If Franz Kafka, whose arresting appearance we know so well from photographs, had looked like Ernest Hemingway or Homer Simpson or Boris Johnson—almost anybody other than Franz Kafka—the figure of a hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, self-enclosed neurotic, whose quivering otherworldly sensitivity unfitted him to the trivialities of human intercourse, might not stand so firmly between us and him. The ears suggesting extraterrestrial ancestry, the “intense, creaturely gaze of startled composure—enormous fears, enormous control,” as Philip Roth puts it. Even Kafka’s baby picture reproduced on a wall of the Morgan Library and Museum’s exhibition “Franz Kafka” says, Uh-oh, here comes trouble.

Those indelible images of a lone witness about to be engulfed in darkness function as graphic emblems of Kafka’s writing, and reinforce a wariness among potential readers. In any case, there seem to be a lot of people who approach (or avoid) Kafka’s fiction in anticipation of something somber, cryptic, too abstruse to enjoy. It’s unfortunate, because the fiction is mesmerizing, unendingly rewarding, and often wildly funny. It comes to the page from very deep regions of the mind—a narrative alloy of matchless realness, shocking intensity, and essential mystery. True, one might be baffled, horrified, resistant, or impervious, but reading Kafka’s fiction requires no more special skills or knowledge than dreaming does. As in a dream, each image, each narrative element, is a condensed amalgam of multiple associations whose relationships are both protean and tightly entwined. And like dreams, his fiction invites—provokes, demands—interpretation. To which it is ultimately unsusceptible; it’s just too—pardon me, but—perfect. The enigma is irreducible.

Showing at the Morgan until April 13, “Franz Kafka” marked the centennial of Kafka’s death when it opened last fall and was first mounted as “Kafka: Making of an Icon” at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. An exhibition of this sort is possible because scrupulous and inspired scholarship over the past decades has yielded an enormous amount of information about Kafka. At the very least, the conventionalized portrait of the writer has gained detail, and quite a different man comes forward from the darkness. It’s not that the familiar epithets are inaccurate in themselves—Kafka was in fact hopelessly complicated, alarmingly delicate, and afflicted by neurotic symptoms—but that the brand is; he was also, we find, exceptionally alive, fairly sociable, reasonably athletic, widely curious, unusually able and multitalented, with charm to burn. Incidentally, for what it’s worth, it turns out that a number of those striking solo images of him were extracted from photographs in which he appeared with other people, including his first (and second) fiancée, Felice Bauer.

The apparently ineradicable notion that he was incapable of a “real” sexual or romantic relationship is a bit of a fiction. True, his love life was conflicted and tormented, filled with obstacles and sorrows, vexed by the restrictive ambivalence and fears particular to his nature, but was it that much more conflicted and tormented, filled with obstacles and sorrows, vexed by idiosyncratic psychological tendencies, than—frankly—the usual?

His oeuvre is considered very small, and compared to its stature and to the commentaries, translations, analyses, biographical studies, and slag heaps of verbiage it has generated, it certainly is. It includes the portion of his short fiction that was published during his lifetime (a small fraction of everything he wrote) and the vast majority of his writing that was never intended (by him) to see the light of day: aphorisms, three unfinished novels, various other fragments, and an abundance of notebooks, diaries, and letters. He was sharply observant of himself as well as others, and maybe it’s the purely private writing that has licensed the opinion of many people (who themselves might keep journals) that he was significantly more self-involved than they.

Kafka’s reservations concerning the publication of his fiction are well known, as is the stipulation in his will that his close friend and champion, the writer Max Brod, burn his unpublished work, and it’s well known that Brod did not. Less well known is that Kafka himself burned a certain amount, and that his final love, Dora Diamant, whom he wished to marry, said she also burned some, though that seems not to have been true. What is true is that what we have was saved from oblivion only by chains of improbable circumstances, starting in 1939—as the exhibit tells us—with Brod’s escape from Prague on the last train out before the Germans invaded, with a suitcase full of Kafka’s papers.

Selections at the Morgan of this treasure, available to be seen in the United States for the first time, include the manuscript of Die Verwandlung (the story whose title is usually translated as The Metamorphosis), a notebook containing the story “The Judgment,” a notebook opened to the page where Kafka broke off his unfinished novel Das Schloss (The Castle) in midsentence, other manuscript pages, notebook and diary entries, letters, four original pages of his aphorisms, postcards sent from his European travels—several of them, amusing and affectionate, to his youngest and favorite sister, Ottla—and a few of his drawings.

