The single most important moment in the cockroach's cultural life happened on a writing desk in Prague. In 1915, Franz Kafka published 'The Metamorphosis', the story of a young travelling salesman named Gregor Samsa who wakes one morning to find himself transformed into what Kafka called a 'Ungeziefer', a German word for unclean vermin. Generations of translators and critics have read the creature as a cockroach. The novella is often interpreted as an allegory of alienation, anti-Semitism, and the slow dehumanisation of the modern worker. Kafka, a German-speaking Jewish writer in Habsburg Bohemia, was warning about something he could already...
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
