In late 1914, Franz Kafka began reading aloud to a small group of friends in Prague the manuscript of a new novel. The first sentence was: Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne dass er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
His friend Max Brod — the future literary executor who would defy Kafka's deathbed wishes and publish the manuscripts anyway — later wrote that Kafka laughed so hard during the reading that he had to stop. The laughter was so loud and so prolonged that the author repeatedly broke off, unable to continue. The novel was Der Process. Kafka thought it was a comedy.
This is not the Kafka most readers carry around in their head. Most people associate his name with a generic feeling — Kafkaesque — that means cold, dehumanising, hopeless. The man who wrote those books read them aloud and laughed.
The first sentence is a joke
The opening of The Trial is a deadpan setup. It deploys the language of a legal report — the past perfect of etwas Böses getan hätte, the impersonal jemand musste, the calm consequential wurde er verhaftet — and applies it to a situation that is itself the negation of any legal report. Someone must have slandered him. The verb müssen is doing all the work. There is no specified slanderer. There is no specified slander. There is only the fact that something must have happened, because the consequence — arrest — is what is now in front of us.
It is, structurally, the joke of every bureaucratic absurdity that has come after it. Yes Mr K., we cannot tell you why you are here, we can only confirm that you are. Anyone who has been on hold with a phone company has heard a version of this sentence. Kafka wrote it first.
The Metamorphosis has the same shape
The opening of Die Verwandlung:
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt. Er lag auf seinem panzerartig harten Rücken und sah, wenn er den Kopf ein wenig hob, seinen gewölbten, braunen, von bogenförmigen Versteifungen geteilten Bauch, auf dessen Höhe sich die Bettdecke, zum gänzlichen Niedergleiten bereit, kaum noch erhalten konnte.
When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin. He lay on his armour-hard back and saw, when he lifted his head a little, his domed brown belly divided into stiff arched sections, on whose summit the bedspread — about to slip off altogether — could barely keep its grip.
Note the tone. It is not the tone of a horror novel. It is the tone of a description in a damage report. The bedspread, about to slip off, could barely keep its grip. The matter-of-fact concern with the linens is funnier on the third reading than on the first.
And then Gregor's first reaction. He has become an insect. His chief reaction, in the second paragraph, is workplace anxiety. He is going to be late for the train. He needs to catch the five o'clock. His chief clerk will arrive at his door any minute now to ask why he isn't at the office. The horror of having become an insect is registered, but it is registered after the horror of being late. This is the joke. David Foster Wallace, Walter Benjamin, and Milan Kundera all wrote essays explaining it.
Why nobody hears the laughter
Two things happen on the way from Prague to your American high school.
The first is that translations flatten the rhythm. Kafka's German has a precise legal cadence — short clauses, common verbs, almost no flourish. He worked his day job as a lawyer at the Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, writing accident reports about textile workers who had lost fingers in machines. The bureaucratic precision was the prose he had on hand, every weekday, for fourteen years. It is exactly what makes his sentences funny. Every clause sounds like a clause from a piece of paperwork that has gone subtly insane.
In English translation, the rhythm is replaced by Anglophone literary register, which has no comic relationship to bureaucratic German. Kafka in English reads as solemn. Kafka in German reads as funnier than your high school teacher told you.
The second thing that happens is the Kafkaesque myth. The word entered English in the 1940s, and by the 1960s it meant any situation involving an unhelpful customer service line. The actual books got covered up by their own influence. Generations of students arrived at Gregor Samsa woke up to find himself transformed expecting Edgar Allan Poe and got Buster Keaton instead. They thought they had misread.
Kafka liked Chaplin
Kafka's letters mention Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton with affection. He went to the cinema in Prague repeatedly during the 1910s. He thought of his own writing as belonging to a tradition of small men in suits being undone by large incomprehensible systems. This is a more accurate frame for The Metamorphosis than the gloom version high school assigned you.
It is also why his ideal reader is closer to a stand-up audience than a literature seminar. The jokes are timed. The clauses snap. There is a setup and there is a punchline. The German legal vocabulary — der Beamte (the official), die Akte (the file), der Anwalt (the lawyer), die Verhandlung (the hearing) — is itself the punchline, deployed in a context where no actual official, file, lawyer, or hearing will ever produce a result.
Why this matters for a German learner
Kafka of all people is an unusually friendly read for a German learner, exactly because of the same thing that makes him funny. The vocabulary is small. The sentences are short. The verbs are common — sein, haben, gehen, sehen, liegen. The strangeness comes from the situation, not the language. If you can read a sentence describing an office, a door, a chief clerk, you can read the most-quoted opening paragraph of twentieth-century literature.
And the joke translates. The horror — the small man in a suit being undone by something he cannot see — is the same in any language. But the timing of the joke, the deadpan rhythm of the German clauses, only really lands in the original. That is the part that is worth doing the work for.
While you're on the German shelf
Kafka does not stand alone. The German tradition he wrote out of runs from Goethe through Schiller through the Romantics through the Vienna of 1900 and into him. If Kafka clicks for you, the easiest next book on the same shelf is The Sorrows of Young Werther — Goethe's twenty-four-year-old novel of letters that started a wave of copycat suicides across Europe in the 1770s. The German is plainer than you'd guess for a book of its reputation. After Werther, Goethe's Faust is the same author thirty years older and four levels stranger.
I'm one of the makers of Storica, a daily reading club for the language you're learning. The full Kafka trilogy — The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle — sits on the German shelf at A2+, adapted into twenty-five short chapters each. The original German is on the shelf if you want it. Read fifteen minutes a day, write a short reply at the end of each chapter, and you will have read all three in less than three months.