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Also on display is a facsimile page of the novella-length letter he wrote to his stormy, belittling, dismissive, blowhard father, Hermann, who, even when Franz was gaining recognition in Prague, considered his son’s consuming drive to write to be an inexplicable pastime, like a fancy for model trains. Reiner Stach, in his enthralling three-volume biography of Kafka, notes that Hermann often spoke of his own childhood sufferings “as though his miseries were great achievements.” (The letter never reached him; it was intercepted by Kafka’s milder, more sympathetic mother, Julie.)

It’s an odd sensation—a little bewildering—to drift through a show of a writer’s papers, especially if one doesn’t read the language in which they’re written. After all, unless one is a graphologist or an expert in the composition of ink or paper, what exactly are we looking at? How do they illuminate the life of a writer who lived in another time? And what does a writer’s life have to do with the writing, anyhow? For that matter, what does the writing have to do with the writer? Does the moral conduct, for instance, of the writer correspond to the validity of the writer’s work?

The fashion of the moment says yes, I say no, but even on the off chance a correct answer exists, it will not be derived from pieces of paper on a wall. And although there have been a great many children with a parent or two as crushing as Hermann Kafka—children who have been made to feel miserable inadequacy, persistent guilt, shame, resentment of the injustice, and as much fear of their own internalized feelings as of the parent who levied them—no manuscript fragment, or indeed anything else, will explain how it came to be that Franz Kafka and only Franz Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis. Yet the sheer physical fact of these papers, the intimate small shock of the handwriting, of a word or phrase crossed out, the irrefutable existence of a time that once existed in exactly the same materiality as ours, is at moments uncannily effective; one feels that urgent messages from eternity, written in an indecipherable language, are emitting an inextinguishable afterglow.

If you were new to the planet, it might never occur to you that eggs and butter and sugar and flour, of all things, constitute cupcakes, but you might very much enjoy eating one. And the more you learn about the particulars of Kafka’s life, the clearer it becomes that the use he made of those particulars in his work has emptied them of biographical significance and mobilized their transcendent essences: the anxiously readjusting logical progressions; the specters of shame, guilt, justice, and power inequities; the tasks that must, but cannot possibly, be accomplished; the conundrum of the individual’s relationship to social authority—the father, the colonizer, the judge, the academy.

Most mysterious is the tensile strength of the pieces. Nothing feels arbitrary or random or empty. The integrity, the inner coherence, is—though unfathomable—unassailable. The core seems to unfold and unfold; sometimes one has a sensation of falling from a great height at several speeds simultaneously—a breathtaking plummet with leisure to see the passing details outlined with a preternatural clarity.

The exhibition is divided into five sections: “Life and Times,” “The Metamorphosis,” “The Castle,” “Journeys,” and the fifth, implicitly culminating section, which repeats the startling phrase “Making of an Icon” from the title of the catalog. A display of this kind can provide only sparkly little points of orientation to Kafka’s “life and times,” but radiating out from his fairly stable social and historical position, their coordinates connect as a huge, threatening net, pulsing with violence, past and future, in which Kafka was deeply enmeshed.

Hermann and Julie were Jewish, as the exhibition makes clear. As we know, for centuries throughout much of Europe, Jews were de facto aliens, frequently herded into semiautonomous communities, barred from many ways of making a living and from owning land and therefore from participating in the civic life of their nation. But conversant by default with disreputable things like trade and currency, Jews also had their uses, and from time to time a reformer would come to power, loosen restrictions, and confer various rights.

Distrust and murderous fear of this disenfranchised, persecuted, and excluded—and therefore unallied and politically “unreliable”—group didn’t automatically evaporate when restrictions were lifted; they did not evaporate, for example, in Prague, where Kafka was born and grew up. Active antisemitism was largely quiescent in Kafka’s youth—confined to a tense atmosphere—though the Jewish community, try as it might to fit in, was always aware that it was on historically thin ice, ice that was shattered from time to time by spasms of violence.

