccupations seep into his narratives, influencing not only his portrayal of bureaucracy but also the very structure of his language. Kafka’s spontaneous choice to write in German rather than Czech or even Yiddish carries weight: German symbolised authority and control; it was both his father’s language and, in early 20th-century Prague, the language of the bureaucratic apparatus, the language of the Empire. As philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari argue in their influential study Kafka, Pour une littérature mineure:
L’allemand est la langue véhiculaire des villes, langue bureaucratique d’État, langue commerciale d’échange (mais déjà l’anglais commence à être indispensable a cette fonction).6
Kafka’s prose, with its convoluted syntax, its labyrinthine logic, its tendency towards abstraction, its obsession with detail, mirrors the German legalese, the chancery jargon, the impulse to categorise, organise, and control. This wasn’t merely a stylistic quirk; it was a purposeful decision, a method to reflect the language of the institutions he found himself in and railed against—a means to transform this bureaucratic language into a weapon of the pen, using it to articulate the absurdity and alienation of the postindustrial world.
So, Kafka’s office writings provide a vital perspective on his literary style. However, they also give rise to a larger question: what does it mean that the literature of modernity, as epitomised by Kafka, with its apprehensions about technology, bureaucracy, and the individual’s place in a world progressively detached from personal relationships, originated from the language of the office?
Here’s where things get really interesting. Fast forward a century, and Kafka’s “bureaucratic prose” finds its uncanny echo in the corporate jargon that infects our modern workplaces; in a world where, in addition, the office has infiltrated every aspect of our existence, from our language to our relationships. Our homes become “home offices,” our leisure time is filled with “productivity hacks,” and our very identities are index-linked to a consumer profile and shaped by the demands of the market. We’ve all become, in a sense, employees of the Castle, struggling to navigate a world where work has become an end in itself and even thought and creativity have become a consumer product (Substack sometimes feels like that too).
And just as Kafka’s characters navigate labyrinths of incomprehensible rules and procedures, today’s office workers find themselves immersed in a language characterised by abstract metaphors and baroque neologisms that seem to arrive from nowhere and gain immediate acceptance. We’ve all encountered them: the nonsensical buzzwords, the hyphenated mash-ups, acronyms, and compound phrases (“synergy,” “paradigm-shift,” “deep-dive,” “parallel-pathing,” “growth-hacking,” “up-levelling”), the inflated job titles (“Chief Happiness Officer,” “Growth Hacker,” “Customer Experience Magician”), the meaningless verbs turned into nouns (“ask” becomes an “ask,” “fail” becomes a “fail”)... The only point of these phrases is to fill space and create an illusion of communication and productivity, a sense of false authority, and ultimately confirm that delusion is an asset.
And just as these Kafkaesque characters struggle to assert their humanity in the face of dehumanising bureaucracy, modern workers may find their identities shaped and subsumed by the workplace’s “empowerment language,” which simultaneously folds us into an institutional organism and insists on that institution’s worthiness. The “aspirational” influence of corporate jargon can be seen as a tool for concealing power relations and unpleasant realities.
Similarly, the formal language of Kafka’s fictional institutions often seems designed to obfuscate rather than clarify, mirroring the opacity of the bureaucratic systems he depicts. The dense, circuitous language of his novels and stories, with their endless deferral of meaning, could be seen as a parody and precursor to the “nonlanguage” of corporate speak (which is neither beautiful nor particularly efficient).
Kafka, it seems, anticipated not only the bureaucratic dystopia but also the rise of corporate jargon as a means of enforcing it. Indeed, the newspeak of corporate authoritarianism surrounds us, shaping how we perceive our roles, concealing the inherent absurdity of contemporary employment, operating as a tool for social manipulation and self-delusion. And indeed, the most grimly accurate revelation of Kafka’s Office Writings and their fictional ramifications is that there is no way to evade the panopticon of the Castle. Like Kafka’s characters, we’re entangled in a maze of rules and regulations that we can never fully comprehend or control.
And yet, within that Kafkaesque trap lies the potential for uncovering meaning in a world that often appears devoid of it. This ironic twist could be regarded as Kafka’s ultimate legacy. His works serve as a form of resistance against the dehumanising nature of bureaucracy. By exaggerating and satirising the workings of impersonal institutions, Kafka asserts the perspective of the individual struggling to maintain their humanity and dignity in the face of an indifferent system. In essence, his writing represents an attempt to co-opt the system’s power by laying it bare. While Kafka fulfilled his role as a mere cog in the insurance machine by day, he subverted that very machine by night, transforming it into the primary substance of his provocative, unsettling art.
In the end, Kafka’s office writings are not merely biographical curios or a mere footnote to his literary oeuvre. They are an essential component of his creative process, offering both the inspiration and the object of his critique of contemporary society. By examining Kafka’s fiction through the lens of his office work, we can better grasp the manner in which he transmogrified the base material of bureaucratic drudgery into visionary literature. Though the term “Kafkaesque” has been overused to the point of cliché, a close investigation of Kafka’s lived confrontation with the administrative “Castle” can help us re-appreciate the enigmatic alchemy of his literary output.
To finish, this week’s
friendly advice—steer clear of Kafka:And a wonderful creative essay by
on lawyers-writers, revolutions, Brotberuf, company policies (and the desperate need for paying subscribers):Corngold et al., Franz Kafka: The Office Writings, loc. 691.
Ibid., loc. 5773.
Ibid., loc. 7077.
Ibid, loc. 895.
Letters to Milena, 31 July 1920, Schocken, pp. 130-131.
Éd. Minuit, loc. 572: “German is the vehicular language of the towns, a bureaucratic language of the state, a commercial language of exchange (but English has already started to become indispensable for this purpose).” (Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Plan, University of Minnesota Press, p. 56).
Hapsburg bureaucracy is a pretty niche interest area but it's one that grabs the hell out of me. 🤝 Brilliant essay, Leonard—and thanks for the shout out.