this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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In my highschool German class we read Kafkas "Metamorphosis", it gave me weird dreams for weeks.
In a literary sense it's a masterpiece, simple yet intricate. The first sentence alone is genius :
No backstory, no explanation, the reader is left with the same confusion as the characters. Then the societal observations he weaves in are sharp yet puzzling.
I recommend it highly, but be prepared for strangeness and being left with an uneasy feeling.
You should read Kafka's "The Castle" if you haven't. It's a surreal book about navigating an insane bureaucracy. It hit me harder than Metamorphosis, personally.
Will absolutely do, after writing this comment I pulled out Metamorphosis and read the first couple pages again and it's just so good. Like I said the societal observations are so sharp, I am German native and even more than a hundred years later it is still on point, everybody trying to bring a rational attitude in a otherwise completely absurd situation.
It reminds me a little of the German comedian Loriot, he also had a way of describing exactly that. There is a Loriot sketch where a man enters a bathroom in a hotel, to get a bath, just to find another man sitting in the bathtub. So he gets into the bathtub with him and they start to argue with each other about if they want to have water now and later about if the rubber ducky can also join in the tub, without ever really addressing that they are together in a bathtub. All the while they stay perfectly polite with each other, using each other's full names and titles (Herr Müller-Lüdenscheid! I insist that you water the duck now! - Herr Doktor Knöbel, my duck won't share the tub with you!). It is so absurd it brings me to tears laughing.