On TikTok, a collection of objects sits atop a stack of books: a string of pearls, a Diptyque candle, a Sylvanian Families rabbit figurine in a scallop-collared dress.
A woman’s hand brushes them aside. She pages through the pile of books below. Viewers see My Year Of Rest And Relaxation by American author Ottessa Moshfegh and The Bell Jar by American writer Sylvia Plath. Also, The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, a fat black bug on its cover.
A question typed over the scene asks: “What do you conclude about me?”
The video’s creator is 25-year-old Margarita Mouka – @aquariuscat444 on TikTok, where she frequently posts about Kafka, integrating his work, likeness and life story into her online persona of romantic intellectualism.
When her account was publicised in 2023, alongside those of a handful of other young Kafka-heads, media outlets were not quite sure what to conclude about her.
“Franz Kafka becomes an unlikely heart-throb on TikTok – where Gen Zers are swooning over the Czech novelist nearly 100 years after his death,” ran a Daily Mail headline. The article surfaced fancam-style compilations that use Kafka’s pictures as well as melodramatic readings of his letters.
Baffled reactions followed in The Spectator and Literary Hub: Did they think he was hot? Did they know he had a kind of body dysmorphia? Was Kafka the Harry Styles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
To Mouka, the appeal was obvious. “I felt like that bug,” she said from her home in Athens, Greece.
On BookTok, where a flashed book jacket conveys a glimmer of a user’s inner life, a classic text can leave a durable impression. It plays like a deep cut, reaching back through time to ground a TikToker’s content in a more enduring human experience.
Besides, the personas of dead authors are more fun to play with than those of the living.
Some literary TikTokers style their feeds in Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky’s melancholy (“I now refer to him as my Russian man”), others in Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s mischief (“Such a snarky queen”).
Kafka has turned into shorthand on the app for alienation, which has become the backdrop of a digitally mediated life.
Telling the internet that English singer Harry Styles is your boyfriend is a fantasy. Telling the internet that Franz Kafka is your boyfriend – that is a thesis statement.
Kafka was born in 1883 to Czech Jewish parents in Prague. He earned a law degree and worked by day as an insurance officer, investigating injuries from industrial accidents.
He wrote at night. When he was 32, he published The Metamorphosis, a parable known for its opening line: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”
His stories and three unfinished novels explored themes of estrangement from others and from the self, and inspired an adjective – “Kafkaesque” – for describing nightmarish encounters with impenetrable bureaucracies. He died of tuberculosis in 1924, at age 40.
Mouka was born in 1999. She earned a degree in economics and works by day doing social media for luxury hotels and restaurants. She has clinched personal brand partnerships with a perfumery, a Korean skincare company and a designer of coquette-style dresses.
When she was 22, she picked The Metamorphosis off a bookstore shelf, and as she read it, she was as surprised to see herself in Gregor as he was to see himself as a bug.
“His first hardest task was to get out of bed,” Mouka said of Gregor. “So many people my age relate to that. I’ve been there as well.”
After The Metamorphosis, she read Letters To Milena, a collection of private letters from Kafka to his love interest, Czech translator Milena Jesenska, which only heightened his appeal.
The alienation and anxiety that Mouka finds in Kafka have come to define her generation. “We’re constantly online, and we’re constantly connected somewhere, but we still feel disconnected,” she said.
The internet, the very place where people are now expected to craft a self, is also an identity-destabilising machine. When Kafka wrote, “I have hardly anything in common with myself”, he could have been describing the experience of confronting one’s own online persona.
His openness around what Mouka called “his mental health issues” reverberates in social media’s therapeutic thunderdome. Commentators have variously speculated that he may have experienced anorexia, autism, insomnia, borderline personality disorder and hypochondria, in addition to body dysmorphia.
There is something pleasurable about seeing Kafka enlivened in a TikTok comments section, his appeal translated into hypermodern slang. Fans post things such as “Gorgeous girls lie awake at night mourning kafka” and “Kafka is my bare minimum and i won’t date a man until he is kafka”.
But it is also uncanny to watch his image proffered as an affective shorthand, his face a gesture towards a fan’s Myers-Briggs personality type or dark academia aesthetic.
Kafka’s own relationship with technology was ambivalent.
“Kafka had a fascination with and scepticism of the already rapid developments” that punctuated his lifetime, said Mark Harman, editor and translator of a new collection of Kafka’s works, Selected Stories. “This anxiety about technology is palpable in his fiction.”
In one of his letters, to his one-time fiancee Felice Bauer, Kafka expressed deflation at the modern experience of paging through a set of his own photographs, watching himself transform from a spirited child into what he calls “the ape of my parents” in adolescence.
Harman also pointed to a moment in The Castle, an unfinished novel published after Kafka’s death, in which the antihero K. tries to phone that bureaucratic fortress. “At first, he hears only what sounds like high-pitched singing,” Harman said. But after an official picks up and methodically interrogates K. about his identity, K. is left wondering, “Who am I, then?”
“Kafka was a notoriously severe judge of himself and would certainly not have wanted completely uncritical admiration,” Harman said of the author’s online fans. And yet it is precisely Kafka’s painful self-awareness that plays so winningly on social media, among generations of readers who have grown up not just picking up a telephone, but staring it down.
What Harman described as “Kafka’s capacity for humorous detachment”, his “self-irony” and his “impish sense of humour” are now TikTok house style.
Keeping up with the platform’s tumbling obsessions and inside jokes – and withstanding the heat of viral attention – requires a puckish attitude towards one’s own emotional life.
For example, one video jumps off the trending set-up, “Men only have four moods”. In this version, the moods are: “Waking up as a repulsive bug, learning how to live as a bug, being rejected by people, giving up on life.”
In a new anthology of short stories, A Cage Went In Search Of A Bird: Ten Kafkaesque Stories, Kafka’s sensibility is projected into digital labyrinths in many of the works.
In Hygiene, British novelist Helen Oyeyemi imagines a text-message exchange between a man and a woman in a casual relationship that wildly escalates when the woman’s friend assumes control of her phone. And in God’s Doorbell, English writer Naomi Alderman explores a utopian human society built atop a class of “machine-thinking tools” that resemble evolved chatbots – a society shaken after the humans tell the machines to build a tower to God.
Becca Rothfeld, the non-fiction book critic at The Washington Post who wrote the introduction for the anthology, said of Kafka’s depiction of absurd bureaucratic incidents: “Kafka, when he was writing, was describing a relatively new experience.”
Gregor complains that his job as a travelling salesperson is merely a succession of “always changing, never enduring human exchanges”. After he transforms into a bug, he lies in bed instead of reporting to work, so his manager finds him at home and delivers a negative performance review through the locked bedroom door.