Franz Kafka printable poster

This printable poster is available in A4, A3, Letter and Tabloid formats. You purchase and then download a high resolution (300 dpi) JPG file that you print on the media of your choice.

The poster depicts the German-speaking Austro-Hungarian writer of Jewish descent Franz Kafka, with his name written in capital letters in imposing and broken calligraphy, with his simplified portrait taken from one of his famous photographs, and in the bottom one of his original manuscripts where we recognize one of his recurring characters, “K”. The whole gives the impression that the writing is trying to make sense, in a chaotic and absurd world.

Franz Kafka, his life and work

Born in 1883 to a Jewish family in Prague, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he has two brothers and three sisters and his parents run a small business. After a sad and lonely childhood, he studied law and was then employed in an insurance company. In parallel with this work which he considers boring, he begins to devote himself to literature. For years he suffered from poor health and died in 1924, at the age of 40, of tuberculosis. 20 years later, most of his family will die in the Nazi extermination camps.

His friend Max Brod, to whom Kafka had asked to burn all his writings, decides on the contrary to publish them. He published in particular his unfinished novels: The Castle, The Trial, and his short stories, including The Metamorphosis, as well as letters, in particular the Letters to Milena and the Letter to the Father, and the famous Journal.

The Trial tells how the main character, Joseph K., is one day arrested and indicted, without knowing what he is accused or who is accusing him. He is summoned to a hearing without giving him the address. The court looks more like a place of debauchery and intrigue than a place of justice. Relations with the lawyer are corrupt and incomprehensible. After tragicomic adventures in an atmosphere of suffocating and nightmarish bureaucracy, Joseph K is finally executed in a barbaric manner.

In The Castle, the character of K. has just been employed as a surveyor in the service of the authorities of a castle which governs a village. He becomes acquainted with various characters linked to this castle, but never manages to be in direct contact with these authorities, as if this power were inaccessible. Symbol of the State, or of God?

Amerika, or The Disappeared, is a sort of parody of a learning novel, where the character, instead of improving, goes from disaster to disaster and ultimately learns not much, except that the world and people are all crazier than the next.

In The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, one fine day finds himself transformed into “a monstrous insect”. He is rejected by his whole family and ends up starving himself.

In The penal colony, we find the theme of absurd justice explored in The Trial, but this time taken to the extreme through the story of a death machine that ends up destroying itself.

Overall, Kafka’s work develops new themes in literature: alienation, absurdity, bureaucracy, totalitarianism…