Throughout his work, Franz Kafka depicts bodies disabled by the exhausting effects of the workplace. In Amerika (1911 to 1914), set in an era of early 20th-century free-market enterprise, Kafka portrays the gruelling consequences of overwork on desperate people.
Reminiscent of the menial graft in Victorian classic David Copperfield, in one scene an exhausted labourer is crushed by falling bricks in front of her child. Later, a disabled woman imprisoned in her bedroom must rely on her lodgers to care for her. With near-Dickensian irony, their board is paid not with money but by this inadequate round-the-clock care.
Commemorating 100 years since Kafka’s death, many are revisiting his stories. A focus on how disabled bodies relate to the workplace brings a new appreciation of his fiction, as well as both his professional and personal life.
