Teaching Kafka a Hundred Years After His Death
Why his work can still resonate with young people
One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armor-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.
-Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (translated by Ian Johnston)1
Today is the 100th anniversary of Franz Kafka’s death.
A few days ago, the New York Times posted an interesting piece by Amanda Hess about Kafka’s resurgence as a kind of ironic (?) TikTok leading man. As someone who read The Metamorphosis with teenagers many times over the last several years of my teaching career— including during our extremely Kafkaesque online year— I wasn’t surprised to see that Kafka held some kind of appeal for young contemporary readers.
But predictably (because it’s The Times), there were those in the comment section who took the opportunity to bemoan the shallowness of Zennials, and to suggest that Kids These Days™ could never understand the alienation of a figure like Kafka. I don’t think they’re reading the same Kafka my students and I were reading.
The article understandably hones in on technology— something that certainly factors into the surreal and uncomfortable landscape of Kafka’s stories. For example, Hess writes,
The internet, the very place where we are now expected to craft a self, is also an identity-destabilizing machine. When Kafka wrote “I have hardly anything in common with myself,” he could have been describing the experience of confronting one’s own online persona.
In a striking scene from The Castle, the main character K. tries to use a phone to contact the titular Castle:
From the mouthpiece there came a humming, the likes of which K. had never heard on the telephone before. It was as though the humming of countless, childlike voices— but it wasn’t humming, either, it was singing, the singing of the most distant, of the most utterly distant, voices— as though a single, high-pitched yet strong voice had emerged out of this humming…
Meanwhile, everyone in the inn where K. is making the call is standing around watching to see what happens. It’s not about the Internet, of course, but it’s also certainly not not about the surreal effect of communication technology.
But I also think it’s a mistake to reduce Gen-Z to its technology. My own students definitely vibed with Kafka’s tale of a man who is transformed into a “vermin,” perhaps because we’re merely taking the narrator’s word for it that he was transformed. In the reality of the story, Gregor Samsa simply is a vermin. He “finds himself” having already been transformed in the first sentence of the story.
To me, that’s the great acknowledgment of Kafka’s writing: sometimes things just are the way they are, and sometimes the way they are goes against all expectation and hope. And post-adolescence might be a time of particularly keen sympathy with the idea of inexplicably being something strange, new, and perhaps gross.
The Internet rarely came up as we read the story, but students often did reflect on family, on the awkwardness of growing and changing, on the stresses of school and work, on the pressures of expectation, on Gregor’s relationship to his overbearing and violent father, on his sometimes unwholesome attachment to his younger sister, on the melodramatic behavior of his highly emotional mother— who, in one memorable scene, manages to faint in slow motion as she travels across a room, shedding clothing items as she goes, all while his father menaces him with real violence.
Also, the story is seriously funny, often through this kind of juxtaposition of truly horrifying imagery and situations with the mundane concerns of a stressed-out traveling salesman with what seem to be deep codependency issues involving his family:
[Gregor] felt a slight itch up on his belly; pushed himself slowly up on his back towards the headboard so that he could lift his head better; found where the itch was, and saw that it was covered with lots of little white spots which he didn’t know what to make of; and when he tried to feel the place with one of his legs he drew it quickly back because as soon as he touched it he was overcome by a cold shudder.
He slid back into his former position. “Getting up early all the time”, he thought, “it makes you stupid. You’ve got to get enough sleep.
And while some in the article comments seemed to believe Kids These Days™ are simply lazy because they reacted strongly to the idea that Gregor doesn’t want to get out of bed, this seems to miss the point of the humor here: Gregor doesn’t want to get out of bed because he has transformed into an inhuman creature, and yet society doesn’t care.
Within an hour or so, the Chief Clerk from his office is banging on his bedroom door and embarrassing him in front of his family. (Our district used an automated attendance robocall for this purpose, but close enough.)
Specifically for my students reading The Metamorphosis off of a Chromebook during the pandemic, the context is important: they were being told to keep logging in and completing assignments and turning on their cameras, during what felt at the time like it could be a humanity-ending pandemic. How did it feel to see footage of bodies being piled in the streets in New York, for example, and then to log in to make sure you were getting credit for a graduation that felt like it might never come? (While our collective memory is— perhaps understandably— reshaping the pandemic as something of a severe inconvenience, some of these students lost parents and neighbors, and kept logging in to virtual school while waiting to see if tomorrow would ever come.)
Rebecca Turkewitz and Breanne Lucy nailed a less serious element this feeling and its connection to Kafkaesqueness in their satirical piece “Kafka Narrates My Online Teaching Experience”2:
It is 8:35 a.m. You are speaking to a grid of black squares. One of the black squares coughs. One of the black squares gets a text notification. One of the black squares is today replaced by an image of a naked mole rat. None of the black squares will tell you what they found interesting in the reading.
