I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else.
--Kafka, Diaries, 1910–1923

There are certain existential conflicts that contribute to the ills of modern society. The incompatibility of vocation and profession is one of them. For Kafka, the struggle to balance his artistic calling and his civil job would prove catastrophic, even as it provided the material and truth of his fiction. When he chose literature as the only avenue that offered a chance for liberation, he was already an attorney in the service of the imperial Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. The problem for Kafka lay in the anguish that this double life caused him, and the tremendous tension it involved.

Kafka became a double agent. A bureaucrat in a world of bureaucrats, he could have been a candidate for the annual lawyers’ convention he imagined in one of his short stories. At the same time, in His Majesty’s Secret Service he pursued his art. This pursuit drained him and drove him to become a representative witness of his century.

A den of bureaucrats.

When he joined the Workers’ Accident Insurance Bureau, Kafka was appointed to the most important division, insurance assessment, at the orders of the superior inspector, Eugen Pfohl. Kafka was entrusted with statistical tasks, “important appeals” and “hierarchical appeals.” However, it was not long before his “outstanding intelligence” led to his being assigned to accident prevention, a function of the highest responsibility. This brought him into direct contact with the more negative aspects of the process of industrialization: an increase in bureaucracy, dehumanization of workers, and a dramatic rise in the number of accidents. Kafka had a good relationship with his superiors, for whom he wrote speeches and a vast number of reports, but he ultimately became disillusioned and bored, to the point of describing his working environment as a “den of bureaucrats.”