"What If I Slept A Little More?"
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 into three overlapping circles of exclusion: Czech majority, German minority, and Jewish community within that minority. This episode traces his life under the overwhelming shadow of his father Hermann, his night writing alongside exhausting insurance work, and the tuberculosis that killed him at forty. It explores his major works in detail, including The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle, alongside the letters to Felice and Milena and the devastating Letter to His Father that was never sent. The episode examines Kafka's central themes of waking into strangeness, guilt without crime, authority that cannot be reached, and the body that fails and hungers. It closes with Max Brod's refusal to burn the manuscripts and the emergence of the word Kafkaesque as a name for our modern condition.
