The author about his script for the ARF/ORF miniseries “Kafka”, the streamers’ despondency, Kafka’s wild rant about Arthur Schnitzler – and about the most unreadable book in the world.
Even for those familiar with Kafka’s work, your new miniseries has surprises in store. For example, that his literature-loving bosses may have prevented him from dying ten years earlier…
Daniel Kehlmann: Yes, this astonishing twist that when Kafka wanted to volunteer in the First World War, they declared him to be important to the war effort, against his will! I find it wonderfully unexpected that the bureaucrats that Kafka himself always portrays as so threatening save his life. In general, I wanted to show that this gray, terrible, burdensome bureaucracy, as Franz Kafka describes it, was in practice something very bright and tidy. Kafka always suffered so much from his work and portrayed it so horribly. But basically the working conditions were fantastic and he was enormously appreciated by everyone around him.
And these files in which Kafka deals with career alternatives for disabled people during the First World War who are missing an arm, a leg, he even suggests “roofers”: Where does all this come from?
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