Kafka Explained: Why He Destroyed 90% of His Work

Deb Olin Unferth's five films on Kafka are coming out now, with the audio series to follow. Watch the first ones and hear when the rest is ready at https://rebindclassics.com/yt/kafka Deb Olin Unferth introduces Franz Kafka and three of his stories, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and A Hunger Artist: who he was, the world he wrote in, and why he destroyed most of what he wrote. Film 1 of 5 with Deb Olin Unferth on Kafka: The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and A Hunger Artist. This first film sets up the series. Unferth first read A Hunger Artist at 17 and has reread it a couple dozen times since. She lays out the plain facts of Kafka's life: born in Prague in 1883, an insurance official who reviewed claims and wrote safety manuals, never married, lived with his parents, dead of tuberculosis at 40, his three sisters later killed in the camps. He destroyed 90 percent of his work and told Max Brod to burn the rest. 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. She ends on the question the three stories keep asking: where is the way out? 0:00 Three of Kafka's best stories 0:35 Kafkaesque: the Kafka everyone half knows 0:54 Reading A Hunger Artist at seventeen 1:37 Meet Deb Olin Unferth 2:20 Who was Kafka? A government clerk in Prague 2:55 Dead at forty; his sisters and the camps 3:15 He destroyed 90 percent of his work 3:37 Max Brod and the instruction to burn it all 4:04 Why a humble clerk matters 4:44 Born into modernism: airplanes, elevators, Einstein 5:56 The Great War, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism 6:13 The alienation of the modern world 6:55 A century on: iPhones, AI, faceless bureaucrats 7:34 Where is the way out? Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, two novels, two collections of stories, a graphic novel and a memoir, and has written for Harper's, The Paris Review and The New York Times. She is a professor of creative writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin and the director of PEN City Writers, a creative writing program at a maximum security prison in South Texas. The Metamorphosis was published in 1915, In the Penal Colony in 1919, and A Hunger Artist in 1922. Kafka died in 1924, a month short of forty-one. The series reads David Wyllie's translation. Rebind Classics is a library of great books read in company. For every book, we ask a reader who has lived with it for years, a novelist, a scholar, a philosopher, to talk you through it, start to finish: films, an audio series, and essays on where to start and what to read next. The first films are free here on YouTube. Everything is at https://rebindclassics.com/yt Instagram:   / rebindclassics   Questions or press: support@rebindclassics.com. We read everything. Made by Rebind Publishing. Everything we publish is made by people and credited to them. #Kafka #TheMetamorphosis #FranzKafka #DebOlinUnferth #RebindClassics