It might be correct to refer to Kafka as a Czechoslovak writer, though he began to write before Czechoslovakia emerged out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's certainly incorrect to call him a Czech writer. Czech was exclusively an ethnic designation for the the Czech-speaking Slavs of that country. Kafka was a German-speaking Jew.

I'll take Louis Bayard's word for it that this book is "learned," but it forfeits the right to be called scholarly or responsible if it really tries to tell readers that there is a "K-myth" out there that presents Kafka as saintly. A straw Kafka, indeed. It's true that critcs present Kafka as tortured by various internal demons, but hardly as a man who is above reproach.

As a side note: while there has been more than a little dark absurdity in our post-invasion times, it seems to me bureaucrats have been redeemed. It wasn't bureaucracy that caused the obscene death and suffering; it was the deliberate, coordinated plan of a cabal--much more a Jacobean revenge tragedy than a Kafka-esque story of decentralized, unnamable evil. What has become clear is that Cheney et. al. expended great effort to block and neutralize all of the laws, regulations, and safeguards––the bureaucracies––that are supposed to keep individuals from abusing power. Some of the bureaucrats fought back, and got fired, derided, and abused for their trouble.

Good on Bayard for picking up on Ungeziefer - an important point usually missed by translators.

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Ah the amazing self-discipline of the American intellectual. Kafka's nightmarish police states, with their torture chambers and byzantine legal proceedings that can only produce guilty verdicts, resonate with him only from afar.

We are "... hearing his voice in Beijing, in Myanmar, in Chechnya."

The example that would be more powerful, meaningful, and unsettling for the readership of Salon is the US penal colony in Guantánamo Bay and various "black site" US secret prisons around the globe. But for the responsible American intellectual the more relevant example, the one the readership of Salon are most responsible for and best in a position to do something about, it must go unacknowledged.

A writer for Soviet-era Pravda would have written it up no differently.

Or you could read the first paragraph of Wiki

So? What has any of this, concerning the artist and how he lived his life, to do with the work, the art?

And if you took the first sentence of this article, googled it, you'd hit on documents recently made public - from the Bush administration. Life - imitates art, yes?

As did his father. While he wrote in German, and was a loyal subject of a German-speaking monarchy, he nonetheless lived and died within the boundaries of today's Czech Republic.

I'm no scholar of Austro-Hungarian policy and mores about ethnic divisions, but I think we should, a century later, not assume that all of those compartments were as watertight as the bureaucrats and nationalists of the era wanted them to be.

And there is a story--perhaps apocryphal--that one of Kafka's forefathers, a member of a Protestant denomination, converted to Judaism in the late eighteenth century. The way I heard it, he did so in response to an edict from the Emperor Franz Joseph that commanded all of the members of this sect to convert to Catholicism, but which ended with the sarcastic note "Unless, of course, you want to become Jews." Which is what Kafka's great-grandfather did, or so the story goes.

describes the "machine (that) quite literally writes condemned people to death."

I read Kafka in college (on my own, not for a class) and this story was the one that has resonated with me for decades.

that's the name of it.

Cockroaches are insects.

You seem to have skipped the first paragraph of this article.

Not to make too much of it but my mother is a Czech. Believe me that these distinctions were and to a considerable degree still are "water-tight". No German speaker, let alone a Jewish German speaker, would ever be regarded by Czechs as a fellow Czech. The very idea is absurd. You're also wrong that Kafka spoke Czech. He didn't. That would have been extremely unusual among native speakers of German in Prague. The Czech language was looked down upon at the time after 200 years of German cultural domination despite its importance during the Middle Ages and it would have been unheard of for a German speaker to bother to learn it. At any rate, any understanding of the Czech character makes it obvious that they could never produce anything remotely like a Kafka.

Re: Was Kafka Czech or not? He did live in what would become Czechoslovakia, but maybe it would be more accurate to call him Bohemian (though that has rather a different connotation for us). His first language was indeed German, but to correct one of the letter writers, he ALSO spoke Czech. It was apparently good business. (It was probably also good for picking up Czech girls.)

...a little Yiddish, mostly self-taught, because of his interest in the Yiddish theater, a very little English for work, and he studied Hebrew toward the end of his life as part of a renewed but ever-ambivalent Zionism.

And anyone who likes to read his fiction should check out Elias Canetti's Kafka's Other Trial which Bayard really should have cited in this article, since his closing argument about the interrelation between The Trial and the engagement to Felice Bauer is taken almost word for word from Canetti.