Abstract

While reading about Franz Kafka's death in a recent biography, the author recognized strangely familiar phenomena. Kafka was Jewish, terminally ill, and euthanized by a friend, circumstances the author had encountered in an essay on Freud's death a few years earlier. Further, both Kafka and Freud were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, both explored the deeper reaches of the human psyche, both had fatal diseases involving the head and neck, both read works with themes of fading away into death, and both had an intimate friend named Max. The author's feeling on reading the Kafka biography could, from this perspective, be described as uncanny. Beginning from that experience, the paper explores the sense of the uncanny, as well as Freud's essay of the same name.

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