Who was Kafka? Who was that man who had a vast, monstruous world inside his head and whose life was an ascesis in literature and for literature? The mystery called ‘Kafka’ is covered by the thick layer of a banal daily life as an employee of an insurance company, but he was in fact ‘made of literature’, incapable of being anything else. Since then, a succession of interpreters has tried to decipher the enigma, assuming it carries the form of an inner abyss. Before anyone else, Walter Benjamin said that the Czech writer did everything in his power to make the answer to the question of his identity inaccessible: ‘It is as if [Kafka] had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors.’