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Owing to the Austrian constitutional reforms of 1849, Hermann Kafka—unlike his own father, a schochet (kosher butcher)—could legally marry and choose his means of livelihood as well as his place of residence. Like many liberated Jews in Bohemia, Hermann came to Prague, escaping a straitened life in a rural village, and with the help of Julie’s dowry, agreeable personality, and family experience in retail, this overbearing and abrasive man opened a fancy-goods shop, where the couple toiled like cart horses. The child of this basically secular pair, who were determined to assimilate into the bourgeois German-speaking Jewish culture of the city, was both stiflingly pampered and stiflingly pressured—a familiar social pattern; his mandate from birth was to shed ethnic signifiers and enact his father’s idea of what it meant to be a success, an idea that contained no template for weirdo writer.

Kafka was a born outsider—to the life his parents had put behind them, to the life they emulated, and to the language spoken by half of Prague. The city was populated by German-speaking Protestants as well as by Czech-speaking Catholics, between whom there was plenty of bad historical blood; the Kafkas spoke the language of the empire, but increasingly the prestige and social potency of German was waning in favor of Czech—the language of the nation.

The day of Kafka’s birth happened also to be the day on which an anodyne-sounding Bohemian parliamentary decision effected a momentous power shift that enabled many more of the Czech majority—and more Jews, too—to vote. Here’s what the Neue Freie Presse, the Viennese newspaper of record, had to say about that: “Will it really get to the point that Prague drowns in the Slavic inundation?” Not at all, the paper declared: “Prague will again become what it was, a center of human culture, that is to say German culture.” Reality had other plans. Throughout Austria-Hungary, countries and regions were chafing under imperial control and increasingly resentful of the imposition of German and Hungarian over their own languages. In Bohemia, tensions between the Germans and the Czechs heated up, and antisemitism was once again a live issue, with Jews being a handy—and unifying—target for all sides. The empire held together until 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, though in retrospect one hears the rotted seams tearing in 1883 as Kafka was laid in his cradle.

Thousands of years have not sufficed to settle the contentious (particularly among Jews) debates about what constitutes Jewishness—what makes a person a Jew. And in the absence of solid criteria, when push, so to speak, comes to shove, either self-definition or antisemitism will qualify you as a Jew to someone. And in that sense—although his relationship to both Judaism and Zionism (like Judaism a blurry category) was complex, conflicted, and vacillating throughout the course of his life—Kafka doubly qualified.

Formally, he was less engaged in Judaism than his parents, who observed the High Holidays and Passover and never disassociated themselves from the religion. But whereas they were eager to wash their hands of exotic stains, Kafka, like many acculturated young urban Jews, felt the pull of Jewish—that is, Eastern European and Russian Jewish—culture, stories, and mysticism. He studied some Hebrew and taught himself more, learned a bit of Yiddish, and periodically dreamed of traveling to Palestine.

There are a couple of photos in the show, discharging a faded carnival atmosphere, of performers in a traveling Yiddish theater company in which Kafka became very interested. Really, it’s not at all surprising that courteous, reserved, punctiliously dressed, and fastidious Herr Doctor Franz Kafka (the title was conferred with his doctorate of law degree) was entranced by this ragged, filthy, largely illiterate, stunningly amateurish company, and promoted their performances to a baffled audience of Prague’s middle-class Jews, who couldn’t understand a word they said. To the horrified revulsion of his father, he befriended the leader of the troupe, Jizchok Löwy.

Narrated by a former wild ape who is now a famous performing hybrid of some sort, “A Report to an Academy,” like all of Kafka’s fiction, neatly fuses associations of many sorts. The story most conspicuously concerns the unwilled betrayal of one’s own nature, the costs entailed—the quasi-freedom and third-rate approval gained in being forcibly deracinated. The overwhelming impact of the story doesn’t in the least depend on knowing about Kafka’s conflicted relationship to assimilation or that he referred to himself as his “parents’ ape.” But knowing it does make one feel worse for Kafka.

Kafka longed to escape Prague, which he called “this little mother” with “claws,” and to enter into the literary life of Berlin and Vienna. His curiosity about the world was active—the exhibition notes his dreamy attraction to China and Japan—but he never got farther than Paris and northern Italy. One of his pleasures (a pleasure that seems to have been sunnier in retrospect) was traveling, when possible with Brod. On these brief trips Brod ran off to see the sights while Kafka washed away travel grime and then went out to see the people.

