Franz Kafka and the Nightmare of Bureaucracy

Kafka took some early stabs at writing a novel, but none of them really worked out. In 1903, he started The Child and the City. He abandoned it, and the manuscripts have since disappeared. He tried to collaborate with Max Brod on a work called Richard and Samuel, but that didn’t work out either. The fragment “Wedding Preparations in the Country” was supposed to be much longer than it was, but he gave up on it. Therefore, when talking about Kafka’s novels, we always have to start with Amerika. Although like his other attempts it remains unfinished, enough of it exists for us to recognize it as a novel, and so it is here we begin.

Liberty Fund

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on enduring issues pertaining to liberty.

Commentary Magazine

Commentary is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life. Since its inception in 1945, and increasingly after it emerged as the flagship of neoconservatism in the 1970’s, the magazine has been consistently engaged with several large, interrelated questions: the fate of democracy and of democratic ideas in a world threatened by totalitarian ideologies; the state of American and Western security; the future of the Jews, Judaism, and Jewish culture in Israel, the United States, and around the world; and the preservation of high culture in an age of political correctness and the collapse of critical standards.

Ayn Rand

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905. At age six she taught herself to read and two years later discovered her first fictional hero in a French magazine for children, thus capturing the heroic vision which sustained her throughout her life. At the age of nine, she decided to make fiction writing her career. Thoroughly opposed to the mysticism and collectivism of Russian culture, she thought of herself as a European writer, especially after encountering Victor Hugo, the writer she most admired.