“When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.” With this sentence begins Franz Kafka's famous story “The Metamorphosis.” And what initially seems like a bad dream soon reveals itself as a merciless reality: Gregor must now live as an insect. From the indispensable support of a debt-ridden family, he has become a being of monstrous uselessness, a foreign body, a parasite. Yet Gregor takes pleasure in his otherness, while his family increasingly turns away from him and banishes him to the next room. They once had a son, a brother. Now, next door lives a repulsive insect that makes normal family life impossible. If only “it” could simply be gotten rid of...