> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.rebindclassics.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # An Introduction to Kafka - URL: https://www.rebindclassics.com/kafka-an-introduction/ - Published: 2026-01-02T00:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-12T20:15:45.000Z - Description: Unferth introduces the insurance clerk from Prague who destroyed most of what he wrote and still named the modern predicament. - Author: Andrew Wessels - Tags: Deb Olin Unferth on Franz Kafka, #video Deb Olin Unferth opens with the Kafka most people already know, the man who turns into a bug and the adjective made from his name, and then with the one she met at seventeen: a story so brutal, dark, strange, and somehow funny that she has reread it a couple dozen times since. She lays out the plain facts of the life. A government clerk in Prague who reviewed insurance claims and wrote safety manuals, never married, lived with his parents, destroyed most of his own work, and left the rest to a friend with instructions to burn it. Then the world he wrote inside: the first airplanes and telephones, Freud and Einstein in the cafés, the Great War, and the new feeling of being a cog in a machine with no visible way out. She closes with why she chose these three stories and what their endings have to say about that way out. ## Transcript Hello, and welcome to Rebind. I'm Deb Olin Unferth, and I'm excited to be talking to you about Franz Kafka and about three of his very best stories: "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," and "A Hunger Artist." Even people who have never read a word of Kafka usually know that "The Metamorphosis" is about a man who turns into a bug, or they know the word Kafkaesque. Kafka has influenced countless writers, movie directors, and visual artists. He is part of our culture and our psyche. I still remember the first time I read a story by Kafka. I was 17 years old, a freshman in college, and we read one of his late works, "A Hunger Artist." I couldn't believe how powerful, brutal, dark, and strange it was, and somehow funny. I have since read that story a couple dozen times, along with his other stories, unfinished novels, and fragments. I can never get through a year without having at least a brief Kafka phase, where I sink into his world, spend many afternoons rereading his fiction, diaries, and the biographies about him. For me, and for so many other writers and artists, he is a touchstone. A little about me. I'm a writer. I've published six books: two novels, two books of stories, one graphic novel, and one memoir. I've also published stories, essays, and journalism in Harper's, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and other places. I'm a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where I teach for the Michener Center for Writers and the New Writers Project. I am also the director of the PEN City Writers, a creative writing program at a maximum security prison in South Texas. I've been teaching Kafka at all of these places, and at other universities and prisons, for decades. So who was Kafka in his time? He was a pretty humble figure. He was born in 1883 and spent his whole life in Prague, apart from a few months. He was an insurance official, a government clerk, a white-collar employee. He spent his days reviewing employee insurance claims and writing safety manuals. He never married. He had no children. He lived in his parents' apartment for most of his life. He was very tall, very thin, and a vegetarian. He died of tuberculosis at 40 years old, one month before his 41st birthday. He was Jewish, and although he died before World War II began, all three of his sisters and many of his friends perished in concentration camps. The entire community he grew up in was scattered and destroyed. He only ever wanted to be a writer, and made great sacrifices to do it. Still, he published very little while he was alive, and he himself destroyed 90 percent of his work. But he left behind a pile of finished and unfinished work, stories and novels, stacks of diaries and letters. Famously, he left it all in the hands of his closest friend, Max Brod, with instructions to burn it. Famously, Brod did not. Instead, he saw to it that it was published. Kafka knew his friend would disobey him. Brod warned him in advance. But it's unlikely that Kafka ever could have imagined how influential his work would become only a few decades later. Why is this humble government clerk so important? Kafka may seem humble from this coarse recitation of the facts of his life, but he was passionate, brilliant, and observant, with a finger on the pulse of human experience and with a profound empathy for all living creatures, and he had an ability to portray emotion, personality, and narrative with a rigorous simplicity. He wrote these strange, funny, devastating stories in such a way that they felt universal, almost like absurd or surreal parables for the modern era. Kafka was born, came of age, and died during the early years of modernism. Modernism is a period that most scholars date to, more or less, between 1890 and 1945, a time of industrial and technological transformation. Kafka saw the earliest airplanes, the earliest movies, the earliest telephones, though he was never comfortable with them. He saw electric lights in homes. He rode in an early elevator at a county fair as a teenager. In Kafka's day, the European world was becoming increasingly mechanized and urban, less agrarian. More people spent their days at the factories and offices, away from their families. The writings of Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Einstein were new and thrilling and filtering through society, changing how we thought about nature, time, the self, God. Kafka and his friends discussed and debated these ideas in cafes and rotating reading groups and at salons. Kafka attended a series of lectures delivered by Einstein himself, and met him on several occasions. Later in Kafka's life, the Great War, or World War I, upended Europe. World War I brought on major revolutions in art, music, literature, architecture. Dada, Cubism, Surrealism: these were moving across Europe. What Kafka saw and captured was the alienation of the modern world. He was a master of satirizing bureaucracy, at that feeling we now call being a cog. He did not write of the glory of the new society. He wrote of the lostness and confusion, the boredom and anxiety, the hilarious absurdity, the tragedy, the illogic of being a human lodged in the great machine of civilized life, of racing around trying to find one's way out but seeming to come upon only grim faces and locked doors. The modern predicament: that was Kafka's talent. A century after his death, Kafka is beloved as ever, because his work is still so familiar, so relevant. Our environment can be more alienating than ever as we sink deep into the computer age, with its iPhones, AI, social media, self-driving cars, the impending doom of climate change, a time when even the internet seems broken, outdated. Kafkaesque scenarios rise around us in the form of bizarre devices, faceless bureaucrats, an impending sense of hopelessness. Where is the way out? Kafka asks. He doesn't hazard an answer, but by considering the endings of the three stories we will read, we will see his dark, ironic take on the matter, and where one might perhaps see light. I've chosen for us three stories that are certainly some of his best, and they demonstrate the thematic range of his work, his sense of humor, his insight, his sense of tragedy, and his depth. Each story opens with a short video where I will introduce the piece. Then, scattered throughout the text, you'll be able to ask questions and hear my answers, and even answer back to me, and in this way, hopefully, have a sort of conversation about these brilliant stories. I'm excited to get started, so let's get to it.