---
title: "Franz Kafka (1883-1924) - IVU - International Vegetarian Union"
description: "Franz Kafka (1883-1924): Kafka was a Prague-born, German-language Jewish novelist, whose work had a tremendous influence on Western literature. His many books include The Castle , The Trial , and The Great Wall of China ."
url: "https://ivu.org/history-of-ivu.html?view=article&id=2483:history-europe20a-kafka&catid=60"
date: "2026-11-06T00:04:26+00:00"
language: "en-GB"
---

#  Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

![Franz Kafka (1883-1924)](https://ivu.org/images/legacy/history/banners/history-europe20a-kafka.png)Kafka was a Prague-born, German-language Jewish novelist, whose work had a tremendous influence on Western literature. His many books include The Castle , The Trial , and The Great Wall of China . His novels have been translated into many languages and have been adapted for movies, plays, and operas. The plot in his books generally center around the hero`s search for identity.

 Kafka was attracted to vegetarianism for health and ethical reasons. While viewing a fish in an aquarium, he said, "Now I can look at you in peace; I don`t eat you any more." He had little faith in conventional doctors; he was interested in the benefits of raw-food diets. He was also involved in anti-vivisection activities.
 *- Richard Schwartz*

for a much more detailed account see [Franz Kafka – Vegetarian Activist](https://ivu.org/media/legacy/history-documents/congress/2008/texts/StastnyFranz.doc) *(word/.doc file)* - from a talk by Jan Stastny at the 2008 IVU World Vegetarian Congress in Dresden.

A note on this archive. The history section of this website is drawn from a body of legacy content originally compiled by John Davis, former manager of the International Vegetarian Union. It represents his curation of historical material, and in places includes passages written by him directly.

Over the years, the IVU website has migrated between several different hosting servers. In the course of these migrations, a number of PDF files were unfortunately lost, and **some links to PDF documents may no longer function**. Where this is the case, we have chosen to leave the original link text in place, as it may itself carry information of historical value.

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