Tall, lanky, thin as a rake, with a haunted look in his eyes; yet his face was that of an eternal boy. In the bitter winters of early-twentieth-century Prague, Franz Kafka — a workers' accident insurance clerk and one small cog in a bureaucratic apparatus not yet as all-encompassing as today's — would wander about in a summer suit, as though defying a world that must have seemed incomprehensible to him.

By day he worked diligently at his office, silently observing the mechanisms of a supra-personal social system. By night — partly owing to chronic insomnia — he wrote about his waking nightmares. It was from this that his atypical characters were born: drowsy, womanising judges; bureaucrats of shifting appearance, forever elusive and unreachable, yet invested with enormous power.

In Franz Kafka's world, the ordinary man is often depicted with his head bowed, yet never content to stop searching for his own dignity. Sometimes, filled at once with honour and humiliation, he is granted the privilege of spying on them through the keyhole. His superiors dozed over greasy sheaves of paper, entirely indifferent and unaware of his presence.

The machinery of the state, even then, built itself up on its own, heedless of everything else, while the odyssey of each individual always started over from the beginning, in an endless circle. The Administration is repellent by definition, power cannot be consulted and is, in any case, incomprehensible.

Today, a new generation of bureaucrats and powerful figures flourishes with ever greater momentum, forging pacts and alliances that cross borders like the wind. Meanwhile, the ordinary man has still not given up chasing not a simple dream, but a reason to exist in the world. Like the humble heroes of Franz Kafka, he does not seek the ultimate meaning of life, but work, a home, family and mutual respect: his own salvation within the community and starting from it.