Lifestyle
Franz Kafka's life wasn't so kafkaesque after all, TV miniseries shows
Max Brod (left), a recognized writer at the time, relentlessly promoted the writings of his friend, Franz Kafka, played here respectively by David Kross and Joel Basman in the Austrian-German series Kafka, now streaming in the U.S.
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If you’ve ever felt powerless when confronted with faceless bureaucracy, confounded by absurd accusations or simply hopeless, chances are the word “kafkaesque” might sum up your situation.
But a television miniseries released in the U.S. this month shows Prague-born author Franz Kafka, whose work inspired the word, as anything but kafkaesque. Tortured recluse he is not here.
Instead, Kafka is a wrangler of labyrinthian bureaucratic systems, so successful in fact that his bosses do all in their power to keep him at home and prevent him from enlisting in World War I. That’s the story according to Kafka, a six-part series that was co-produced by Germany’s ARD, Austria’s ORF and Superfilm.
“We all think we hear of the bureau, or the office, that it’s a dark world and it’s apocalyptic (for Kafka). But in the real world, it was a paradise,” Director David Schalko told NPR’s Michel Martin during a joint interview with Joel Basman, who plays the title role.
Schalko said he was inspired to take on the project after reading Reiner Stach’s three-volume biography of Kafka, originally published in German between 2002 and 2014. In rejecting the usual tropes of equivocating Kafka’s angst-ridden works with the writer’s life, Schalko’s biopic offers a lush, more humanly complex picture.
Max Brod (David Kross) and his wife Elsa (Tamara Stern) escaped Prague on one of the last trains to leave the city before Nazi forces took control, recognizing the danger to Jews like himself. He carried Franz Kafka’s papers with him in a suitcase.
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One perspective per episode
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The first theme is the author’s relationship with his close friend Max Brod — who ultimately defied Kafka’s wish to have all his manuscripts burned and instead posthumously became his biographer and literary executor.
The other episodes focus on the his (bourgeois) family, three of his lovers and his role as an insurance lawyer.
Kafka’s domineering father Hermann (Nicholas Ofczarek) plays a central role in his life and writings.
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In episode four, Kafka wins successive court cases and contracts for the company. He is held in high esteem by his superiors at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute. They also admire his writings and press him to review their own mediocre texts. It’s an admiration that Kafka does not reciprocate.
“He was very good rhetorically and he was fighting for the insurance company,” Schalko said. “It’s not the silent Kafka who is not able to talk in front of other people. It shows a complete different Kafka.”
The series alternates between biographical material, historical context and scenes from Kafka’s writings.
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Basman says he felt compelled in portraying Kafka to “get away from the cliché of him being a depressed person. First of all, he’s a funny man. He’s got humor. And of course, he’s got his issues, and we all got them in our lives, but he was far away from depressed.”
A century since Kafka’s death
The series’ release coincides with the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death this month. And it comes at a time of renewed interest in the writer, who has become an unexpected hot item among a younger generation reflecting on alienation via posts on TikTok.
Just last year, readers could finally access a new translation of Kafka’s diaries, by Ross Benjamin. Prior versions relied on a manuscript heavily edited and redacted by Kafka’s friend Brod, whose version was polished and removed lewd, homoerotic and unflattering material concerning Kafka and himself.
The unfiltered version shows a more hesitant Kafka who often left his thoughts unfinished mid-sentence — not surprising for an author who never didn’t complete the three novels he started and whose characters struggled with the impossibility of finishing tasks.
Kafka’s longtime fiancée Felice Bauer (Lia von Blarer, right) got so fed up with his constant equivocation that she confronted him alongside her friend, Grete Bloch (Marie-Luise Stockinger), an event that inspired the novel The Trial.
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“The feeling to wake up and feel like vermin, like an insect, and feeling the shame and get canceled by the others, is a feeling you know from social media very well,” Schalko said, while pointing to arbitrary arrests in Russia as another example.
“He also writes about the bureaucracy and how it feels to be a human being in a system that doesn’t see you as a human being. And that’s a big issue in our times as well.”
In a memorable scene in episode three, Kafka brings home for dinner a traditional Yiddish theater actor he befriended, Yitzhak Löwy. But Kafka’s domineering father, Hermann, disapproves and says Löwy is dirty and compares him to an insect.
The confrontation inspired Kafka to write his novella The Metamorphosis, the story of a man who turns into a bug. Kafka had also written a 100-page letter criticizing his father — the closest he came to writing an autobiography — though he neither sent nor published it.
