Why you NEED to read Franz Kafka

Source: Why you NEED to read Franz Kafka, Unsolicited advice, 27:54, uploaded 2024-08-19, Watch Later position 775.

Unsolicited advice opens with fear, anxiety, suffering and helplessness, then places Franz Kafka beside those feelings. Kafka’s work speaks to modern life because it gives strange forms to problems that remain ordinary: the effort to decide who one is, the wish for closeness that makes judgement frightening, the helplessness produced by systems no one can explain, and the shame that follows from having a vulnerable inner life. The video treats those feelings as historically durable. Kafka lived a century ago, yet his distance from us becomes evidence that our troubles have predecessors.

Identity between inherited roles

Kafka has found a new audience on TikTok. The video connects that interest to the anxieties many young people have about personal identity. Kafka lived inside several communities without finding a stable place in any of them. He was a broadly secular Jewish man in an antisemitic Europe, a Czech speaker and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a German-language writer who dreamed of Berlin, and a Prague resident who disliked his home town whilst refusing to leave it. He worked as a lawyer and bureaucrat whilst trying to become an artist. He could be ambitious and fearful within the same life.

The tensions between these roles made a complete identity difficult to claim. Antisemitism kept Kafka from seeing himself as fully German, whilst his weak connection to religious faith made a fully Jewish identity difficult as well. The video recommends Karolina Watroba’s Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka for a fuller account of these conflicts around nationality, ethnicity and faith.

Kafka turns the question of identity into a bodily problem in The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa wakes to find that he has become a monstrous insect. His former identity had rested on recognisable functions. He was the family’s breadwinner, an educated man and a human being who could work, speak and eat with others. The transformation removes those functions at once. Gregor now lives in a room, finds scraps of rubbish delicious and can produce only sounds that his family cannot understand. His family gradually resents him because he can no longer perform the role that held their household together. He dies from an infected wound that neglect and anger leave untreated.

The same loss of an allotted place appears in A Hunger Artist. A man starves himself as a public act, yet fewer people come to watch him as the years pass. At the end he admits that he never found food he liked. His act has become a profession and an identity even though it began with an absence of desire. In In the Penal Colony, an executioner throws himself onto his own torture machine rather than face the question of who he is after the system removes his task. Kafka’s people often meet the loss of a role as if it were a sentence they cannot appeal.

The video connects this pressure to the economic life of younger people. Home ownership, financial security and the possibility of starting a family can feel like milestones that keep moving away. The narrator says that he cannot responsibly judge the economic claims behind this feeling, yet he sees a wider sense that people have failed to receive their side of a social bargain. A decline in community and the uncertainty of social identities add to the difficulty. Kafka’s characters make these anxieties strange enough to see. Their absurd situations also make them faintly comic, which keeps the stories from becoming pure despair, while the heightened stakes remain close to the experience of an acute anxiety attack. A person can feel as if a fear will kill them even when the danger has no literal power to do so.

Kafka’s answer to the demand for a fixed identity, as the video presents it, is a wish to remain fluid and difficult to define. His age does not make the question obsolete. It lets a reader recognise that the difficulty of finding a place in the world has lasted longer than one generation and will continue beyond it.

Isolation in public

The second movement turns to a modern contradiction. Mobile phones and social media make it possible to contact people across the world at once, whilst reported loneliness has grown. The video refers to surveys that place young people among the loneliest groups and to the World Health Organization’s description of loneliness as a global public health concern. The description links the Campaign to End Loneliness, CNN, The Guardian and the Mental Health Foundation as sources for this part of the discussion. Those sources distinguish loneliness from simple physical isolation and describe the feeling of being disconnected even in the presence of other people.

The narrator gives the example of people living in central London who remain surrounded by others and yet feel unshakably lonely. The same experience can appear among friends or family. A person can participate in a room whilst feeling as if they are watching themselves from outside it. Kafka’s life contains this division between company and solitude. Friends remembered a sociable, even jovial man who read his manuscripts aloud late into the evening and laughed with them at the jokes. His letters and journals show a different interior life. In his letter to his father, Kafka describes a mental enclosure that physical relationships never quite penetrate.

This helps explain why Kafka said that he and his writings were the same. The novels and private papers became the place where his isolation could take a form that ordinary social behaviour could not provide. His fear of judgement also appears in the instruction he gave Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death. Kafka could read extracts from The Trial to friends and still imagine that the work would fail in posterity. We have so much of it because Brod ignored that instruction.

The Castle gives the conflict a social setting. K. tries to enter village life, take on relationships, marry and find a place among its people. He accepts several social roles, yet the rules governing them remain hidden. He can offend people without knowing what he has done, while the village government makes arbitrary decisions through offices that no one can understand. The result is a person who wants to belong and keeps acting as if belonging were possible, even though each attempt leaves him more bewildered.

Kafka treats sexual relationships with the same mixture of desire and fear. The protagonists of The Castle and The Trial have love interests, yet sex tends to bring guilt and shame rather than a stable form of intimacy. The prose treats the encounters in a cold, matter-of-fact way. The characters want to be known and accepted, while exposure also opens them to judgement. Kafka gives this risk a literary dignity by showing the pain that comes with reaching out and the definite loneliness that follows when a person keeps themselves closed.

Mundane helplessness

The video next brings Kafka into conversation with Byung-Chul Han’s criticism of a culture built around excessive positivity. Han argues that contemporary society treats anything as possible and turns a failure to achieve into a personal fault. Jean-Paul Sartre’s claim that people are condemned to be free gives the same pressure a philosophical form. If every choice belongs entirely to the individual, then every bad result appears to belong there as well. The material, economic and physical limits that shape a life disappear from view.

