They premiere a new series that tells the life of Franz Kafka

A century after his death from tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka, now available online, is a new series that tells the story of the Czech-Jewish author Franz Kafka.

The new project, produced by David Schalko, follows the life of the author, played by Joel Basman, focusing on Kafka's emotional complexities, his various works and his passionate romance with Czech translator Milena Jesenska.

But the series also explores Kafka's complex Jewish legacy and his contradictory relationship with Zionism and assimilation. The writer grew up in an upper-class Jewish family in Prague. He lived with his father, Hermann, his mother, Julie, and his sisters Elli, Valli and Ottla. 

The Holocaust claimed the lives of Kafka's three sisters. Milena, arrested in 1939, died in the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck in northern Germany in 1944.

Daniel Kehlmann, co-writer of the series, and also a famous German novelist, explained that “Kafka lived in a world that completely disappeared, that was completely destroyed by the Nazis.”