Franz Kafka Explained

In July 1914, in a Berlin hotel, Franz Kafka was put on trial by three women holding his own letters. A few weeks later he began a novel about a man arrested without a charge. This video follows Kafka from a Prague family and an insurance office to some of the strangest and most honest stories ever written, and asks what he was really describing: not just bureaucracy, but how reasonable it feels to obey an authority you can’t check. In this video: Kafka’s life, from Prague and his father to the insurance office where he worked by day and wrote at night The night he wrote The Judgment, and the pattern of unexplained guilt that never left him The Metamorphosis, and why Kafka insisted the insect must never be drawn The Trial and the parable Before the Law: the man who waits for years at an open door The Castle, and the story of Amalia and a punishment nobody ordered The Letter to His Father, the Zürau aphorisms, A Hunger Artist and On Parables His illness, his last years with Dora Diamant, and his death Why Max Brod refused to burn his work, and what happened to the papers and the people around him Sources and further reading: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, The Trial (Breon Mitchell’s translation follows the critical edition), The Castle (Mark Harman’s translation restores the text as Kafka left it) Kafka, Letter to His Father, The Zürau Aphorisms, Letters to Felice and Letters to Milena Kafka, “A Hunger Artist,” “Before the Law” and “On Parables” Reiner Stach, the three-volume biography of Kafka Benjamin Balint, Kafka’s Last Trial (2018) Welcome to Simply Explained. #FranzKafka #Literature #Philosophy #Kafkaesque #TheTrial #SimplyExplained