100 years after the death of , a new mini-series aims to dive beneath the surface of an author who remains enigmatic even as his influence on the culture continues to grow. , an ambitious German-language meta-drama written by Austrian writer/director David Schalko ( ) and best-selling author David Kehlmann ( ), is based on Reiner Stach’s exhaustive three-volume biography of Kafka and weaves together the writer’s life and work, finding the connections and gaps between the two. Schalko, who spent more than a decade developing the series, and directs all six episodes, says he was well aware of the perils of trying to capture Kafka on screen.
“Everything we think we know about Kafka has become a cliche,” says Schalko. There is a temptation to depict Franz Kafka, the writer, as a “Kafkaesque” character, and his work as simply a heightened reflection of his life. On the surface, Franz Kafka appears to be almost nakedly autobiographical.
One could draw a straight line between Josef K.’s struggles in — as a man arrested for an unknown crime and condemned to death, who finds himself trapped in a labyrinth of official red tape, unable to find help or humanity — and Kafka’s day job as a clerk inside the byzantine bureaucracy of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague. Kafka’s letter to his father — 103 handwritten pages that were never delivered — is an excoriating excavation of his relationship with Hermann, his strict and domineering father, and.