Usually all it took to make The Metamorphosis engaging and relatable for teenagers was to give them permission to laugh (something I don’t think we do enough in modern K-12 education, in which Literature has to be Super Serious).
Despite what the Times commenters may think, Kids These Days™ have lived through a pandemic where dueling state, local, and federal bureaucracies fought a war of words with conflicting and sometimes self-contradictory policies. Certainly they can relate to a writer whose characters— Josef K. in The Trial, or K. in The Castle, or Gregor in The Metamorphosis— are caught nightmarishly between incompatible requirements.
Kids These Days™ have lived through seven years of the rise of “post-truth,” and increasingly fascist-leaning politics. They’ve seen the election of a man who had predicted he could shoot a person in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, a man who went on to be the first US President convicted of a felony, a man who for some reason insisted it wasn’t raining during his inauguration, even though it was.
Kids These Days™ were interrupted in their online learning day by a violent coup attempt on the US Capitol. They watched on television or online as people broke windows in the Capitol Building, fought police with makeshift spears and bear spray, and roamed the building with zip ties to presumably kidnap legislators. And then they watched as many of their leaders— including some who were there in the videos and pictures as this all unfolded, often hiding or running from the rioters— gradually evolved their narrative into it wasn’t so bad, maybe it didn’t really happen, perhaps the Mainstream Media made it up.
Kids These Days™ spent the first half of their education career in the tension between do-gooders trying to, and arguing about how to, incorporate values like sharing, social emotional learning, and acceptance of diversity, and the second half in the tension between people who think individuals should be able to remove books from use by all public school students and individuals and groups who… think state censorship is bad.
Kafka’s life coincided with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the expansion of the bureaucratic state, World War I, the intensification of antisemitism and populist fascist movements in Europe, the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1919, and the lead-up to World War II. He died at 40 of tuberculosis. He lived to witness the beginning of the rise of Adolph Hitler— including Hitler’s own failed, violent coup attempt, the “Beer Hall Putsch,” in October 1923— and if he had lived a little longer, he likely would have died in a Nazi concentration camp, as each of his three sisters did.
In other words, his life and works have plenty of eerie resonance with our own times.
My students went to school each day in a country that allowed school districts to ban books including The Diary of Anne Frank, The Bluest Eye, Stamped, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many others that largely focused on the experiences of minority groups (particularly Black Americans and LGBTQ+ people). While Kafka didn’t live to see it, after his death, according to Arthur Samuelson’s preface to The Castle, “the Nazi government put Kafka’s novels on its blacklist of ‘harmful and undesirable writings’” in the late 1930s. (Previously, the Nazis had allowed the publisher to print books, with the requirement that they would only be for Jewish consumption; presumably Kafka’s popularity with non-Jewish Germans resulted in the ban.)
But I hope that in addition to these frightening reminders of how history can rhyme, students will continue to find catharsis and humor in Kafka’s work. And for teachers interested in introducing students to Kafka, one method that worked really well for me, after a shared reading of The Metamorphosis (which is very short!), was to help students select “critical lenses” (for example, historical criticism or psychological criticism) to evaluate the novella. Its surrealism, originality, and ambiguity make it a great test case for applying different kinds of lenses to the work, and students often came to profound, esoteric, and well-argued conclusions about the story that demonstrated the power of literary discussion and analysis.
Of course, even though applying critical lenses is what scholars and critics do, many of these lenses— particularly anything redolent of the dreaded “Critical Theorists” or so-called “identity politics” (you know, lenses that don’t automatically foreground the concerns of straight, white, Christian males— is currently a little tricky to teach, because faux anti-authoritarian groups with “Freedom” and “Liberty” in their names are arguing for, and using state power to pursue, and yet somehow also waging a culture war against the apparatus of that same state, in favor of a kind of anti- “woke” cancel culture.
And normal people are simply caught, like bugs, in the middle.
An ask: If you oppose state censorship of books and live in SC, please consider contacting your state legislators as soon as possible to oppose the adoption of H. 3728, one of several proposed policies aimed at reducing intellectual discussion and readings to approved texts. You can use the ACLU’s form by clicking the button below.
Sad news: Normally, this is where I would offer a donation link to support this newsletter, or a link to subscribe. Instead, I’d like to encourage you to donate— if you are able— to support the family of Eric Childs. Eric was a tremendous advocate in South Carolina, particularly for the rights of transgender children. He was a passionate speaker, a beloved husband and father, and a true agent of positive change, and was running for an SC House seat in order to give constituents a true choice in the upcoming election. You can donate to his family using the link below.
This electronic version is the one I most often-used with my students. The document is primarily Johnston’s public domain translation, with a few sentences from David Wylie’s 2015 translation. The document also includes my discussion questions and footnotes. Teachers, feel free to do with it as you like!
Shoutout to my wonderful former coworker and friend Taryn Auerbach for sharing this piece with me back then. We were both teaching The Metamorphosis, and reading this was deeply cathartic at the time.