Critic’s notebook: The very online afterlife of Franz Kafka

On TikTok, a collection of objects sits atop a stack of books: a string of pearls, a Diptyque candle, a Sylvanian Families rabbit figurine in a scallop-collared dress. A woman’s hand brushes them aside. She pages through the pile of books below. We see “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh and “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath. Also, “The Metamorphosis” by Franz Kafka, a fat black bug on its cover. A question typed over the scene asks: What do you conclude about me?

The video’s creator is 25-year-old Margarita Mouka — @aquariuscat444 on TikTok, where she frequently posts about Kafka, integrating his work, his likeness and his life story into her online persona of romantic intellectualism. When her account was publicized last year, alongside those of a handful of other young Kafka-heads, media outlets were not quite sure what to conclude about her.

“Franz Kafka becomes an unlikely HEARTTHROB on TikTok — where Gen Zers are swooning over the Czech novelist nearly 100 YEARS after his death,” ran a Daily Mail headline. The article surfaced fancam-style compilations that use Kafka’s pictures as well as melodramatic readings of his letters.

Baffled reactions followed in The Spectator and Literary Hub: Did they think he was ... hot? Did they know he had a kind of body dysmorphia? Was Kafka the Harry Styles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?

To Mouka, the appeal was obvious. “I felt like that bug,” she said.

On BookTok, where a flashed book jacket conveys a glimmer of a user’s inner life, a classic text can leave a durable impression. It plays like a deep cut, reaching back through time to ground a TikToker’s content in a more enduring human experience.

Besides, the personas of dead authors are more fun to play with than those of the living. Some literary TikTokers style their feeds in Dostoyevsky’s melancholy (“I now refer to him as my Russian man”), others in Nabokov’s mischief (“Such a snarky queen”). Kafka has become shorthand on the app for alienation, which has become the backdrop of a digitally mediated life.

Telling the internet that Harry Styles is your boyfriend is a fantasy. Telling the internet that Franz Kafka is your boyfriend — that is a thesis statement.

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to Czech Jewish parents in Prague. He earned a law degree and worked by day as an insurance officer, investigating injuries from industrial accidents. He wrote at night. When he was 32, he published “The Metamorphosis,” a parable known for its opening line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” His stories and three unfinished novels explored themes of estrangement from others and from the self, and inspired an adjective — “Kafkaesque” — for describing nightmarish encounters with impenetrable bureaucracies. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, at age 40.

Margarita Mouka was born in 1999. She earned a degree in economics and works by day doing social media for luxury hotels and restaurants. She has cinched personal brand partnerships with a perfumery, a Korean skin-care company and a designer of coquette-style dresses. When she was 22, she picked “The Metamorphosis” off a bookstore shelf, and as she read it, she was as surprised to see herself in Gregor Samsa as he was to see himself as a bug.

“His first hardest task was to get out of bed,” Mouka said of Gregor Samsa. “So many people my age relate to that. I’ve been there as well.”

I spoke with Mouka over Zoom from her home in Athens shortly before the 100th anniversary of Kafka’s death, which falls on June 3. I was curious about how Kafka’s image was circulating online, and she told me of her admiration for his work, while also graciously explaining TikTok slang like “thought daughter” to me. (It’s a twist on a misogynistic phrase, reclaimed by women who overthink everything.) After “The Metamorphosis,” Mouka read “Letters to Milena,” a collection of private letters from Kafka to his love interest, the Czech translator Milena Jesenská, which only heightened his appeal. “You are out here being excited over a stinky ugly uneducated man texting you back when kafka wrote ‘i can’t hold enough of you in my hands’ to milena,” Mouka wrote in one video.

The alienation and anxiety that Mouka finds in Kafka have come to define her generation. “We’re constantly online and we’re constantly connected somewhere, but we still feel disconnected,” she said.

The internet, the very place where we are now expected to craft a self, is also an identity-destabilizing machine. When Kafka wrote “I have hardly anything in common with myself,” he could have been describing the experience of confronting one’s own online persona. Kafka’s openness around what Mouka called “his mental health issues” reverberates in social media’s therapeutic thunderdome — commentators have variously speculated that he may have experienced anorexia, autism, insomnia, borderline personality disorder and hypochondria, in addition to body dysmorphia.

And his “Letters to Milena” — written over the course of three years, to a married woman he rarely saw in person — has become a rich TikTok text. Kafka fans hold his passionate words in playful contrast to the lazy and pathetic text messages they have received from men. The correspondence offers commentary on the slippery nature of disembodied relationships, too. As Kafka wrote to Jesenská in 1922, “Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost.”

And yet his work also challenges the idea that Gen Z’s misery is attributable solely to the smartphone.

Presenting his books before the eye of its camera suggests a deeper explanation. The hundred-year gap between Kafka’s experience and our own functions as its own commentary on the fundamental dehumanization of modern life, and of the degradations of work under capitalism. Even as Mouka celebrates Kafka, even as she crafts an identity around him, she is performing a job, laboring at a second shift that never ends.

