Truth is stranger than fiction in new miniseries based on the life of Franz Kafka
In ‘Kafka,’ now streaming on ChaiFlicks, the Czech Jewish author’s escapades and complex inner struggles are creatively portrayed through the eyes of those who loved him most
Reporter at The Times of Israel
In a scene from the new miniseries “Kafka,” when a Yiddish theater troupe from Eastern Europe tours Prague, the titular character Franz Kafka is among the audience.
The Czech Jewish literary wunderkind and his smart-set pals watch an unconventional Shabbat dinner unfold: four actors — two in drag — mimic a shtetl family, accompanied by three musicians on the bass, violin and accordion. The patriarch issues an ultimatum against arguments on Shabbat, then begins to recite a blessing. An incensed family member interrupts by dumping the imaginary contents of a bowl over his head. Kafka, entranced, does the actors one better: He envisions an actual bowl of soup, noodles and all, being dumped over the head of his own overbearing father, Hermann.
This scene-within-a-scene-within-a-scene characterizes the creativity of the series about the celebrated early 20th-century author. “Kafka” first aired on German national TV in June, 100 years after the tormented writer’s premature death from tuberculosis in 1924, with Swiss-Israeli actor Joel Basman in the title role. The series is available on the Jewish and Israeli streaming platform ChaiFlicks. Prominent German producer and playwright David Schalko conceived the idea and co-wrote the series with acclaimed German novelist Daniel Kehlmann.
Kehlmann told The Times of Israel that the show’s reception has been very positive.
“We were worried that everybody has an idea of what Kafka was like and how you should show him. Lots of people before said, ‘It can’t work, no actor could do Kafka.’ I think Joel did a wonderful job doing Kafka.” He called it “something so magical… how he transformed himself into Kafka,” said Kehlmann.
Was truth stranger than fiction? Kafka’s day job was not as a writer — rather as a lawyer for the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. He had a side hustle — running an asbestos factory after some prodding from his father.
In a land of beer and dumplings, he ate rarely, and when he did, he chewed his food no less than 40 times, per the advice of a Dr. Horace Fletscher. His love life often foundered. An early engagement to Felice Bauer, punctuated by feverish letter-writing to her, ended after he interminably delayed the wedding.
Later in life, he had an affair with his married Czech translator, Milena Jesenska; on-screen, it fizzles out after a whirlwind day in the Wienerwald. Yet by the series’ end, it’s clear that Kafka has inspired love in those around him, as reflected by the care he receives from his third lover, Dora Diamant, as well as his lifelong best friend and fellow writer, Max Brod.
Series birthed on the slopes
The series has an unusual origin story. Schalko and Kehlmann are friends, and about eight years ago, they went on a momentous ski trip with their families. In passing, Schalko mentioned that he had acquired the film rights to author Reiner Stach’s recently completed three-volume biography of Kafka. Kehlmann loved the idea and offered to help if and when his friend got funding. It took two years, but finally Schalko connected with German national TV and brought over not only Kehlmann but also Stach, with the latter getting full veto power as the trio tackled the challenges of introducing Kafka to a 21st-century audience.
“His life and his literature are very closely connected,” Kehlmann said. “Stach writes extensively about what experiences made him write which stories. We had to find a way to make the show about this… The first big challenge was, what made him write the way he did?”
“The other thing was making him speak; we do not have any records of Kafka. We do actually have descriptions of what his voice sounds like, but we cannot hear it,” he added, in an observation that itself contained a bit of the Kafkaesque.
What the filmmakers did have were Kafka’s diaries and letters. While Kafka urged those closest to him to destroy his correspondence upon his death, they disobeyed him. This included Brod, who smuggled his late friend’s papers out of Nazi-occupied Europe, then made some questionable editorial decisions that resurface, decades later, in episode one. There was also a 100-plus-page letter to Hermann — unsent, but preserved for posterity and quoted in the series.
“The question is, how did he actually talk?” Kehlmann asked. “If somebody writes like that, he probably also talks like that.”