Featured in the show is an architectural model of an apartment where the family lived for some time, which served, with a bit of imaginary reconfiguring, as the inescapable interior of The Metamorphosis. Kafka was said to be abnormally sensitive to noise, and if nature did not make him so, no doubt the layout of the apartment did. Unlike his sisters’ shared room, his was “private”—but it had two doors, one opening onto his parents’ room and the other onto the living room, and to get to their own bedroom, Hermann and Julie had to pass right through their son’s.

He lived with his parents until he was thirty, but oddly, the section of the exhibition devoted to The Metamorphosis—the ultimate domestic story, and Kafka’s best known, whose famous first sentence describes Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, awakening from troubled dreams to the reality that he is a giant, disgusting, bug-like thing—is largely given over to elegant drawings of bugs and entomological writings. This apparent deflection calls attention to a problem that has flummoxed Kafka translators from the outset: How to translate the physical form that Samsa has assumed in the new (and final) stage of his life cycle, an “ungeheuren Ungeziefer”?

Edwin and Willa Muir, Kafka’s first—and superb—English-language translators, settled on “gigantic insect”; among other approximations out there, Susan Bernofsky’s recent lively translation gives us “some sort of monstrous insect”; Mark Harman, just “monstrous insect”; and Michael Hofmann, “monstrous cockroach.”

But the German original, something more literally like “monstrous vermin,” has a wealth of connotations, including uncleanliness and unfitness for ritual slaughter, that emphasize with fierce irony the title’s lofty promise: the fulfillment of a destiny. In The Metamorphosis we learn what that destiny is immediately: as the humble caterpillar will be in its fullness the glorious butterfly, the pitiably insufficient Samsa will be in his fullness an ungeheuren Ungeziefer. Anybody over the age of eleven or so—given a sense of humor, an empathetic nature, and a robust threshold for anxiety, grief, and horror—who has ever been, or met, a member of a bourgeois family will recognize, very possibly with gratitude and a gleeful feeling of vindication, the brute physics of family life.

Some fluent readers of German contend that Kafka is untranslatable. No doubt this is, in a strict sense, true; if languages and cultures all operated in the same way, literary translation would work sort of like Bingo, and Google Translate would be overqualified. But the talents required of a literary translator include, even more than an understanding of the language being translated from, an extraordinary sensitivity to the language being translated into, an exceptionally alert responsiveness to tone, and fundamentally a deep insight into the text. As a literary translator once said to me, “If you don’t understand what’s going on between the lines, you can’t translate the lines.” Regardless of the degree of fidelity with which Kafka can be represented in another language, marvel after marvel has been rendered into English from Kafka’s German. And those of us who are confined to reading English have the somewhat compensatory pleasure of comparing the word choices of various translators, each of which emphasizes a particular coloration that influences the whole.

I’d think that one of the difficulties in translating Kafka is, paradoxically, the clean, bland, pedestrian plainness of expression—no holes or frills to hide in, nothing squishy or bendable, no suspect claims. That is to say, no room for errors or irrelevant associations. Although his fiction is often set in an indeterminate place whose natural laws are not necessarily appreciable, owing to that very precision and to the perfect verisimilitude of detail the narratives are indubitable from the very beginning. When the coverlet slips annoyingly off Gregor Samsa’s carapace, we know, before we have a chance to think, that he’s a bug. And when he looks at the clock and understands that he didn’t hear its alarm, we experience his intensifying panic as he comes to understand that turning into a huge revolting insect is GOING TO MAKE HIM LATE FOR WORK. (Which incidentally Kafka almost was, almost always.)

Kafka’s civil service job with the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute was a lot better than Samsa’s job. Less than half accurate, at best, is the notion that Kafka was a low-level clerk of some sort. On the contrary—although inconveniently Jewish, he was invaluable. His Czech was not as good as his German, but it was very good, his memos and legal briefs were outstanding in their logic and lucidity, and he was an excellent draftsman, capable of drawing a worker’s gruesome injury as well as the complicated machinery that had caused it. He was so indispensable that even when World War I broke out and he wanted badly to enlist, his employers arranged for a deferment.

