After splitting up with Diane Keaton in the film Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s lugubrious Alvy hooks up with a hippy-dippy music journalist for a one-night stand that does neither of them any favours. “Sex with you is really a kafkaesque experience,” says Pam, over a post-coital cigarette. “I mean that as a compliment.” Given that Pam (a fabulously drifty Shelley Duvall) is a self-confessed Rosicrucian, with a chat-up style that leans heavily on the word “transplendent”, it’s clear that finding a philosophical vocabulary for life’s highs and lows is not her strongest suit.
Annie Hall was released in 1977 – 30 years after the first usage of the adjective “kafkaesque” was recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. One might have thought that such a resounding satirical takedown in an Oscar-winning film would make the word an embarrassment. But no. Fast-forward to 2010 and it was back in the satirical crosshairs, as the title of an episode in the third series of Breaking Bad, in which bags of blue meth from Walt and Jesse’s superlab are distributed in tubs of batter to fried chicken restaurants across the American south-west. The pair’s lawyer, Saul, tries to persuade a bemused Jesse to launder his ill-gotten gains by becoming the tax-paying proprietor of a nail salon. When the leader of Jesse’s support group says his working conditions sound kafkaesque, he has no idea how right he is.
A century after Franz Kafka’s death, international fascination with him shows no sign of abating, with an edition of the Czech author’s diaries just out in the UK, a new TV serialisation of his life from Germany, and the distinguished Polish director Agnieszka Holland hard at work in Prague on a biopic. The word kafkaesque, meanwhile, is everywhere. On TikTok, the hashtags #kafka and #kafkaesque are attached to thousands of posts with many millions of views. An ad hoc survey of mainstream UK news outlets over the last two years, in print and online, reveals that the adjective was used 570 times. Not as frequently as Orwellian (980), but very few 20th-century writers have their own adjective. Those who do – Orwell or Samuel Beckett, for instance – evoke something about the human condition that chimes far beyond the circles who have actually read their work.
The comic usages in Annie Hall and Breaking Bad reflect two important aspects of the kafkaesque. First, that most people who use the word have only the faintest idea what it might mean. Second, that it’s not an entirely external condition, but one in which the comedy of personal haplessness plays an intrinsic part. The most kafkaesque thing about Gregor Samsa, in the novella Metamorphosis, is not that he wakes up as a bug, but that once transformed, he keeps trying to behave like a human.
So what does kafkaesque mean, and why has it become such a ubiquitous part of the cultural shorthand that even Springfield in The Simpsons has a Café Kafka, famed for its poetry recitals, and the gauche teenager Walt in Noah Baumbach’s comedy The Squid and the Whale calls on it as a chat-up line? Opinions vary, but it is neither as externalised as Orwell’s evocation of individuality crushed by an all-seeing, all powerful state machine, nor as internalised as Beckett’s pared-down psychological landscapes of despair, although it intersects with both.
“What’s kafkaesque,” wrote Kafka biographer Frederick Karl, “is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behaviour begins to fall to pieces. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance.”
If you want an illustration of this theory in action, you need look no further than Apple TV+’s dystopian workplace thriller Severance. In the offices of a mysterious biotech company, with their brains bisected so that their “innie” selves can only recall their time at work and their “outie” selves can only remember their home life, employees – pointedly referred to as Mark S or Helly R – are summoned along endless corridors and incentivised with pointless perks for work that has no comprehensible purpose. Dan Erickson’s compelling series not only evokes the transformation of Samsa in Kafka’s Metamorphosis but the hopeless pursuit of reality in The Castle and the stifling injustice faced by Josef K in The Trial. Alternatively, you could turn back to The White Ribbon, the Palme d’Or-winning film by the Austrian director Michael Haneke (whose earlier movies include an adaptation of The Castle), in which a schoolteacher’s attempts to find those responsible for a series of violent incidents in a small village outside Berlin on the eve of the first world war is continually thwarted by the villagers themselves. You could revisit David Cronenberg’s 1980s classics Videodrome or The Fly (on the back of which the Canadian director was invited to write the introduction to a new translation of Metamorphosis), or almost anything by David Lynch, whose most popular creation, Twin Peaks, placed a portrait of Kafka in the offices of FBI chief Gordon Cole, played by Lynch himself.
The most kafkaesque event in Kafka’s own life is the one without which the word would never have existed. At his death at 40 from tuberculosis 100 years ago this week, he was the little-known author of a handful of poems and stories. His final request, to his friend Max Brod, was for all his diaries, manuscripts and letters “to be burned unread”. In what was either a great literary betrayal or a loyal enactment of Kafka’s real wishes, Brod took no notice and, within two months, had signed a contract for the three unfinished novels. Over the next three years, The Trial and The Castle were published, followed by the earlier and less well known Amerika.