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, played by Lars Eidinger, is shown moved to tears after reading Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the story of a man who turns into an insect that was inspired by a confrontation between Kafka’s domineering father and the writer’s Yiddish actor friend Yitzhak Löwy.
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“For his father, it was more important to be accepted by the elites of Prague; he tried to maybe even hide his Judaism,” Basman said.
The Swiss-born actor says he could relate to this ambiguity in Kafka’s family identity because his own father is originally from Israel but he’s an atheist.
“I was never Jewish enough, but I also was never Swiss enough… I realized, okay, people want to brand you and if they can’t brand you, they don’t want you on their team,” Basman said.
“I think for Kafka, religion was also just a journey of getting to know himself because it was hidden by his father so strongly that he took this journey by himself.”
Kafka was engaged four times and never married, keeping most relationships long-distance via extensive letter-writing. His penultimate relationship was with the writer Milena Jesenská (Liv Lisa Fries), who recognizes his talent.
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Kafka and women
The women in Kafka’s life also left an indelible mark. He was engaged several times but never married. One of his fiancées was Felice Bauer, Brod’s cousin. The pair meet and only get to know each superficially before Kafka sends her hundreds of agonizing letters for months on end, through an initial parting, a second engagement and a final breakup.
Fed up with Kafka’s constant equivocation, Bauer at one point confronts him, letters in hand, with her friend Grete Bloch — another recipient of letters from Kafka — by her side. The episode drawn from the writer’s life inspired his novel The Trial, published posthumously in 1925.
The protagonist Joseph K. navigates an absurdly complex bureaucratic system and makes mistakes that make him look guilty of an unknown crime for which he is put on trial and then executed “like a dog.”
Two men in leather coats (Raimund Wallisch, left, and Gerhard Liebmann) lurk in the background, a representation of the angst and absurdities of bureaucracy that concerned Kafka.
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Kafka is available to stream on ChaiFlicks. New episodes will release weekly.
The broadcast version of this story was produced by Mansee Khurana. The digital version was edited by Obed Manuel.
Nephi Craig’s mother is White Mountain Apache and his father is Diné Navajo. He grew up on both reservations.
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Nephi Craig, the founder of the Native American Culinary Association, credits eating, cooking and teaching about Indigenous food with saving his life.
Craig became addicted to alcohol and drugs at an early age. After his first DUI, the judge gave him the option of three months’ probation if he agreed to get a job or go to college. That’s when he enrolled in cooking classes at Scottsdale Community College.
Craig says he initially felt like an “oddball” in the classes because he was unfamiliar with terms like “bistro” and “vichyssoise.” But he also credits the classes with igniting his interest in cooking — and teaching him more about Native foods, including the tomato.
“[When] I came across this info that [the tomato] was native to the Americas, it just brought this really big smile to my face,” Craig says. “As a Native American in Arizona, you don’t really see yourself represented in really anything, let alone cookbooks and culinary school curriculum. So that was a neat point of validation for me that grew into many other interests.”
Craig eventually landed a job at one of Phoenix’s top fine dining restaurants, a goal he’d been working towards for years. But after a period of sobriety, a relapse ultimately cost him the job. He wound up in jail, where he worked in the kitchen and learned to design meals with whatever food was on hand.
“I was bunched in with the other Native Americans. And in jail, we call ourselves ‘chiefs,’” he says. “Banding together to feed, I think it was 7,800 inmates a day, was really eye-opening. It showed me that I was not above or below any style of cooking.”
Over the years, Craig completed nine rehabs and ran away from five others. Now sober, he works as the nutritional recovery program coordinator at the White Mountain Apache tribe-owned Rainbow Treatment Center in Whiteriver, Ariz., which serves people recovering from substance abuse. In 2021, he opened Café Gozhóó, a restaurant on the reservation that’s a place for the community to eat and talk. His new memoir is Our Knives Will Save Us: Dispatches from a White Mountain Apache Chef.
Interview highlights
On the ubiquity of Native American food
For major American holidays like Thanksgiving, everyday staples like turkey, corn, squash and cranberries — those are all important Indigenous foods. And when people ask me what recipes or what ways do we prepare Native foods differently, or the question comes up, how come I haven’t heard of a Native American restaurant, or why are there no Native American cookbooks? I usually will say, “Well, you’ve been eating Native American foods and cuisine since as long as you can remember. It’s just that the stories are not told.”
