New Kafka miniseries is especially relevant today

Life is so much messier than anyone can imagine. Europe is shattered and people die in unimaginable numbers,” wrote Franz Kafka about World War I, in one of many moments that seem especially relevant today from the new television series Kafka, which has just become available on Chaiflicks to mark the 100th anniversary of the great Jewish author’s death.

Chaiflicks is a streaming service featuring Jewish content that is available in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. It will likely be broadcast later this year in Israel, as well.

Co-written by best-selling author Daniel Kehlmann (Measuring the World) and David Schalko (Me and the Others), who also directed, the six-part series is a look at the writer who changed the face of modern literature with ground-breaking works such as The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, as well as short stories and diaries. His work was so unique and haunting that anytime you hear literature described as avant-garde, experimental, or original these days, it’s worthwhile to step back and ask yourself whether Kafka was creating works that were far more interesting and bolder over a hundred years ago. The answer is virtually always yes, and so much of what passes for literary innovation today is simply a blander version of the mostly allegorical tales of alienation, angst, and injustice that Kafka wrote.

Life and work

The more you know and love Kafka’s work, the more you will get out of this Austrian/German series, which is at its best showing how Kafka’s life and literature melded. As much as possible, the writers get inside Kafka’s head – an interesting place to be – and mix realistic scenes with fantastic ones, just as Kafka did to such great effect in his fiction.

Each episode has a theme, focusing on a particular relationship or aspect of the writer’s life. The opening one spotlights Kafka (Joel Basman, who appeared in The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch, and who gives an appealingly low-key performance here) and his friendship with Max Brod (David Kross, who was in The Reader). These days, Brod is known mainly as Kafka’s literary executor, but he was equally important to Kafka during his life. Although his books are rarely read today, Brod was a literary star who took Kafka under his wing, convincing German companies to publish his works, in some cases, before Kafka had actually written them. 

Grasping the scope of Kafka’s genius, he encouraged the neurotic, perfectionist young man to keep writing no matter what and the scenes that portray this are very touching. The most famous aspect of their relationship, that Kafka begged Brod to burn all his unpublished works, among them masterpieces such as The Trial, is a key part of their story. Obviously, we know what Brod chose to do, and it’s interesting to see how he went to great lengths to take Kafka’s journals and papers with him when he fled Prague in 1939, worrying that the Nazis who boarded his train car would destroy them.

Throughout the series, the creators are at pains to portray Kafka as a chevreman, an outgoing guy, who frequented pubs and brothels and hung out with a group of Jewish intellectuals. One episode showcases his day job, which for much of his life was at the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute, where he investigated and assessed industrial work accidents. Although he said he hated the work and dreamed of devoting himself exclusively to his writing, he was actually a committed advocate for those injured workers, and the combination of bureaucracy and gruesome accidents resulting in the loss of limbs and fingers seems to have inspired his writing.

Other episodes look at Kafka’s relationships with two women who were important to him: his fiancée, Felice Bauer (Lia Van Blarer), and Milena Jesenská (Liv Lisa Fries of Babylon Berlin), his Czech translator, and through these relationships examine different aspects of his Jewish identity. With Bauer, he spoke Hebrew at times, although he couldn’t decide how he felt about her Zionist sentiments. On an outing with Jesenská, who was not Jewish but had a Jewish husband, Kafka was harassed by antisemites, which is shown in the series. Jesenská helped Jews flee the Nazis during World War II and was arrested and died in a concentration camp. Yad Vashem recognized her as Righteous Among the Nations in 1994.

The one episode that flounders is the one I was looking forward to the most, about his family life and how he came to write The Metamorphosis. The father who comes through in his writings is a larger-than-life tyrant, and I was hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the elder Kafka through the series, but he is shown as an angry, self-absorbed monster we know from the writings, with no shading or redeeming features. Toward the end of the episode, when Kafka has a breakthrough and writes the novella about a young man much like himself who is transformed into a bug overnight, the story is dramatized effectively. At the end of this episode, we also see the fates of his parents, who died before the Holocaust, and his three sisters, who were murdered by the Nazis.

Campus protesters may want to throw away their copies of Kafka’s books, because, as this series shows, despite his ambivalence about many aspects of his Jewish identity and his rebellion against the conventions of Jewish European bourgeois life, he was a Zionist. This fact is shown clearly in the final episode, dedicated to his life with Dora Diamant (Tamara Romera Gines), his last fiancée and the one who nursed him through the final years of his painful struggle with tuberculosis. Although when he was younger, he wavered in his support for Zionism, with Dora, a young woman from an ultra-Orthodox background who had left Galicia and moved to Berlin, he dreamed of marrying her and starting a new life in Palestine.

To that end, he began to study Hebrew seriously, reading the Torah and Hebrew novels, and in the series, they speak Hebrew together at times, although soon he lacked the strength to recite the Friday night blessings with her. But moving to Palestine was a dream that sustained him towards the end of his life. Ernst Pawel wrote in his biography, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka: “Above all, [Kafka and Diamant] clung to the dream of a new life together in an old land – next year in Jerusalem. Or in Tel Aviv, where they were going to open ‘a little restaurant,’ with Dora in the kitchen and Kafka waiting on tables. As Puah [Ben-Tovim Menczal, Kafka’s Hebrew teacher] put it, Dora didn’t know how to cook, he would have been hopeless as a waiter, but why not? ‘In those days, you know, most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them.’”

This ambitious miniseries tackles this and the rest of the emotional and literary aspects of Kafka’s life with care and intelligence. This story of a Jewish genius trying to figure out how to make a career as a writer and come to terms with his Jewish identity in an antisemitic society is a perfect drama for today’s troubled times.