The three writers saw their era as one in which alienation, isolation, lack of recognition, and the meaningless of existence were prevailing ideas and attitudes, and they were correct that these concepts were coloring much of the life of Europe in the first half of this century. This was the era of the two World Wars, the Great Depression that affected most of the world, and the tensions that affected Europe between the two wars. Perceptive writers such as Franz kafka, Thomas Mann, and Albert Camus understood the sense of malaise affecting the intellectual and social life of their time and wrote convincingly of the effects of these forces as well as about some of the causes.
Franz Kafka has become identified with a certain view of the nameless and faceless bureaucracy that stands over us all, caring not for our feelings, unconcerned with our pain, and operating as a vast machine with its own rules, crushing anything or anyone in its path with compete indifference. This operates at both the human level, with the bureaucracy of the state, and at a higher level, with the "bureaucracy" of the universe, equally indifferent and carrying out its mandate without compassion. The story of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis operates at the universal level. Kafka uses a fantastic situation to create an allegory about the meaning of humanness and about the relationship of the individual to the world in which he lives. For Gregor, all ties to the old world are broken when he awakes to find that he has been changed into a huge vermin. The only contact he has with the world in which he lived the night before is through the family members who can be heard moving around the house and who react to Gregor's change in various ways. Underlying this story is the sense that Gregor is being punished for some unstated crime and that the universe has taken this means of inflicting that punishment. As with certain other Kafka heroes, Gregor seems to ha...