KAFKA

LIFE TAKEN APART LIKE THE FANTASTICAL STORIES

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The old town square in Prague survived centuries of state directed social engineering in Europe.

Nearby, on July 3, 1883, Franz Kafka was born into relative obscurity as the son of a shop keeper earning a living inside the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

With the king’s castle on the hill and the father’s clothing shop down below, Franz Kafka began to blend the realism of life with the fantasy generated by the immediate presence of history in day to day adventures.

Director Agnieszka Holland recreates the thought processes occurring during that regimented time through history in the story of Franz Kafka in Franz (2025).

The surreal distortion experienced walking along the cobble stone roads below the castle ended up in his letters, which subsequently inspired fiction writings about the threatening complexity of bureaucracies of varying sorts.

Holland recreates the time distortions reflecting in the writings as if the characters survive disembodied in a Kafka time machine.

This complicated narrative continually flexes from Kafka’s childhood, learning to swim with his father, to his adulthood, working as a trained lawyer, and then to those solitary moments writing in relative obscurity.

Idan Weiss plays Franz Kafka as an introvert whose intellect bubbles out once in a while, especially in letters and failed attempts at earning a living publishing novellas.

Kafka must stay quietly sublime, even as an adult living at home with an authoritarian patriarch, to avoid the uncontrolled wrath of his father, Hermann Kafka, played by Peter Kurth.

Weiss creates a world internalized by Kafka as his mind wanders from family life to his life as a bureaucrat to his fictional creations, such as a machine built to punish workers for not following orders.

Kafka was not recognized as a writer during his lifetime except by a small circle of admirers who included a publisher friend and close family members. Kafka’s early literary works were published in magazines.

The characters from the early 1900s, prior to war and authoritarian control in Prague, are well developed. Kurth reaches all the boundaries of a Germanic patriarch in the few scenes he appears in, often captured around the dining room table or in the hallways of his home, over eating and shouting nonsensically.

Sandra Korzeniak plays Kafka’s mother, Julie, who is similarly introverted. Julie stays within her role as a housewife in order to avoid the lashing shouts of her husband who is running the household with an iron fist, in every respect, including the dinner menu.

Every once in a while, the camera finds someone in real time touring the Kafka landmarks in Prague, in part to underscore that Kafka is better know today than during his lifetime.

The complex narrative is held together with these various characters and with the camera returning to the compelling story of Kafka making his way through life during an historical time.

Kafka love is explained as engagement in fleeting relationships, that include prostitutes and a distance relationship with a woman from Berlin whom he meets in a chance encounter in Prague.

The film also suggests how the private human body, and how people react with their own extremities, influences how the person engages with reality in public, as Kafka turns himself inside and out, several times over, with the camera capturing every moment.