There’s something pleasurable about seeing Kafka enlivened in a TikTok comments section, his appeal translated into hypermodern slang. Fans post things like “Gorgeous girls lie awake at night mourning kafka” and “Kafka is my bare minimum and i won’t date a man until he is kafka.” But it’s also uncanny to watch his image proffered as an affective shorthand, his face a gesture toward a fan’s Myers-Briggs personality type or dark academia aesthetic.

In one video, Mouka has edited Kafka’s photograph into a thought-daughter montage, somewhere between a scene from Vincent Gallo’s “Buffalo ’66” and a snapshot of Sharon Tate. Amid this roving eye of cultural impressions, Kafka’s face plays like a wink toward seriousness. The friction between the images explodes the video’s emotional range.

“I always want to cry when I see him,” Mouka said of Kafka’s photograph. “I’m just sad when I see his face.” ‘Who Am I, Then?’

Kafka’s own relationship with technology was ambivalent. “Kafka had a fascination with and skepticism of the already rapid developments” that punctuated his lifetime, said Mark Harman, the editor and translator of a new collection of Kafka’s works, “Selected Stories.” “This anxiety about technology is palpable in his fiction.”

In one of his letters, to his onetime fiancée Felice Bauer, Kafka expressed deflation at the modern experience of paging through a set of his own photographs, watching himself transform from a spirited child into what he calls “the ape of my parents” in adolescence.

Harman also pointed me to a moment in “The Castle,” an unfinished novel published after Kafka’s death, in which the antihero K. tries to phone that bureaucratic fortress. “At first, he hears only what sounds like high-pitched singing,” Harman said. But after an official picks up and methodically interrogates K. about his identity, K. is left wondering: “Who am I, then?”

“Kafka was a notoriously severe judge of himself, and would certainly not have wanted completely uncritical admiration,” Harman said of the author’s online fans. And yet it is precisely Kafka’s painful selfawareness that plays so winningly on social media, among generations of readers who have grown up not just picking up a telephone, but staring it down.

What Harman described as “Kafka’s capacity for humorous detachment,” his “self-irony” and his “impish sense of humor” are now TikTok house style. Keeping up with the platform’s tumbling obsessions and inside jokes — and withstanding the heat of viral attention — requires a puckish attitude toward one’s own emotional life. One of my favorite Kafka videos jumps off the trending setup “Men only have four moods.” In this version, the moods are: “Waking up as a repulsive bug, learning how to live as a bug, being rejected by people, giving up on life.”

For more clues to Kafka’s contemporary appeal, I called Becca Rothfeld, the nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post. But first I dialed the wrong number several times, repeatedly triggering a voice recording that notified me that I had “reached a non-working number at the House of Representatives.” When we finally connected, Rothfeld said: “Trying to call a non-working number at the House of Representatives is very Kafkaesque.”

Rothfeld wrote the introduction for a new anthology of short stories, “A Cage Went in Search of a Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories,” which includes works by Joshua Cohen and Tommy Orange. In many of them, Kafka’s sensibility is projected into digital labyrinths. In “Hygiene,” Helen Oyeyemi imagines a textmessage exchange between a man and a woman in a casual relationship that wildly escalates when the woman’s friend assumes control of her phone. And in “God’s Doorbell,” Naomi Alderman explores a utopian human society built atop a class of “machine-thinking tools” that resemble evolved chatbots — a society shaken after the humans tell the machines to build a tower to God.

“Kafka, when he was writing, was describing a relatively new experience,” Rothfeld said of his depiction of absurd bureaucratic incidents. Gregor Samsa complains that his job as a traveling salesman is merely a succession of “always changing, never enduring human exchanges.” After he transforms into a bug, he lies in bed instead of reporting to work, so his manager finds him at home and delivers a negative performance review through the locked bedroom door.

Harman told me that the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy quadrupled in size in Kafka’s lifetime, as society rapidly industrialized and technology accelerated. Now, “what seemed so new and uncanny when he was writing has become very familiar,” Rothfeld said. The once-surprising edge of the Kafkaesque insight is “irrecoverable,” she added, “because now it’s just our life.”

But this familiarity has also allowed Kafka’s work to persist, and has freed his persona to circulate in ever more playful ways. Kafka, the TikTok boyfriend. Kafka, the love bomber. Kafka, the dog. As we spoke, Rothfeld sat on a porch with her 2-year-old English shepherd, Kafka. “He’s actually a very happy-golucky, cheerful dog, and very physically robust, so he’s not actually like Kafka at all,” she said. “But it gives me great joy to call my dog Kafka.”

Since Rothfeld discovered Kafka the novelist in high school, she has found that his work has grown only more relevant. As experiences of bodily and social alienation expand their reach into human life, he keeps pulling her back in. “I think about him all the time,” she said. “Maybe even more now that I scream his name a thousand times a day.”

Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the Culture section of The Times, covering the intersection of internet and pop culture