Kafka’s characters live inside those limits. They rarely face a single evil power that has chosen to hurt them. They meet procedures, offices and institutions whose obtuseness blocks them without offering a clear enemy. This raises a question about the appeal of Kafka. Reading about helplessness seems like an odd way to seek relief, yet the video argues that Kafka provides recognition. He confirms that a person can be trapped inside a situation whose scale and complexity exceed their control, which gives the experience a name and keeps it from looking like a private defect.

The video traces recognition through Hegel, Axel Honneth and Martin Buber, then connects it to the distress of gaslighting. When other people insist that an unsettling situation exists only in one’s imagination, the person loses confidence in their own perception. Messages about unlimited self-mastery can produce a similar doubt. The narrator cites the first half of Robert Sapolsky’s Determined as a persuasive account of how much of a life lies outside immediate control, whilst making clear that he rejects some of Sapolsky’s wider conclusions. The source gives these philosophical and psychological claims without a full bibliography, so they remain part of its interpretation here.

Kafka’s bureaucratic powers differ from the gods of ancient Greek drama. His characters do not receive a blow from the heavens. They move from office to office, with each official explaining that nothing can be done there and suggesting another branch. The next branch produces the same answer. The institutions rarely seem to care enough about the protagonist to hate him. Since no individual appears to make the decision, blame has nowhere to settle.

The video sees a modern version of this problem in black-box algorithms that advise organisations about mortgages, prison sentences and other decisions. The powerlessness comes from the combination of a decision’s effects with the absence of an accountable person who can explain it. The narrator does not claim that modern life is uniquely terrible and says he would rather live now than in any earlier period. His claim concerns the quality of powerlessness. People may have greater freedom in many areas whilst facing systems whose scale and opacity have changed the kind of obstruction they meet.

That is why Kafka travels so easily across national boundaries. The details of a bureaucracy change, yet the feeling of being subject to rules written in an unknown language remains recognisable. The video mentions Kafka’s popularity in South Korea as an example of this reach. His work does not say that every society produces the same life. It gives a form to the experience of confronting forces that feel too large to understand.

Fear, shame and the ordinary self

The final chapter gathers the emotions that appear across Kafka’s writing: guilt, fear, shame and anxiety. The Judgment turns Kafka’s father into a figure who condemns his son to drown for his filial failures. The Castle and The Trial place their protagonists in situations where their mistakes threaten their safety and cause them to feel guilty for harm they never meant to cause. Gregor Samsa becomes ashamed of the burden his involuntary transformation places on his family, and that shame helps his family justify the way it treats him.

Kafka’s work usually keeps fear in the background instead of describing a single dramatic crisis. His letters to Milena show the same mood in private form. He apologises for imagined offences, worries when her replies become infrequent and writes as if a minor failure could put him on trial. The video compares this heightened self-awareness with Dostoevsky’s underground man, whose thought and passion turn inward until ordinary life becomes hard to bear.

The source uses a method from Plato’s Republic to explain what Kafka’s exaggerations can show. Socrates asks what justice looks like in a state so that he can reason about justice in an individual. Kafka enlarges the individual’s mental states until they become visible as events. Gregor searches for scraps of humanity after his family shuts him away. Joseph K. still complains that he has been killed like a dog, clinging to a social idea of honour when death has already made that idea useless. K. in The Castle cannot tell whether he loves someone selflessly or uses the relationship for his own ends.

These characters make unpleasant and ridiculous parts of ordinary life large enough to inspect. The video calls this an emotional hyperreality. Kafka leaves realism behind in order to show the inner shape of guilt or fear with greater precision. Simone de Beauvoir’s description of him as a developing existential philosopher appears here as one way of naming that work, rather than as a settled classification of Kafka.

Kafka’s own ordinariness matters to the conclusion. He did not travel through the world as a confident eccentric like Lord Byron, and he did not become a public prophet after the manner the video associates with Dostoevsky. He worked, worried, doubted his writing and died of tuberculosis at forty. His life contained little worldly heroism. He took the pain of an anxious, lonely and embarrassed person and made art from it whilst retaining its awkwardness.

The video links this to Schopenhauer’s idea that people can share their pain so they recognise that suffering does not make them uniquely abandoned. It compares Kafka’s achievement with Michelangelo’s Pietà, which gives divine grief a form that other people can see. Kafka gives the same dignity to feelings that people often hide because they seem small, shameful or absurd. Most people will live without heroic deeds. Every person will meet fear, loneliness, guilt or shame. Kafka’s work remains useful because it lets those experiences count as material for thought and art.

Limits

This note reconstructs the complete English caption track, the video’s metadata, its description and its five chapter markers. The automatic captions contain errors in names and phrases, so I have corrected clear cases such as Franz Kafka, Karolina Watroba, Byung-Chul Han, Jean-Paul Sartre, Axel Honneth, Martin Buber, Robert Sapolsky, Dostoevsky and Simone de Beauvoir. The video presents biographical details, literary readings and philosophical claims without a full bibliography. Those claims remain attributed to the source here, while the interpretation of Kafka’s stories remains open to other readings.

The loneliness discussion links to several public-health and research pages, yet the video does not attach each statistic to a particular study in the narration. The linked pages provide context for the claims about loneliness, while the broader statement that community has declined across the last century remains the narrator’s own generalisation. The source mentions Watroba’s Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka and a separate video about Kafka on TikTok. The Patreon appeal, email-list invitation and closing recommendations are omitted because they do not carry the argument.

Further reading / references

• Karolina Watroba, Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka.
• Facts and statistics about loneliness, Campaign to End Loneliness.
• Lonely adults and the Gallup poll, CNN, linked from the video description.
• WHO declares loneliness a global public health concern, The Guardian, linked from the video description.
• Loneliness in young people, Mental Health Foundation.
• Kafka and TikTok, the related video linked from the description.