Franz Kafka earned his living as a corporate lawyer, toiling away in-house at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute, a large Czech insurer. An academic press recently published a collection of documents he wrote on the job, described by a reviewer as including:
a panegyric welcoming … the new director of the Institute; long sections of annual reports of the Institute; polemical memoranda concerning such matters as the scope of compulsory insurance for building trades, the fixing of insurance premiums, and the inclusion of private automobiles in the category of enterprises that require insurance; his well-known paper on preventing accidents in the use of wood-planing machinery; memoranda in a couple of interminable contested cases; the jubilee report for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Institute; and appeals for the creation of a public psychiatric hospital in wartime Bohemia and aid to disabled veterans.
I’m a fan of Kafka’s fiction, and I’m a corporate lawyer, but even I can’t muster up any enthusiasm for reading his office papers. Not even his “well-known paper on preventing accidents in the use of wood-planing machinery.” It all seems deadly dull.
Then again, I am the guy who thought the world would be interested in the use of “as amended” in statutory citations and the proper pronunciation of “comptroller,” so who am I to turn up my nose?