A six-part TV series, starring Joel Basman as the seminal author, is streaming on Channel 4’s Walter Presents and ChaiFlicks, timed for the June 6 centenary of Kafka’s death.
Kafka, an ambitious German-language drama written by Austrian writer-director David Schalko (Braunschlag) and best-selling author David Kehlmann (Measuring the World), is based on Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Kafka.
It weaves together the writer’s life and work, finding both the connections and gaps between the two.
Schalko spent more than a decade developing the series, and directs all 6 episodes. 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 temptation to depict Kafka the writer as a “Kafkaesque” character, and his work as simply heightened reflection of his life.
On the surface, Kafka appears to be almost nakedly autobiographical. One could draw line between Josef K.’s struggles in The Trial — as a man arrested for 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 bureaucracy of the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague.
Kafka’s letter to his father — 103 handwritten pages that were never delivered — is exploring his relationship with Hermann, his strict and domineering father, and of his suffocating home life among his bourgeois and secular Jewish family.
The series abandons the conventional biopic approach for a more fragmented, non-chronological take.
Each episode, or “chapter” is structured like a Kafka short story and tells a section of the writer’s life from the outside, from the perspective of those who knew him best.
Kafka is seen by his close friend and literary executor Max Brod, who defied his friend’s dying wish that he burn all his unpublished manuscripts. Kafka from the angle of his family in Prague.
Kafka is also perceived by Felice Bauer, Milena Jesenská and Dora Diamant, the three most important romantic relationships in his life.
In a chapter called “The Bureau,” the Kafka story is framed from inside his day job at the Institute and shows the bureaucracy as less oppressive than helpful. At the height of the First World War, his bosses intervene to save Kafka’s life by having him officially declared indispensable to the company, preventing him from enlisting and heading to the front.
Breaking with Cliches
The multiple angles approach suggests that that there is no definitive way to see Kafka or to interpret his works. The narrator, voiced by Michael Maertens, repeatedly stops the story, correcting what he has just said. “Maybe one has to start from a completely different place…”
Not a Classic Biopic
“We would never have presumed to tell the story from Kafka’s perspective, to tell a classic biopic,” says Schalko. “All we really know of Kafka we know from the outside, from how other people saw him and how other people see his stories.”
Schalko and Kehlmann have assembled who’s who of German-speaking acting talent. David Kross (The Reader, War Horse) is Max Brod. Babylon Berlin‘s Liv Lisa Fries is Milena Jesenská. Austrian star Nicholas Ofczarek (Braunschlag, Pagen’s Peak) is father Hermann.
Lars Eidinger (Dying, Personal Shopper) has a single scene as Austrian poet, and Kafka fan, Rainer Maria Rilke.
“Unlike the image we have of him, Franz was a very warm person, a philanthropist, an incredibly attentive, humorous, and sensitive person,” says Basman. “Someone who was highly intelligent but who knew very well how to put up facades, when and where to allow himself to express emotions.”
The actor, who has Swiss and Israeli-Jewish heritage, said it was “oddly comforting” to play Kafka after many roles as Nazis in films like Land of Mine or series like Generation War.
“This is a historic Jewish character whose story doesn’t end in a concentration camp. There are no Nazis. Even if it’s sad that he dies so young, Kafka’s is actually a beautiful story that is significant and important to tell but that won’t leave you with post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
Salman Rushdie called Kafka “the best dramatization of the life of the great Kafka that it’s possible to imagine…does a great service to one of the true giants of 20th-century literature.”
Ian McEwan, whose 2019 novella The Cockroach is a modern-day update on The Metamorphosis set in the Brexit era, called the series “simply brilliant…The writing flows like honey. Gorgeous, mesmerizing scenes throughout and, at the end, a heart-rending theatrical climax which leaves the viewer deeply moved by the strange and beautiful echoes of Kehlmann and Schalko’s triumphant collaboration.”
