Kafka. Writing for Life

Franz Kafka today is one of the most famous names in the history of Western literature. But who was he at the beginning of his journey, in Prague at the start of the last century? "I have no inclination towards literature; I consist of literature, I am nothing else but literature, and I am unable to be anything else," Franz Kafka wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer. Writing was his existence, which meant more to him than a finished work. The renowned philosopher and biographer Rüdiger Safranski shows what writing can mean for life, how everything can be subordinated to it, what torments and moments of happiness arise from it, and what insights are revealed at this existential boundary. Safranski discusses the moments of happiness that Kafka experiences at his desk, and the moments when the world seems completely alien to him.