Artists as well as scholars have often been impressed by Kafka´s amusing idea to transform a travelling salesman into an “old dung beetle” (74), which both wasn´t invented out of the blue but follows a shrewed concept both in business and in private life. It allows Kafka - and artists who want to write about the near, the obvious, the unspectacular and the evident that very rarely finds its Orpheus who sings its praise - to reflect on some facts and restrictions that made his life in pre- and postwar Prague as a bachelor and a (private law´s) factory inspector employed by a large insurance institution who had to travel up and down the country by train (very much like Gregor Samsa of course) almost unbearable. The transformation into a verminous insect has some hair raising implications such as the fact that the successful nazi-movement used some deep rooted aversions against untideness and bugs in the history of German emotions. In his “Letter to my father” Kafka did use the same expression when he accused his father that he had no respect at all for “childlike people as the Yiddish actor Löwy. Before you even knew him you compared him in some dreadful way (...) with vermin.” Metamorphosis now takes the expression for a fact and travelling salesman Gregor Samsa spends several weeks in the flat of his parents -before “the end of March”(91)- in the shape of an ugly beetle. The ebook I consulted (see attached) mentions the word “room” 131 times. It is by far the most important word in the entire story. There is a kitchen, a living room, a hall, a bedroom for the parents (73) and at least three more rooms, one of which is Gregor´s own room - with a bed that was the arena for his spectacular overnight transformation. Gregor “had been accustomed to the room furnishings for a long time” (53), the room is “comfortably furnished with pieces he had inherited (...); he couldn´t function without the beneficial influences of the funiture.” (54) We find a “chest of drawers (53,56f, u.ö.) “in which the fret saw and other tools were kept” (57), a “writing desk which was fixed tight to the floor, the desk on which he (...) had written his assignments”, as an “elementary school student”, but also as “a school student” and as “a business student” (57), which in other words adds up to much more time than the five years (36/96) that Gregor has been living in this room of his parent´s very large apartment in the middle of Prague - “we lived in the quiet but completely urban Charlotte Street.” (47) On one wall in Gregor´s room we find “the picture of a woman dressed in nothing but fur” (58) - “a fur hat and a fur boa (...), a solid fur muff into which her entire forearm disappeared” (4). Not an unimportant piece of art in “a room for a human being only somewhat too small” (3), a human being that happened to be a bachelor and “a member of the family” - which meant “a requirement of family duty to suppress one´s aversions and to endure - nothing else, just endure” (66) - but with not much fortune with young ladies and prospective brides while (and because) the bachelor as travelling salesman/inspector is forced to “study his travel schedules” (15), “worries about train connections” (4) - “day in day out on the (rail) road” (4), “my train leaves at five o´clock” (5f) in the morning, “what a demanding job I have chosen” (4), “this getting up early (...) makes a man quite idiotic” (5) etc - so that “chercher la femme” in the sense of finding a bride is painfully difficult and “the young man has nothing in his head but business. I´m almost angry that he never goes out at night. Right now he´s been in the city eight days, but he´s been at home every evening” (15), the latter being a statement by Gregor´s very worried mother. Gregor himself frequently raises the topic of the unhealthy conditions he was living and working in. He calls it “an occupational illness of commercial travelers” (9), f.i. spending the nights in “small hotel rooms (...), tired out he had to throw himself in the damp bedclothes.” (67) In an era before fast food was discovered and commercial travelling became endemic Gregor complains about “irregular bad food, temporay and constantly changing human relationships which never come from the heart.” (4) Not catching the morning train in time meant that “he was in danger of losing his position.” (16) This would have had severe implications for the whole family as the economic arrangements the family had settled in since Gregor was offered the job of a travelling salesman come down to Gregor supporting all family members - his own father and his sister Grete included but also some auxiliary domestic work forces such as “a huge bony cleaning woman with white hair flapping all over her head” (69), an “old widow who in her long life must have managed to survive the worst with the help of her bony frame” (73) or “the servant girl with her firm tread” (13) who was “about sixteen years old” (52) and “naturally shut up in her kitchen” (60). The family´s reaction in this time of crises shows signs of character and resolve. The retired father refrained from reading newspapers all day, accepted the humiliation of working as a servant and was seen “dressed in a tight fitting blue uniform with gold buttons, like the ones, servants wear in a banking company. Above the high stiff collar of his jacket his firm double chin stuck out prominently, beneath his bushy eyebrows the glance of his black eyes was freshly penetrating and alert, his otherwise disheveled white hair was combed down into a carefully exact shining part.” (62) While the father thus “b(r)ought (?) breakfast to the petty officials at the bank, the mother sacrificed herself for the undergarments of strangers, the sister behind her desk was at the beck and call of costumers” (70), which means “the mother sewed fine undergarments for a fashion shop” in the evenings, “bent far over”, whereas Grete, the sister, has “taken on a job as a salesgirl” and “in the evening studied stenography and French, so as perhaps later to obtain a better position.” (67) To round things up and to be on the safe side “they had rented one room of the apartment to three lodgers. These solemn gentlemen (all three had full beards...), were meticulously intend on tideness (... and) for the most part they have brought with them their own pieces of furniture.” (75) The father had trouble to adhere to “the respect which he always owed to his renters.” (83) “The parents, who had never previously rented a room and therefore exaggerated their politeness to the lodgers, dared not sit on their own chairs.” (79) The lodgers started to take “their evening meal at home in the common living room” (76), cooked by Mrs. Samsa, “reading and smoking” jovially after dinner (78) while the Samsa family “itself ate in the kitchen.” (77) But in the long run this constituted an altogether impossible situation no family with pride can endure for long. Hence Gregor´s ultimate death at the end of this masterpiece of enigmatic fiction solves the problem of overburdening and the three lodgers “left the apartment with a fearful slamming of the door.” (95) Mr. Samsa “looked down as the three lodgers slowly but steadily made their way down the long staircase, disappeared on each floor in a certain turn of the stairwell and in a few seconds came out again. The deeper they proceeded, the more the Samsa family lost interest in them.” (93) The finale entails an excursion “with the electric tram into the open air outside the city” - “something they had not done for months now” (95) - and “a change of dwelling. Now they wanted to rent an apartment smaller and cheaper but better situated and generally more practical than the present one, which Gregor had found.” (96) As Salinger has often expressed his contempt for the skill of broad description in literature we find this trait in Kafka´s ficition also; instead we have to count - here and there - the number of rooms, draw the floor plan of the apartment and take into consideration what windows, doors, furniture or stairwells are standing for. In other words: We are drawn into the art of respecting Mitscherlich´s confession to the near world (Bekenntnis zur Nahwelt). Fictional families like the Samsas, the Glasses or the Caulfields lay the foundation for reflecting the family values of personality, recreation and good humor in an urban environment that more and more tends to tear those ties apart. Eminent German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf has called those ties Ligaturen (ligatures) and as the word “language” itself stems from the latin root ligare - meaning verbinden (to connect) - we are in for a recognition that the poverty of the present language standards in schools and public life mirror the work of hidden forces that try to unchain human relations from its last obligations towards history and civilization. Kafka´s advice: Resist or you might well go adrift.