Franz Kafka, Brief an den Vater, November 1919. Never delivered.

Franz Kafka began Die Verwandlung in Prague on 17 November 1912 and finished it in the first week of December. Every surface of this site is set in his words.

IDer Morgen · The morning

»Was ist mit mir geschehen?« dachte er. Es war kein Traum.

“What has happened to me?” he thought. It was no dream.

IDas Zimmer · The room

Sein Zimmer, ein richtiges, nur etwas zu kleines Menschenzimmer, lag ruhig zwischen den vier wohlbekannten Wänden.

His room, a proper human room, if a little too small, lay quiet between its four familiar walls.

IIDie Decke · The ceiling

Besonders oben an der Decke hing er gern; man atmete freier.

Above all he liked hanging up on the ceiling; one breathed more freely.

IDie Tür · The door

»Gregor,« rief es – es war die Mutter –, »es ist dreiviertel sieben. Wolltest du nicht wegfahren?«

“Gregor,” someone called – it was his mother – “it’s a quarter to seven. Didn’t you mean to go away?”

IIIDie Violine · The violin

War er ein Tier, da ihn Musik so ergriff?

Was he an animal, that music moved him so?

Kafka never says what Grete played. The strings here are her sentence.

IIDer Apfel · The apple

Ein ihm sofort nachfliegender drang dagegen förmlich in Gregors Rücken ein.

One that flew right after it, though, actually forced its way into Gregor’s back.

IIIDer Staub · The dust

Seine Meinung darüber, daß er verschwinden müsse, war womöglich noch entschiedener als die seiner Schwester.

His own conviction that he must disappear was, if anything, even firmer than his sister’s.

IIIEnde März · The end of March

Den Anfang des allgemeinen Hellerwerdens draußen vor dem Fenster erlebte er noch.

He was still there to see the first of the general brightening outside the window.

One morning, as Gregor Samsa woke from unsettled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

10Franz Kafka, 1883–1924

Born on 3 July 1883 near the Old Town Square in Prague, the eldest of six children of Hermann and Julie Kafka, German-speaking and Jewish. His two brothers died in infancy; his three sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.

Doctor of Law on 18 June 1906. Law, not literature, because it pleased his father and promised a career.

From 1908 at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia: assessing injuries from lathes and saws, writing its annual reports. His day ended at two in the afternoon; the writing happened after.

On 13 August 1912 he met Felice Bauer at the Brods’. On the night of 22 September he wrote Das Urteil in one sitting. On 17 November he began Die Verwandlung.

In October 1915 it appeared in Die weißen Blätter, in December as a book in Kurt Wolff’s series Der Jüngste Tag. On 25 October he wrote to the publisher: the insect itself was not to be drawn.

Tuberculosis was diagnosed in August 1917. He spent months with his sister Ottla on a farm in Zürau and later called it perhaps the best time of his life.

In November 1919 he wrote the Brief an den Vater. According to Max Brod, he gave it to his mother to deliver, and she never did.

He died on 3 June 1924 in a sanatorium at Kierling near Vienna, aged forty, of tuberculosis of the larynx. By then eating had become too painful.

11Die Handschriften · The manuscripts

»Liebster Max, meine letzte Bitte: Alles, was sich in meinem Nachlass … an Tagebüchern, Manuskripten, Briefen, fremden und eignen, Gezeichnetem und so weiter findet, restlos und ungelesen zu verbrennen.«

“Dearest Max, my last request: everything I leave behind … diaries, manuscripts, letters, others’ and my own, drawings and so on, to be burned, all of it, unread.”

»Von allem, was ich geschrieben habe, gelten nur die Bücher: Urteil, Heizer, Verwandlung, Strafkolonie, Landarzt und die Erzählung: Hungerkünstler.«

In the second note, six things were allowed to stand. Die Verwandlung was one of them.

Max Brod refused.

1. 1925–27Brod publishes Der Process, Das Schloss and Amerika, the novels Kafka left unfinished.
2. 1939As the Germans take Prague, Brod leaves for Palestine with Kafka’s papers in a suitcase.
3. 1961Most of the manuscripts go to the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
4. 1988The manuscript of Der Process is sold to the German Literature Archive, Marbach, for US$2 million.
5. 2016Israel’s Supreme Court gives Brod’s Kafka papers to the National Library of Israel.

12Lesarten · Readings

A century of readers. Each reading follows a word: the bar shows every place it falls in the German text, counted here, in your browser.

1. 1948Charles NeiderThe father complex, first read into the story in The Frozen Sea.
2. 1980Vladimir NabokovLectures on Literature: not a cockroach but “merely a big beetle”, with wings under his shell. The artist among philistines.
3. 1989Nina Pelikan StrausGrete’s metamorphosis, as daughter, sister, woman, is the story too.
4. 1999Gerhard RieckGregor and Grete as one pair: the passive and the active halves of one person.
5. 2005Peter-André AltThe insect as the creature of a merely functional working life.
6. 2007Ralf SudauSelf-denial: hiding under the sofa, a hunger strike no one understands.
7. 2012Fernando Bermejo-RubioKafka refused a picture of Gregor; the opening sentence is not to be trusted.
8. 2013Volker DrükeThe title may be hers: the daughter who blossoms as the son dies.

13Übersetzungen · Translations

Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt.

1. gigantic insect
2. some monstrous kind of vermin
3. monstrous vermin
4. giant bug
5. monstrous insect
6. enormous bug
7. gargantuan pest
8. monstrous cockroach
9. monstrous verminous bug
10. a vile insect, one of gigantic proportions
11. some kind of monstrous vermin
12. horrible vermin
13. some sort of monstrous insect
14. some kind of monstrous bedbug
15. huge verminous insect
16. a kind of giant bug

At least sixteen renderings of two German words, collected on Wikipedia’s page for The Metamorphosis. Ungeheuer is the opposite of geheuer, familiar; Ungeziefer once meant an unclean animal unfit for sacrifice. Kafka never named the species.

14Ihr Buch · Your book, as a world

The engine
behind the room.

Everything you have walked through is typeset, live, from the text: walls, furniture, voices, apples. Give it any passage and it builds a room from it, in your browser, in milliseconds. For publishers, estates, audiobook and festival teams: your book, as a world.

15Eine Zeile · One line

A room, a family, a century of readers. One line of text.

Exe.Eyes Labs

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Kafka would not let his insect be drawn, so we built the world around it out of his own words. For publishers, estates, audiobook brands, bookshops and festivals: your book, as a world, made from its text.

A concept by Exe.Eyes Labs · 2026

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