Another old one of mine...
The Life and Times of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of Bohemia. He lived a peaceful yet ever-changing life in the ever changing Austro-Hungarian Empire. His entire youth was spent in the company of the person that would influence and affect Franz’ ideas and life the most: his brother Georg Kafka.
Barely younger than Franz himself, Georg would come to exert an enormous deal of influence on him, and through their complicated childhood in which the Kafka family would continuously move from one neighborhood of Prague to another, the two boys would be each other’s best and only friends.
It was through Georg that Franz Kafka lived most of his life, often protecting or following his younger brother depending on the case. This is how the two joined the Imperial Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after Georg had decided that he wanted a life of adventure, which his brother didn’t particularly want, but as in many cases in the life of the Kafka brothers, Franz was dragged by his young brother.
After a few years in the Armed forces, the Kafka brothers would find a new interest, once again through Georg Kafka’s continuous desire for change and adventure, and that interest was politics.
From 1907 the brothers began to participate in Bohemian nationalist activities, campaigning for greater political and cultural autonomy, while at the same time German nationalists continued to increase their own activities within the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Kingdom of Bohemia. Franz Kafka in particular began to take interest in socialist activities while at the same time being an activist for Bohemian autonomy and rights. When in 1909 his brother George began to participate in socialist activities, it was the first time Franz had influenced his brother instead of the other way around. It wouldn’t last for long though.
In May of 1911 Georg Kafka would be arrested by the Imperial Police for acts of sedition along with several other nationalists and socialists in Prague. Four weeks later Georg would die of pneumonia, leaving his brother Franz alone and depressed.
Franz would nevertheless continue with his political activities, writing essays and manifestos for the Bohemian cause. At the same time he began to work in his brother Georg’s last apparent interest: Zionism.
Although not particularly devout Jews during their youth, the Kafka brothers had begun to develop an interest in Judaism and Jewish culture while working in the Jewish ghettos in Prague. Franz would later marry a jewish girl from the Ghetto of Josefstad in Prague, although she would later die of Influenza in 1919.
Traveling to Germany, France and the United Kingdom between 1911 and 1914, he began to involve himself with the Zionist movement gradually but constantly. The beginning and the end of the Great War would nevertheless divert Franz attentions for a while, being elected to the Parliament of 1917 and later to the first Parliament of the new state of Czechoslovakia. His wife’s death in 1919 would nevertheless leave Franz with a deep feeling of desperation and sadness, and when the opportunity presented itself, he decided to move to the British Mandate of Palestine and work for the creation of a Jewish State more directly.
In the Mandate he met the then young David Ben-Gurion and other members of the Labor Zionist movement in the area, which he joined in 1920.
While working for Ben-Gurion and the Moderate faction of the Zionist movement in Palestine, Kafka came to oppose the violent methods of the Orthodox and radicals like Menachem Begin. Kafka was also an important part in the establishment of defensive militias to protect the Jewish settlements from Palestinian and Arab attacks, as well as attacks from the Irgun or other Jewish fanatics within the Mandate.
Franz Kafka also played an important role within the Labor Zionist Party, reorganization much of the Establishment’s apparatus, giving speeches and encouraging the immigration of eastern European Jews, especially after the rise of anti-Semitic governments in the area and the German annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938.
The appeasing policies of the United Kingdom and the limitations to Jewish immigration to the mandate were the targets of Kafka’s speeches during much of the late 1930s, and a source of controversy regarding Israeli-British relations, to the point in which some argue that the British Military might have been involved in at least one of the half a dozen assassination attempts Kafka suffered between 1938 and 1942.
During the 1936-1939 Arab rising and the beginning of World War Two, Kafka and Ben-Gurion worked for the unification of the Israeli militias under a single command, although Begin’s Irgun would be excluded due to its methods, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1946, which killed hundreds of British soldiers.
Kafka’s Israeli Defense Committee would be the source of a new wave of tensions between the Arabs, the Jews and the British, even though Kafka would later offer the services of the Defense Forces to fight against the Germans when the war began in 1939.
Even though Israeli Forces would fight the Arab rising of 1941 and Rommel’s advances in Libya, the British were still distrustful of the Zionist government in general and of Kafka in particular, as de facto Minister of Defense for David Ben-Gurion.
After the war, Kafka and Ben-Gurion led the efforts to create a Jewish state with a moderate tone, despite the activities of Begin’s Irgun against the British Army. During the 1930s Kafka’s visits to America made him with many contacts with the American Jewish community. Georg had made Franz interested in oratory through his interest in theater in their childhood, and Franz was able to impress the Jewish-American community with passionate speeches and a striking oratory.
Negotiations with the British would nevertheless bring no results, and with the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe forcing London into taking a hard line, Begin decided to declare war on the British by blowing up the King David Hotel in 1946.
The Palestinian civil war of 1946 led to several thousands of dead when the Palestinian and Arab militias joined the fight between the British, Irgun and the Israeli Defense Committee under Kafka and Ben-Gurion.
Thousands of dead and the world’s pressure forced the British to abandon the Mandate on May 3rd of 1947, leaving a three-way fight between the Arabs, the Zionist moderates and the Zionist radicals, which were either defeated or incorporated by the time Egyptian troops crossed into Gaza on May 20th of 1947.
David Ben-Gurion was made Prime Minister of the new Free State of Israel on May 22nd of 1947 and Franz Kafka was made Minister of Defense the same day, being the man responsible for the defense of Israel a 64 year old lawyer.
Kafka was nevertheless able to mobilize the Jewish militia with his passionate speech, and thanks to American diplomatic and the intervention of the UN, Israel was saved from destruction by the Arab League. Kafka’s biggest contribution to the war effort might have also been the gaining of support and arms from Czechoslovakia at the time, being able to obtain arms from Czechoslovakia by official and unofficial means.
After the near miraculous end of the Israeli War of Independence on August of 1947, Kafka was made Minister of the Interior and Minister for Foreign affairs between 1947 and 1949, leading the efforts to gain international support, reconcile with the Jewish radicals like Menachem Begin in 1948 and working to built a stable democratic future for the new state, while his own homeland of Czechoslovakia fell to the influence of a communist dictatorship.
Franz Kafka died on April 11th of 1950, His final wish being that he be buried at Prague, a wish that could not be fulfilled until the collapse of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
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Eh, I hope these two biographies didn't create too constrictive parameters for the rest of the writers
I forgot they are all supposed to take place in the same universe...