One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

She became his lover and caused him to become interested in the Talmud. Opinions ranged from the notion that he satirised the bureaucratic bungling of a crumbling Austria-Hungarian Empire to suggesting that he embodied the rise of socialism. During a vacation in July 1923 to Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea Kafka met Dora Diamant a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher from an orthodox Jewish family.

He prepared the story collection Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist) for print but it was not publiFranz Kafkad until after his death. His works such as "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis") Der Process (The Trial) and Das Schloss (The Castle) are filled with the themes and archetypes of alienation physical and psychological brutality parent–child conflict characters on a terrifying quest and mystical transformations. He had a complicated and troubled relationship with his father that had a major impact on his writing and he was conflicted over his Jewishness and felt it had little to do with him although it debatably influenced his writing.