History Creator / FranzKafka

*** [[PunctuatedForEmphasis "HE! IS! FRANZ! KAF! KA! FRANZ-KAF-KA!"

* The ''"Director's Cut"'' episode of ''WesternAnimation/HomeMovies'' features a plotline where teenage metalhead Duane attempts to persuade Brendon to film his [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uaaF83eVig Rock Opera of Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'']], which Brendon is unwilling to do.
** ''A, rock opera, based on Franz Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'' .....I don't think so."

* The "Director's Cut" episode of ''WesternAnimation/HomeMovies'' features a plotline where teenage metalhead Duane attempts to persuade Brendon to film his [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uaaF83eVig Rock Opera of Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'']], which Brendon is unwilling to do.
** "A, rock opera, based on Franz Kafka's ''Metamorphosis'' .....I don't think so."

** I suppose you could cough up a non-downer ending for "A Hunger Artist" if you read the panther as the reincarnation of the hunger artist.

* FishOutOfWater: Karl Rossman.

* {{Asexual}}: Well, sort of. He tried to be, but some of his letters and subtext suggests that while he was consciously horrified by the brutish physicality of the sex act he was subconsciously obsessed with it.
** His long hidden PornStash substantiates this notion [[http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4446131.ece]]
** Averted during the last year of his life. He lived with a woman while he was dying of tuberculosis.

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: In-work in ''The Trial'' when the prison chaplain tells Josef the story [[https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/beforethelaw.htm "Before the Law."]] Is the gatekeeper an ObstructiveBureaucrat who misled the man into keeping him out until he was too old to enter, or is he a [[WhatMeasureIsAMook tragic hero]] beholden to the Law while the man is free to enter, but chooses not to?[invoked]

* AlternateCharacterInterpretation: In-work in ''The Trial'' when the prison chaplain tells Josef the story [[https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/beforethelaw.htm "Before the Law."]] Is the gatekeeper an ObstructiveBureaucrat who misled the man into keeping him out until he was too old to enter, or is he a [[WhatMeasureIsAMook tragic hero]] beholden to the Law while the man is free to enter, but chooses not to?

* He appears in a historical/flashback episode of ''NorthernExposure'', played by the series' star Rob Morrow. Yes, the show set entirely in Alaska.

* The young Indiana Jones meets him in ''The Series/YoungIndianaJonesChronicles''.
* FrankZappa advises buyers of his album WereOnlyInItForTheMoney to read Kafka's "In The Penal Colony" before listening to the last track
* TheOnion [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEyFH-a-XoQ ran a video]] about how Prague's Franz Kafka International airport is the most alienating, dehumanizing airport in the world.
* There's a ShoutOut to ''In the Penal Colony'' in ''[[TheBookOfTheNewSun The Shadow of the Torturer]]'' where the head torturer shows a prisoner an apparatus designed to carve slogans into someone's flesh and mentions that it isn't working properly. [[spoiler: In the original story, there is such an apparatus, which malfunctions and carves a slogan into the ''guard's'' flesh.]]
* Kafka himself is the protagonist of Steven Soderbergh's 1991 film ''Kafka''.

* SurrealHorror - his protagonists are often utterly (and sometimes fatally) bewildered by circumstances that would be funny if the consequences were less hideous.

* OneLetterName - K... Joseph K.

* The young Indiana Jones meets him in TheYoungIndianaJonesChronicles.

* FishOutOfTheWater: Karl Rossman.

Franz Kafka was one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century. His unique body of writing--much of which is incomplete and was mainly published posthumously--is among the most influential in Western literature. He is often viewed as the original EmoKid.

His stories, such as ''Literature/TheMetamorphosis'' (1915), and novels, including ''The Trial'' (1925) and ''The Castle'' (1926), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal, modern, and bureaucratic world.

* DeathOfAThousandCuts - "In the Penal Colony".

** Subverted in "Josephine the Singer", though: after she, representing culture in general, dies, nobody will remember her.

Not to be confused with FrankCapra or [[FinalFantasyVI Kefka]]. And most certainly not [[SayonaraZetsubouSensei Kafuka Fuura]].
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* {{Ambiguously Jewish}}: Kafka's work doesn't directly ever reference his Jewish background, but the Jewish angst somehow seems to seep through anyway.

** Karl Rossman, protagonist of ''Amerika'', unwillingly gets the family maid pregnant, gets sent off to America by his father without any practical skills he could make a decent living with, finds a long-lost uncle, only to be thrown out after he vistits an acquaintence against his uncle's will, gets a alright job as a lift boy, is dismissed due to the Head Porter who has it in for Karl because he does't greet the Porter politely and regularly, falls in with rogues (not the lovable kind), etc.

* {{Determinator}} - K in ''The Castle''. Deconstructed: All his efforts are in vain. He would be happier if he just gave up.

* MagicRealism

* NoEnding

* YankTheDogsChain

* In ''TheProducers'', while looking for the worst play ever written, Max reads the first line from ''TheMetamorphosis'', and rejects it as being too good.