The word “kafkaesque” has come to describe the sensation of powerlessness when dealing with bureaucratic systems; of getting lost in labyrinthine administrative errands, being shut out by faceless officialdom and having your hopes strangled by red tape.
But kafkaesque does not come close to describing the life of the man who lent the term his name, according to an irreverent biopic of the Prague-born author.
In a six-part TV series for the German broadcaster ARD, Franz Kafka is shown not so much as a victim but as a master of bureaucracy – and an effective one at that.
The fourth episode of Kafka, coming to Channel 4’s Walter Presents and several other European streaming platforms from the end of May, shows that the creator of claustrophobic classics such as The Trial knew how to navigate complex bureaucratic systems better than most – from the inside.
As a clerk for the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, the predecessor of the Czech Republic, Kafka – played by the Swiss actor Joel Basman – is shown to excel at his day job.
He crushes opposing lawyers in arbitration courts by dextrously juggling paragraphs defining the “hazard class” of industrial looms. “If a case can be won at all, then Kafka is going to win it,” one of his superiors enthuses.
Daniel Kehlmann, an Austrian-German novelist who wrote the screenplay for the series, which was directed by David Schalko, said: “Kafka was one of the first writers of the 20th century to recognise bureaucracy as a phenomenon of almost existential gravity.
“He saw that our lives are becoming entangled in a system we no longer understand. But he understood it because he was a bureaucrat himself.”
Powerless individuals trying to work their way through maze-like corridors of power are at the centre of the writer’s best-known works. In The Trial (1925), the protagonist, Joseph K, is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority for a crime that is never explained to him; in The Castle (1926), a surveyor struggles to navigate the administrative layers of a mysterious citadel.
A long line of film-makers, including Orson Welles, Michael Haneke and Steven Soderbergh, have tried to adapt Kafka’s cryptic tales for the big screen. Along the way, few have been able to resist the temptation of connecting the dots between his oppressive works and the writer’s biography.
A schmaltzy romance based on Kafka’s supposedly cathartic final relationship before his death from tuberculosis at 40, called The Glory of Life, was released in Germany this spring. The Polish film-maker Agnieszka Holland has reportedly started work this year on another biopic, called Franz.
By contrast, Schalko and Kehlmann’s Kafka, which is based largely on Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography that was published in German between 2002 and 2014, explores the gaps between his writing and his life – one existentially anguished, the other sometimes troubled but not relentlessly so.
Divided into six non-chronological chapters, it examines the Kafka phenomenon from the perspectives of his close friend and posthumous literary executor Max Brod, his bourgeois family, his office colleagues, and the three women with whom he formed serious relationships: Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská and Dora Diamant.
The individual who emerges is a far cry from the myth of the tortured outsider artist alienated from his family, friends and job: an eccentric creative who was plagued by self-doubt and serious depression, but nonetheless enjoyed a comparatively privileged life, with dedicated champions of his work among a tight circle of friends and in high literary circles.
Kehlmann said: “Kafka came from a tradition of eastern European modernist literature. But the tendency has been to read him as this Jewish Kabbalistic prophet who predicted the horrors of the 20th century in complete isolation, and block out his social circle.”
In the series, some of Kafka’s most ardent fanboys are his superiors at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, moonlighting as writers. “Kafka’s employees saw him as a kind of secret weapon to solve legal disputes, and they made sure that he knew how much they appreciated his professional and literary work,” Kehlmann said.
“Kafka was allowed to leave his office at two o’clock every day and never took his work back home”, said the writer, whose bestselling novel, Measuring the World, took a similarly irreverent approach to the biography of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt.
Such was Kafka’s bosses’ admiration for their star employee that when the writer decided – for reasons that remain hard to comprehend – that he should enlist for the front in the first world war, his supervisors exempted him from service by insisting that he was indispensable to the continued operation of their business.
The Trial ends with the protagonist being executed “like a dog” for his unexplained crimes. “The biggest irony of Kafka’s life is that it was the other way around,” Kehlmann said. “Bureaucrats saved his life.”