Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning, in his parents' apartment in Prague, transformed into a giant insect. The first sentence of Kafka's 1915 novella tells you exactly that. The rest of the story refuses to look away.
Gregor is a traveling salesman whose entire family — his father, mother, and younger sister Grete — depend on his salary. He has not missed a day of work in five years. The morning he cannot leave his bed, his manager comes to the door of the apartment to fire him. Gregor's father drives him back into his room with a newspaper and a cane. Across the next three sections, the family adjusts: Grete brings him milk and rotten cheese, then begins to resent him, then to hate him, then to demand he be removed from the household. He stops eating. He dies in his room. The family takes the trolley out into the country.
Kafka wrote in a precise bureaucratic German — short clauses, unsentimental verbs, exactly the voice of an insurance clerk in 1915 Prague (which is what he was). Storica's adaptation preserves the strange clarity of that voice and brings the full novella into A2+ German across twenty-five short chapters. By the end you have read one of the foundational texts of twentieth-century literature, in the language Kafka himself wrote it in.
Kafka's German is famously clean. Short sentences. Common verbs (sein, haben, gehen, sehen). Almost no slang. Where most pre-war German throws subordinate clauses three deep and sends the verb to the end of next week, Kafka writes one bureaucratic clause at a time. That's why it adapts so well to A2+: trim the rare vocabulary, keep the rhythm, and the original voice still comes through. If your German has past, present, and future and you're starting to handle dialogue, you can read Kafka.
Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Metamorphosis was originally written in German, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A2+. Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Metamorphosis is rated A2+, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.