In the Penal Colony

Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883, in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family. Life for the young Kafka and his passion for literature was often made an ordeal by his over-bearing and domineering entrepreneur of a father. In 1889 Kafka was sent to the Deutsche Knabenschule, an elementary school in Prague. His father would only allow him to be educated in German-speaking schools and even went so far as to limit visits to the synagogue to four a year. In 1901 he graduated from the classics-oriented Altstädter Gymnasium. Kafka did well there and across a large range of subjects. He now enrolled at the Charles Ferdinand University, to study chemistry, but quickly switched to law for which he obtained his degree in June 1906 and then performed the mandatory year of unpaid service as clerk at the civil and criminal courts. A job at an Italian insurance company left him little time to write and after a year he took another job with the Worker's Accident