Kafka 100: struggles of disabled characters in systems that don’t support them feel just as relevant today

By Saul Leslie, PhD in Disability and Literature, University of Liverpool

Throughout his work, Franz Kafka depicts bodies disabled by the exhausting effects of the workplace. In Amerika (1911 to 1914), set in an era of early 20th-century free-market enterprise, Kafka portrays the gruelling consequences of overwork on desperate people.

Reminiscent of the menial graft in Victorian classic David Copperfield, in one scene an exhausted labourer is crushed by falling bricks in front of her child. Later, a disabled woman imprisoned in her bedroom must rely on her lodgers…

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