Franz Kafka — Chiese di bruciare i suoi libri. Per fortuna nessuno lo ascoltò | Documentario

Franz Kafka is one of those rare authors whose name has become a universal adjective. Kafkaesque: a word that exists in nearly every language in the world to describe bureaucratic absurdity, institutional oppression, the individual crushed by forces he cannot comprehend. Yet the man who brought this concept to life died at the age of forty, unknown to most, after asking his best friend to burn every word he had written. In this documentary, Leonardo Ricci retraces Franz Kafka's entire life: from late-nineteenth-century Prague, a city on the border between irreconcilable cultures and worlds, to his final months in a sanatorium near Vienna, where the great Czech writer corrected the drafts of his last story while weighing forty-nine kilograms and suffering from tuberculosis of the larynx. A life marked by the devastating relationship with his father Hermann, by the chronic anxiety that plagued him throughout his life, by impossible love affairs, and by his double life as a respected civil servant and an unknown nocturnal writer. The documentary takes an in-depth look at Kafka's major works: The Judgment, written in a single night in 1912; The Metamorphosis, the most famous and best-selling story of his lifetime; The Trial, the novel about guilt without crime, locked away in a drawer and never brought back; and The Castle, his most mature work, abandoned in 1922 on a sickbed in the Bohemian mountains. It explores Kafka's distinctive style, that dry, bureaucratic prose capable of describing shocking situations with the same impassivity as an administrative report, and the historical and cultural context that made it possible: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in decline, multiethnic and multilingual Prague, and the Jewish condition in Central Europe on the eve of the great catastrophes of the twentieth century. Kafka's extraordinary posthumous story is also told: Max Brod's decision not to burn the manuscripts, the gradual publication of the three novels between 1925 and 1927, his slow conquest of the European and then global audience, his explosion of fame in postwar America, his influence on writers like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez, and the global diffusion of the term Kafkaesque as a category of universal human experience. A documentary for lovers of great European literature, for those who want to understand how a work is born from the life of its creator, and for those who believe that the stories of creators are, ultimately, the most important stories we can tell. Stories of Creators is a documentary series by Leonardo Ricci dedicated to the lives and works of the great protagonists of world culture. © Leonardo Ricci. All rights reserved. The texts, narration, and research contained in this video are the exclusive property of the author. Reproduction, even partial, without written permission is prohibited. #FranzKafka #StoriesOfTheCreators #DocumentaryLiterature #LeonardoRicci #EuropeanLiterature