A contradictory Jew
In a return trip to watch the Yiddish theater performers, Kafka’s wit is in full force. His friends debate the future of Europe’s Jews — Zionism versus assimilationism — and then ask where he stands. Kafka responds by partially quoting his well-known, self-deprecatory remark about Judaism: “What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.”
“Kafka had a very complicated relationship to his Jewish ancestry — or a contradictory relationship,” Kehlmann said.
As the series explains, Kafka grew up in an assimilated, upper-class Prague Jewish family — father Hermann, who owned a “Ladies’ Fancy Goods and Accessories” store, mother Julie, and sisters Elli, Valli and — Kafka’s favorite — Ottla. Many of his friends were also Jewish, including Max, as were two of his three lovers — Felice and Dora. Milena had an affair with Kafka while married to a Jew, Ernst Polak; later, she sheltered Jews escaping from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.
The Holocaust claimed all three of Kafka’s sisters and the Yiddish theater star Yitzchak Lowy, who had so delighted Kafka in that onstage Shabbat spoof. Milena, arrested in 1939, perished at the Ravensbruck Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany in 1944. She was honored with the designation Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1994.
“Kafka lived in a world that completely disappeared, that was completely destroyed by the Nazis,” said Kehlmann, whose own father came from an assimilated German Jewish family and survived a concentration camp during WWII.
“It felt very personal to me to write the series,” Kehlmann said. “It was not the reason I undertook it — I love Kafka. While writing, I got more and more interested in the world around him — literary Prague, literary Vienna between 1905 and 1924.”
Nonlinear, like its subject
Featuring sumptuous interiors from both cities as well as panoramic outdoor scenes, the six-episode series covers such momentous events as World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic and — in a lighter moment — the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1910. An omniscient narrator gives context to the viewer and chats with characters mid-scene. Boundaries blur in other ways, including when Kafka maps out his novels in his mind, sometimes casting his nearest and dearest as characters.
Kehlmann laughed obligingly at the suggestion that the show is Kafkaesque, but agreed that its plot is nonlinear, like its subject.
“Kafka was maybe the greatest literary avant-garde writer who ever lived — among the greatest,” he said. “We could not do a traditional biopic of Kafka.” Instead, he explained, “Every episode is through the perspective of someone in Kafka’s life on Kafka.”
Episodes one and two convey the perspectives of Kafka’s best friend Max and his first serious love Felice, respectively. Episode three examines both Kafka’s biological family and his complex relationship to Judaism and Zionism (over the course of the series, he is characterized as a Zionist, a half-Zionist and a non-Zionist, and makes separate, unfulfilled plans to go to British Mandate Palestine).
In episode three, assimilated and traditional Jewish worlds collide when Franz brings home a dinner guest — Lowy. The thespian’s manners are impeccable — unlike Hermann, he’s courteous to the family housekeeper — yet by his third visit, Lowy’s talk of God and Judaism has so unsettled Hermann that he is asked to leave. Shocked, he questions the Kafkas’ Judaism on the way out. Afterward, Hermann refers to Lowy as “vermin.”
In his bedroom, processing what has just transpired, Franz contemplates the novella that will become his classic, “The Metamorphosis.” His hands form the silhouette of an insect on the wall. Then we hear Max narrate the lines that college literature students know so well, in which Gregor Samsa turns into an insect — or, more precisely, “a vast, verminous insect,” to the consternation of his parents and sister. In his mind, Kafka stage-manages the plot, with himself as Samsa, his parents as Samsa’s parents and Ottla as Samsa’s kindhearted sister. And yes, there is a giant bug in this recreation — a stinkbug instead of the generally favored cockroach.
“He has invented something that’s just unbelievable as a technique,” Kehlmann said. “Very strange, dreamlike, surreal images or events, never explained. He just uses them as something natural, what the world is like. It’s something very important, a big influence on me. Also the way he fuses the reality of everyday life with the reality of dreams. No one does it as well.”
What he didn’t do so well, Kehlmann noted, was finish his stories.
“He had such an elevated idea of what writing was like,” Kehlmann said, “what it must feel like to do serious writing — a hypnotic state, being absolutely one with yourself. What you write has to be absolutely perfect.” As a result, he said, “He didn’t finish much.”
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