Franz Kafka: Genius plagued by self-doubt
Franz Kafka died 100 years ago, but millions of readers worldwide are still captivated by his enigmatic stories. Who was this super talent? Why does he still have so many fans? And what does it mean when something is Kafkaesque?
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00:00Have you ever heard of something being Kafka-esque?
00:05Do you even know where the term comes from?
00:09Behind it, it's Franz Kafka, the only 20th-century writer
00:12whose name is part of languages worldwide.
00:15Kafka died 100 years ago near Vienna.
00:18But to this day, millions of readers around the world
00:20are crazy about the dark author's enigmatic stories.
00:24Once you catch Kafka fever, it's hard to get cured.
00:34Kafka's texts deal with our deepest anxieties.
00:41Kafka saw himself as a failed author despite his super-talent.
00:46So what's a super-talented writer all about?
00:49Who was Franz Kafka?
00:50Why is he still read so enthusiastically?
00:53What exactly is Kafka-esque?
00:59An exhibition in Prague called Kafka-esque.
01:03A new video game that brings his literary world to life.
01:07Theater productions.
01:10On the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka's death,
01:13we see the image of this tall, thin man with a hat
01:16and eyes full of astonished world-weariness everywhere.
01:20It's even trending on TikTok millions of times.
01:23Let's first look at who Franz Kafka was.
01:35Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883
01:38to German-speaking Jewish parents.
01:42He's an excellent student, but constantly plagued by self-doubt.
01:47Am I good enough?
01:48Will everyone notice that I am actually completely incompetent?
01:53Maybe that's exactly why Franz chooses a down-to-earth profession after school.
01:58One that doesn't overwhelm him, an insurance employee.
02:02He goes through mountains of files and only lets the writer out at night.
02:06He writes stories, fragments of novels, and tons of letters and diaries.
02:10He also draws.
02:13There are certain years or periods
02:17where we know almost day by day what he was doing.
02:21We can, from a distance, see the development of a human being.
02:27His thoughts, his laughs, his pain, his relationship with his father.
02:32The relationship with his father, a painful chapter.
02:36In the eyes of Hermann Kafka, a successful businessman,
02:39Franz is never enough.
02:42One day, Franz writes a letter to his father, over 100 pages long,
02:46in which he finally wants to clear the air about their troubled relationship.
02:52I, skinny, frail, fragile, you, strong, tall, thick-set,
02:57even in the cubicle I felt a puny wretch,
03:00and not only in front of you, but in front of the whole world,
03:04because for me, you were the measure of all things.
03:09But Hermann Kafka never gets to see the letter.
03:12And things aren't going well with women, either.
03:15He has many love affairs and is engaged twice,
03:18but as soon as things get serious, Franz Kafka gives up everything.
03:23No wonder he also doubts the value of his literature.
03:26Kafka's psyche was somewhat fragile, but unfortunately, so was his health.
03:33At just 40 years of age, he died of tuberculosis in 1924.
03:39His last will, written to his writer friend Max Brod,
03:43was that he should destroy all of his unpublished works.
03:46Fortunately for the world, he ignores this,
03:49because he considers his friend Franz Kafka to be the greatest poet of his time.
03:53Today, Kafka's stories and novel fragments are world literature,
03:57and Kafka is one of the most widely read German-speaking authors in the world.
04:02He would not have liked this.
04:04He would probably have said, guys, this is a huge misunderstanding.
04:08He didn't see himself as a successful writer.
04:11I mean, he tried to write a novel three times, and he never finished any of them.
04:26When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from troubled dreams,
04:31he found himself transformed, right there in his bed,
04:34into some sort of monstrous insect.
04:39This is how Kafka's most famous story, The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, starts.
04:44A young man who wakes up as an insect.
04:47Sounds strange, but apparently it still triggers many people today.
04:51A symbol of feeling at the mercy of others.
04:54Incredibly well captures what it feels like to be misunderstood,
05:00or feel misunderstood as a young person.
05:03You know, the familial stresses,
05:06the pressures of starting out in the world in a profession
05:10where you're just very sure that you are going to fail,
05:13and look at that, here you are failing,
05:15despite your great effort and, you know, intentions.
05:20And I think it resonates a lot with young people.
05:23Susan Bernofsky has translated The Metamorphosis into English.
05:26She teaches at New York's Columbia University
05:29and repeatedly experiences a Kafka-mania among her students.
05:34Every time I bring a Kafka text into my classroom,
05:37the students go crazy for it.
05:39Usually it's me, hey, look at this first sentence,
05:42and then letting Kafka take it from there.
05:46Being lost, not fitting in, not knowing the rules, not reaching your goal.
05:50This feeling runs through all of Kafka's works.
05:56K, the hero of this story, receives a job as a surveyor from the count of a castle.
06:00But K will never get there,
06:02and the residents of the neighboring village cannot help him either.
06:05Man versus bureaucracy. Typical Kafka.
06:12The story of a father-son conflict.
06:14Many have read it as autobiographical.
06:17Kafka's reaction to this? I'm not sure of that either.
06:23Josef K. is arrested and doesn't even know why.
06:26It's a surreal situation.
06:28Josef K. is drawn into a nightmarish labyrinth
06:31without knowing the reason for the accusation
06:33or whether there will even be a verdict.
06:37He is constantly receiving information,
06:39but he cannot assess how reliable it is.
06:42And the information appears contradictory.
06:45And the information constantly raises new questions.
06:48That's the crazy thing.
06:50Every time he gets an answer, it immediately raises a new question.
06:54And then he has to try to research this.