All of American cuisine, every region in the United States is built on the landscapes or the ancestral terroir of Native American food and food traditions. So you can say Boston baked beans, barbecue in the American Southwest. … The hunting and fishing and agricultural bounty of the Northwest. All of these landscapes inform our diets as everyday Americans. So when we think about how we prepare different ingredients, I think it’s pretty straightforward and simple. We like to roast them, simmer them, turn them into pies just like everyone else sometimes. But Native foods have been there the whole time.
On why frybread isn’t Indigenous
It’s not an Indigenous food. It has this lasting legacy with us and when you study how foods were distributed once people were imprisoned, and foods that were distributed required a ration card, and you might get flour, some dried beef, maybe some rice and potatoes, maybe some coffee and sugar. Ration lists varied from place to place, but they were pretty much always going to contain flour and lard, and so frybread emerges, some say in the Southwest. And there’s big debates about where and who did it first, but if you look across all of Native America from Florida to New York to the Great Plains to the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and the American Southwest, every tribe has frybread as a result of military food rations and that grows into these food traditions that are a part of our reality today. I teach it in a way that hopefully can promote responsibility and food choices, not to take it away, but to be aware.
On working at Mary Elaine’s, a high-end French restaurant in Phoenix
That place really built me up into a very strong, young chef. I was an entremetier on the meat station, which means I cook all the vegetables and do all the garnishes. And I became the saucier and the guy that cooks the meat on the meat station. And to be in Arizona, a very meat and potatoes state, it was the busiest station in that kitchen. And I realized how strong I was. And it was beautiful, best of everything. … So it really meant a lot to me. And when I lost that opportunity because of a relapse that crept in and took over, it was heartbreaking. I did not have the words to say it then, but it was a debilitating loss. That I took maybe five, 10, 15 years to process.
On selling his prized Japanese knives for alcohol
Addiction strips away everything slowly. It’s this terrible, terrible affliction that just causes you to devalue yourself and all of your belongings. … These knives were special because I had got them on a trip to Japan in 2007, where I prepared a seven-course tasting menu of Western Apache cooking and cuisine at the Imperial Hotel of Osaka. So I cherished these knives because they were like samurai swords. They were made by a knife maker whose ancestors made samurai swords and were samurai. And I brought them back to the States with me and I still have one of them with me, but I sold those other ones and it was terrible.
On experiencing sexual abuse as a kid
I included this part of my life not as the sole cause of addiction and dependency but a contributing factor. … I never told anyone about the sexual assault I encountered when I was 10 years old. I was just a little kid. My worldview was that it happened to me and it was my fault. My worldview is that no one’s going to believe me. So I just kept it in. And when I kept it, it festered and grew into this rage and anger and shame. And so when I talk about sexual abuse in my story, it’s not to point the finger at it, but I had to really take a long time to come to terms that I was a victim of that, and it doesn’t determine who I am.
On seeing a lot of alcohol addiction on Native reservations
As Indigenous people, we experience oppression differently. We experience being an American citizen differently. We experience capitalism, imperialism and colonialism differently. The systems that enable those three monsters were not designed and built by us. And as Native American peoples, we’ve inherited a legacy of historical trauma and colonial violence. So it’s not that we are different biologically, it’s that we have a different legacy in encounters with colonial violence in America. That’s what I feel is one of the root causes of this multi-dimensional monster that is addiction.
On why he has a Mormon name (Nephi)
All my life, I always encounter these really big, complicated web of American history and our lifelines as Native American people. So how my family encounters organized religion and the LDS Church is when they were small, my dad is out in the Navajo Nation, there were Mormon missionaries trying to convert people all over the Southwest and on the Navajo Nation, and the same thing in Whiteriver on the Apache rez. And so my parents were both placed on the placement program, which is where in the ’50s and ’60s and into the ’70s, young Native American kids were taken from their homes and placed in Mormon homes in Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, anywhere there was a high population of Mormon families. And my parents were essentially raised in the Mormon church in a Mormon community till they graduated high school. And that’s a big part of our life. And so when the three of us, me and my brothers come, into the picture, they decide to name me Nephi. … It’s a lot of complicated elements in how identity forms and for me that’s one dimension of how it contributes to substance use but also freeing myself from it, too.
Anna Bauman and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
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The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.
Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
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Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
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On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
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Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
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For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.
This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
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