Stop turning dead authors into sex symbols

‘As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a TikTok sensation.’ This is not – blessedly – how Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis begins. But almost exactly a century after his death, the Bohemian writer would be astonished to find that not only had his friend and literary executor Max Brod disobeyed his instructions and published works of his that included The Trial and The Castle, but that he had become, of all things, a social media sensation.

It was reported recently that Kafka has become the unlikeliest of sex symbols. One breathless news story announced that ‘for literature-loving Gen Z-ers, the Czech novelist may as well be Harry Styles’, citing how the hashtag #kafka appears 139 million times on TikTok. The platform hosts suitably earnest ‘fancams’, short films that eulogise the writer both for his writing (including his love letters to the Czech journalist Milena Jesenská) and his apparent good looks.