Lionel Hesse

Because of the power of love, the last year of Franz Kafka's life becomes his happiest. The well-known writer has never before been able to allow himself to experience intimacy, he suffers from tuberculosis and is dependent on his overbearing family. In the summer of 1923, he met Dora Diamant in the seaside resort Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea coast, where he is convalescing and she is working in a Jewish Volksheim. He is a man of world, the 14 years younger woman is from the deep East, he can write, she can dance. She has both feet firmly on the ground, he is always hovering a little above it. She embraces the indicative, he gets tangled up in the conjunctive. But the worldly wise Dora accepts him as he is. And he accepts her. Together they go to Berlin and when Franz's health deteriorates rapidly, to a sanatorium in Austria. They are granted a single year together until Franz Kafka's health deteriorates incurable. However their year together allows them to feel the glory of life.

A janitor with a loving wife and a devoted son leads a seemingly quiet, orderly life. One day, the boy asks his father an inconspicuous but profound question: “Dad, why are there no photos of you at my age?” Driven by a restlessness that can no longer be suppressed, the man returns to the place of his childhood: a children's home he has avoided for decades.

Why am I standing in the slow line? Why am I being fired? Why is she falling in love with him and not me? Why me? That's the question we all ask ourselves so often. In thousands of situations. In six episodes, David Schalko, with his trademark dark humor, tells of life situations in which this question is central: WHY ME?