Season 1 - Episode Guide

The first episode is about Kafka's friend Max Brod. He is a recognized writer, full of energy and ideas, but his biggest project is to gain fame for his friend Franz. This is a kind of reverse Amadeus constellation: Brod tries with all his might to help his difficult friend, who, however, never returns artistic recognition or support to his most loyal supporter. Brod is a manic womanizer, always involved in multiple affairs. He is a warm-hearted person and the center of energy and power in the story. Unfortunately, he is not a good writer - a fact that Kafka is well aware of.

The focus of the second episode is Kafka's long-time fiancée Felice Bauer. She is Max Brod's cousin, who only gets to know Kafka superficially, but then bombards her with letters for weeks, months and years. Without really knowing each other, they get engaged. The relationship is long, complicated and painful; the engagement is broken off, renewed, only to be ended again.

The third episode focuses on Kafka's despotic and domineering father Hermann, to whom his son writes a merciless letter of accusation of more than 100 pages, which he ultimately never sends. Gradually the focus shifts to Kafka's relationship with Zionism and his friendship with Yitzhak Löwy, an actor in a traditional Yiddish theater troupe. The confrontation between his father and his friend Löwy led Kafka to write "The Metamorphosis," the story of a man who turns into an insect, arguably the most influential literary work of the 20th century.

The fourth episode shows Kafka in his professional world as an insurance lawyer. He is a well-known expert in the field, wins almost every court case on behalf of the insurance company and is highly respected by his superiors - an honor he does not reciprocate. For him, the rather comfortable workplace is a living hell from which he just wants to escape. At the height of the First World War, his superiors go so far as to save Kafka's life by officially declaring him indispensable, thus saving him from being drafted. This episode highlights the reversal of Kafka's nightmarish fear of an overwhelming bureaucratic force that he highlights so well in his works, for Kafka's superiors are by no means unreachable: they are friendly and helpful - a fact that Kafka never acknowledges or admits.

The fifth episode is about Kafka's short but intense relationship with the writer Milena Jesenská, who recognizes his genius in a way that only Max Brod has ever done. During a long afternoon in the Vienna woods, they go through all the phases of a passionate love affair - until they finally separate.

The first half of the last episode focuses on the vacation of Kafka, who was already seriously ill with tuberculosis, in the spa town of Špindlerův Mlýn in the Giant Mountains, which in his imagination is transformed into the dark and mythical village of his last and most famous novel, "The Castle". But he also meets his last great love, Dora Diamant. After he finally escapes the hated office, the two live in Berlin for a few months and spend his last days together in a sanatorium outside Vienna.

The documentary "Kafka und ich – Wer war der legendäre Schriftsteller?" tells the story and work of the writer in an unusual way: through the eyes of a dog, more precisely Franz Kafka's dog. 100 years after the death of her master and creator, the dog wants to understand why the writer is still so celebrated today. Writer Daniel Kehlmann, philosopher Rüdiger Safranski and Kafka fan Thilo Mischke explain who Kafka the person was and why it is so worthwhile to engage with him again and again.