Die Verwandlung — the original German text of what English readers know as Metamorphosis — was first published in 1915 and stands as one of Franz Kafka’s most perfectly realized works. The novella opens with the famous sentence announcing Gregor Samsa’s transformation into a giant insect and proceeds with Kafkaesque logic to trace the domestic and emotional disintegration that follows.
Reading Kafka in the original German reveals the precise, bureaucratic prose that makes his absurdism so uncanny — the horror resides as much in the sentence structure as in the events. Download this free public-domain EPUB to experience Die Verwandlung as Kafka wrote it.