In 1939, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague before the Nazis closed the Czech border, carrying two suitcases stuffed with Kafka’s papers. Some were returned to Kafka’s family, who donated them to Oxford’s Bodleian library. But on Brod’s death, in 1968, the rest were bequeathed to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, who in turn left them to her daughters when she died in Tel Aviv, aged 101, in 2007. Successive custody battles, first with Hoffe’s heirs and then with Brod’s, only ended in 2016, when Israel’s supreme court ruled that they should go to the National Library of Israel, a country that didn’t exist in Kafka’s lifetime. It would take three more years, and another court case, for Germany to return thousands of pages that had been stolen and sold on over the years.
Through the 1930s, Kafka became such a figurehead among communist-sympathising writers that in 1941, one of their number – WH Auden – proclaimed that “had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Goethe and Shakespeare bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of”. In 1947, the American critic Edmund Wilson fretted that a fascination with his “comedy and pathos of futile effort” was “likely to make ‘kafkaesque’ a permanent word”. By 1954, that word had been co-opted by the British Hungarian Arthur Koestler to describe life under Stalin.
Kafka was not, in fact, as entirely original as his cheerleaders believed. Charles Dickens beat him to a vision of out-of-control bureaucracy in Little Dorrit, with the Circumlocution Office, run purely for the benefit of its own incompetent and obstructive officials. But as Auden also wrote, in a later essay: “One can have experiences which one recognises as kafkaesque, while one would never call an experience of one’s own Dickensian … ”
While Auden typified a snobbish anxiety that Kafka is “one of those writers who are doomed to be read by the wrong public”, Czech-born novelist Milan Kundera was concerned about the academic industry that had grown up around him, which entombed him in castles of theory that said more about the theorists than the writer himself. “Kafkology,” he wrote, “is discourse for replacing Kafka with the kafkologized Kafka.” Against this background, it has become almost a rite of passage for subsequent writers – from Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, through Vladimir Nabokov and Philip Larkin to Will Self and Zadie Smith – to stake out their own understanding of what Kafka was really about.
Larkin competitively complained that he didn’t suffer enough. “My dear Kafka,” he wrote in his poem, The Literary World, “When you’ve had five years of it, not five months / Five years of an irresistible force meeting an immoveable object right in your belly / Then you’ll know about depression”. More recent revisionism suggests that the curmudgeonly poet may have a point. Kafka described himself in a letter to his fiancee as “a big laugher”, and was said by Brod to have laughed so much while reading The Trial aloud “that at times he was unable to continue reading”. His relationship with bureaucracy was also more complicated than commonly assumed, according to Daniel Kehlmann, screenwriter of the new German TV biopic, Kafka, which has just landed on Channel 4. “He saw that our lives are becoming entangled in a system we no longer understand. But he understood it because he was a bureaucrat himself.”
There is such a kafkaesque circularity to these visions and revisions that it is a delight to find a mea culpa from The Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice that exposes their parasitic nature. “I just found out something hilariously funny,” she wrote on Facebook. Back in 1995, she contributed the foreword to an edition of Kafka stories, “and something I said in the intro, about Kafka’s influence on me, has been recently quoted all over the internet as a quote from Kafka! ‘Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.’” She added that her words – “struggling to define the impression Kafka’s example made on me” – had been so effective that, when they were quoted back at her 18 years later, she entirely forgot that they were not Kafka’s but her own.
The usual trajectory of newspaper articles on the kafkaesque is towards a call for the word to be banished as a meaningless cliche. But this has itself become a meaningless cliche. The adjective is too useful, and has too many legs, to disappear. It has crawled beneath the floorboards of the 21st-century psyche so effectively that it does not even have to be mentioned for the concept to pop up from every cranny. Arguably, only satire can meet it on its own terms.
Back in 2009, the magazine the Onion released a spoof news bulletin naming Prague’s (fictional) Franz Kafka International as the world’s most alienating airport. “I asked the ticket person what gate my flight was at, and they said the airline I was flying with didn’t exist, and everyone kept calling me S,” said one interviewee. It’s an experience anyone who has ever taken a package flight understands – and it will undoubtedly be recirculating as a meme with the new holiday season
Ten years later, Ian McEwan published a novella, The Cockroach, about an insect that wakes up to find it has become the prime minister of the United Kingdom. It opens: “That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.” The tragicomedy of Jim Sams is that he’s a human who keeps trying to behave like a cockroach. Now why does that sound so familiar?
• This article was amended on 2 June 2024. An earlier version incorrectly stated that Oxford’s Bodleian library was given Franz Kafka’s papers by Max Brod; in fact, these papers were donated by Kafka’s family.
