Look at those eyes. Those are the eyes of someone who has been persecuted, of someone who is terrified.
And indeed, we do know that Kafka was persecuted and terrified. We know that from his writing and we know that from his biographical information (of course, Kafka has one of the most documented biographies). We know about his relationship with his father, of his doomed romances.
We know from his stories that he wrote about arbitrary persecution, about nebulous authoritative bureaucracies. He foreshadowed the terrifying totalitarianism of the Nazis and the USSR.
And we can tell that when we look at him. This is a petrified individual, someone who is afraid to talk. This is someone who is constantly toils. Indeed, he embodies the horrible cliche that a writer must suffer for his art.
Was Kafka precognitive? Do his eyes foresee Auschwitz, show trials, gulags and Hiroshima? Is his petrified state the perfect analogy for the horrors of the 20th century?
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