The man whose name became shorthand for inescapable bureaucratic horror used to read his darkest stories aloud to friends and laugh so hard he had to stop. This episode reevaluates Franz Kafka through that detail, beginning with his father Hermann, the booming self-made merchant whose shop sign carried a jackdaw (kavka in Czech), and a lonely childhood raised by governesses in a German-speaking Jewish family inside a Czech city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We look at how his administratively pure German became a tool, and how the arbitrary rules of the family apartment scaled up into the logic of his fiction.

We follow the strategic delay of a law degree, the friendship with Max Brod, and the job at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, where a well-liked middle manager assessed claims for lost fingers and limbs and finished work at ...