Self-doubt and perfectionism, so closely but unhappily related, are common writerly characteristics, and both bedeviled Kafka to an excruciating degree. He had taken the position at the institute because it gave him time to write in the afternoons and evenings, but apparently he was incapable of doing anything with less than his full abilities—which, since he would have preferred to have no job at all, was highly counterproductive. As Reiner Stach writes:

He never left the only medium in which he could breathe: language. He longed for clarity and precision in every situation; the texts he wrote on behalf of the institute are ample proof of this…. It was not distractions, being forced to emerge from an overpowering inner intensity for hours at a time, that tormented him…. What tormented him was the endeavor to come up with the most precise linguistic expression for trivial matters. This misuse of his talent was a true act of prostitution…. Every effort of language spent on his official documents seemed to him a loss that could never be recovered.

Painful as this misuse undoubtedly was, we can’t feel, from our vantage, that it was a total loss. In his effort to extract compensation from employers for injured workers (this was at a time when insurance was supposed to help people) he was constantly required to exercise the clarity and precision that make his fiction gleam.*

Published in 1914, the story “In the Penal Colony” is hectic—an almost recklessly satirical and sickening (and to me utterly hilarious) picture of sadism proudly rationalized as justice. It is also among other things a critique of colonialism, an echo of the Dreyfus Affair, and a catalog of types and stages of complicity. The relationships of the characters to the reader and to each other keep altering, disclosing new, proliferating contingencies. Although the story obviously contains traces both of Kafka’s salaried life and of world events, its topical features have been distilled—purified of strictly local associations, absorbed into the condensed core, essentialized and timeless. Surely we can thank Kafka’s familiarity with industrial malfunctions and predictably spurious defenses of dangerous working conditions for the grotesque and preposterous machine at the story’s center, which is programmed to encode, with spikes, inscrutable scriptural corrective justice on a prisoner’s body.

It has been said of “In the Penal Colony” that Kafka anticipated the future. I doubt he envisioned the potential catastrophes of the digital world, and I hope he did not envision the murder of his little sisters, some twenty years after his own painful death from tuberculosis—one in Auschwitz and two in Chelmno. Not that there’s a hard and fast line—or really any line at all—between present and future, but it’s more remarkable to me that he saw his own present; he saw what was there to be seen. Even more remarkably, he could convey what he saw.

It would be hard not to notice that the two centenary exhibitions now at the Morgan—one celebrating a Jewish man and the other Belle da Costa Greene, a Black woman, both celebrating literary history as well as literature itself—happen to have coincided with the 2024 presidential election in the United States. That was a ringing endorsement—if not ringing in numbers, ringing in stark practical consequences—of the intensifying enthusiasm for philistinism, anti-intellectualism, ignorance, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, vengefulness, antisemitism, misogyny, violence, and outright triumphal sadism that is casting its chilling shadow over our days. This is a background against which Kafka’s life and writing have a special, disturbing luster.

It’s also a background against which the show’s aim of demonstrating the astonishing reach of Kafka’s influence has an almost desperate poignancy. I’m still scratching my head over its final section, “Making of an Icon,” which includes many surprising things that have been engendered by his writing. An endearing characteristic of Kafka was that he didn’t care whether something fell into the category of high art or popular art; he liked what he liked. So it’s very possible that he would have been delighted, who’s to say, or selectively delighted, to find himself the subject of all sorts of cultural products, including comic books, children’s books, merch, what have you. The show even includes an architectural model for an apartment building in Barcelona, the architect Ricardo Bofill’s visualization of the Castle—a thing that, like an ungeheuren Ungeziefer, cannot be visualized.

The final item in the exhibit is Andy Warhol’s remarkable silkscreen print, based on the photo from which Felice Bauer was eliminated, from his 1980 series “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century.” It’s beautiful and irrefutably Iconic. Warhol’s subtle tinkerings relieve Kafka of all emotional and psychological distress, and present us with a rather shy and very attractive young man.

But who is this Kafka? Where are Roth’s “enormous fears” and “enormous control”? Where is the sense—to me fundamental to Kafka’s writing—that our species isn’t well suited for the medium of life, that we don’t know how to properly inhabit it, that there’s some colossal misunderstanding at the very heart of our being, and that our lot is the unremitting, losing struggle to figure it all out?

Oh, well. It’s great to know, in this time of darkness, that Kafka has been freed from the sterile position of highbrow idol and now is recognized as one of the great influencers; that after the many adversities (including death) he endured, after the constant exhausting efforts devoted to articulating his intense, fiercely focused, visionary inner life, things have finally worked out for him.