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, …