06:57And of course, he never comes to an end.
07:00Disinformation through too much information.
07:03That's so Kafka.
07:04Bizarre, tragic, and also a bit funny.
07:16All of these texts are over 100 years old
07:18and read as if they had only just been written,
07:21so totally current.
07:25I think Kafka is still so relevant 100 years after his death
07:30because the world that Kafka writes about
07:33is still our world in some way.
07:37The problems, bureaucracy, totalitarianism,
07:42the relationship of people to orders that they cannot understand very well,
07:47be they political or legal or even religious,
07:51these are all the same as today.
07:59What Kafka also noticed very early on,
08:02as something which is a kind of threat,
08:04is that we are flooded with information.
08:07But the information no longer forms a meaningful whole.
08:11You can, if you want, research on the internet from morning to evening,
08:15but the crucial questions are not answered in this way.
08:20No orientation, feeling lost.
08:22Perhaps Kafka's stories are so universal
08:25because they're detached from a time and place.
08:28We don't know where the story happens, when it happens.
08:33He's not using the full names, but just initials.
08:39There's not exact time presented in his text,
08:43so it's ideal work for every period.
08:50Not even the places we're talking about have a name.
08:53This is precisely why Kafka works worldwide.
08:56There are art festivals and exhibitions in Thailand, New York,
09:00and now in Prague that translate his surreal worlds into images.
09:04It's showing the exhibition Kafkaesque,
09:07with works by over 30 international artists
09:10who resonate deeply with Kafka's themes,
09:12even in contemporary times.
09:16One of the artists at this exhibition told us
09:20that he could sign a letter to father with his name,
09:26and he would not change any sentence in the text.
09:30And then the language.
09:31Kafka writes clearly and simply, objectively.
09:34There's nothing artificial or convoluted,
09:36but what he describes is dreamlike and nebulous.
09:40He pulls out all the stops,
09:42and I just, as a young person, was so just blown away
09:47by his way of creating these situations
09:50and using language to describe things so precisely
09:55in a way that, despite all the precision,
09:58you have no idea what's going on.
10:00It's these spaces that Kafka creates
10:03that become smaller and smaller, or larger and larger,
10:06or, as he often describes,
10:08the impossibility of getting from one point to another.
10:14Kafka manages to describe, in very clear words,
10:18the images that we encounter in our nightmares.
10:25These images, the surreal moods,
10:27became a huge source of inspiration for writers all over the world.
10:33Haruki Murakami, Samuel Beckett,
10:37Philip Roth, Paul Celan, Paul Auster,
10:42they were all fascinated by the interplay
10:44between everyday life and the fantastic.
10:47And perhaps the great Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez
10:49only found his voice through Kafka.
10:52When he read Kafka, he thought,
10:54that's how I write, that's how my grandmother spoke,
10:57that's how my father spoke, that's how my mother spoke.
11:00And he thought, that's how I write,
11:02that's how my grandmother spoke.
11:05As a child, his grandmother always told him
11:08about witches and people who flew.
11:11So, I can write like that too, in a very natural way,
11:15without arguing, without explaining anything,
11:18and that comes directly from what magical realism is.
11:25What is known as magical realism in South America
11:28goes back to a large extent to Kafka.
11:31But Kafka's eerie moods don't just provide inspiration for writers.
11:35Hollywood director Orson Welles filmed Kafka's trial,
11:39dark, expressionistic.
11:41To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free.
11:44Filmmaker and painter David Lynch may not make Kafka films,
11:48but in his works he creates Kafkaesque worlds,
11:50in which the boundaries between realism and fantasy are blurred.
11:54In his movie Mulholland Drive,
11:56he leaves the viewer alone in the attempt to understand something.
11:59It's been a very strange day.
12:02I'm getting stranger.
12:04Silencio.
12:06You very often don't know what's going on, what's happening.
12:09It's very confusing for the viewer,
12:12as well as Kafka's text might be confusing for the reader.
12:17David Lynch met with Kafka's writing very early,
12:20already at the end of the 60s,
12:22when he made his first experimental films.
12:26He even said that he feels that Kafka is his spiritual brother.
12:30And he even wrote the script for a film based by Kafka's metamorphosis.
12:37The exhibition in Prague's Doc Center
12:39attempts to explore this feeling in a Kafkaesque way.
12:43Artists who show that Kafka is understood everywhere,
12:46in Israel, in England, and in China.
12:49For example, in the works of Lu Xia.
12:51For many of the Chinese dissidents,
12:54the reality of their everyday life under the communist regime
12:59was very close to those kind of socio-political qualities of Kafka's writings.
13:06She felt Kafkaesque.
13:08Well, here we are again. Kafkaesque.
13:18It exists in almost every language.
13:20It's also in many dictionaries.
13:22Is there an official definition of what Kafkaesque means?
13:26A question we ask our experts.
13:28It's used to describe especially bureaucratic situations
13:32that don't quite make sense and seem unreasonable
13:35and seem to have been dictated by a higher power to which one has no access.
13:40If you get into some bizarre situation on an everyday basis...
13:46Kafkiano in Spanish, Kafkaesque,
13:49is used very similarly as in other parts of the world
13:53to talk about something a little dark, macabre, incomprehensible, overwhelming.
13:59An absurd situation created by absurd rules.
14:02Yes, I know that feeling. We all know it.
14:05The helplessness in a world that is becoming increasingly complex.
14:09Will we still know the word in a hundred years? Kafkaesque?
14:13Most likely, yes.
14:15Because what Kafka describes is something deeply human.
14:18And that will remain.