A century after his death Franz Kafka is still in the zeitgeist

Franz Kafka was not a social person: he spent much of his time alone, trying, and often failing, to write. But on social media he is a hit. #Kafka posts on TikTok have been viewed around 2bn times. Users—particularly young women—swoon over his soulful letters to Milena, his on-again, off-again paramour. Kafka is “the OG lover boy”, reads a caption, below a video of a girl with a T-shirt that says “Reading is sexy”. Other posts dissect his toxic relationship with his father, immortalised in a letter, never delivered, in which Kafka blamed him for being emotionally abusive.

A century after his death on June 3rd 1924, Kafka still has allure, and not just among social-media addicts. A crop of new books pays tribute to him, from fresh translations to even a management book on “Franz Kafka and the Truths of Leadership”. The Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford—home to many of the writer’s manuscripts since 1961, when an aristocratic don drove them there from Zurich—is mounting a special exhibition, “Kafka: Making of an Icon”. A suitably weird biographical series will appear on ChaiFlicks, a Jewish streaming service, in June.

Kafka’s literary immortality would probably be a surprise to him—and a betrayal. He was not famous when he succumbed, age 40, to tuberculosis, two years after retiring from his job at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. He had no wife or heirs; in his will he instructed his friend, the author Max Brod, to burn his unpublished writings. Luckily Brod did not oblige. Instead he worked hard to build Kafka’s legacy. It is thanks to him that Kafka has become a household (and schoolroom) name, with people continuing to be drawn to the absurdity of his fiction, including “The Metamorphosis”, in which a salesman has the bad luck to wake up one morning as a big insect.

He has even spawned a vocabulary to talk about the world: “Kafkaesque”, first coined in the late 1930s, has become a label for nightmarish, complex and illogical situations, from government investigations to customer-service lines to nowhere. Covid restrictions in many countries—from quarantines to rapidly changing travel bans—made many think of Kafka, too.

Why does a sickly Austro-Hungarian Jew from Prague with father and commitment issues loom so large over modern culture? Kafka’s status is due, in part, to his prescient portrayal of one of the defining experiences of modern life: the co-existence of rationality and absurdity. The best-drawn example is “The Trial”, a fragmentary novel published a year after Kafka’s death, about a man prosecuted by a mysterious authority for an unknown crime. Readers, including the philosopher Hannah Arendt, have read the tale as foreshadowing totalitarianism. “The Castle” (1926) recounts the experience of a land surveyor who arrives in a village and tries and fails to be recognised by the authorities who govern it from a mysterious castle.

But Kafka’s fame is not only the product of literary excellence and relevant themes. He also got lucky, as Karolina Watroba, an Oxford academic, argues in “Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka”, a new biography of his afterlife that traces the author’s reception worldwide. Kafka wrote in widely spoken German, rather than provincial Czech; he benefited from an entrepreneurial literary executor in Brod, who assembled fragments and edited his texts for publication. It does not hurt that his name, which means “jackdaw” (a type of bird) in Czech, is easy to remember and fun to pronounce.

His fluid identity has also allowed him to be a part of many literary traditions without being confined to any of them. He was born in “a decaying, impotent empire” in the form of Austria-Hungary, “which would disappear from the map during his lifetime”, Ms Watroba writes. He cannot comfortably be called Czech, German, or Austrian, yet he is celebrated by all three cultures. Though Kafka never wrote an explicitly Jewish character, Jews have claimed him, and some of his papers are preserved in Jerusalem. At the same time, his depiction of oppressive bureaucracy and senseless violence has moved many, including Israeli and Palestinian authors critical of Zionism, such as Mahmoud Darwish. One of Kafka’s greatest literary achievements is his ability to metamorphose, depending on his audience.

His clear, memorable stories travel well, too. Unlike the dense fiction of other modernist writers, including James Joyce, Kafka’s work is easy to relate to, even if some of the subtext remains elusive. Beyond the West, where he has been a lodestar for everyone from Gabriel García Márquez to Paul Auster, Kafka has found large audiences in Asia. In South Korea female authors have found inspiration in Kafka for their dissection of gender dynamics, notably in Han Kang’s novel “The Vegetarian”, which plays with Kafka’s theme of psychological alienation.

Although he was far from an optimist—there is an infinite amount of hope in the universe but “not for us”, he is said to have observed—Kafka’s future is bright. While other old books gather dust, Ms Watroba writes, “The man from Prague seems to have adapted to the age of the cloud remarkably well.” The Goethe Institute, a German cultural group, has rendered “The Metamorphosis” in virtual reality, so people can see how it feels to wake up as a giant bug; and last year researchers used ChatGPT, an AI tool, to take a stab at completing “The Trial”. The results are better than you might expect. The world is still mirroring Kafka’s imaginings. If only he were here to write about it.

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