The answer is D: ewish people, such as Kafka, were often persecuted and referred to as that word.
The German word that Kafka used in the opening lines of his novella was <em>ungeziefer, </em>which best translates into English as <em>vermin. </em>Kafka made sure that his character, Samsa, was not given a specific form, so that the reader would have to form an image of his character based on imagination and not description. A vermin can be considered a bug, like a cockroach, but it could also be considered a rat. The word was used to designate Jewish people in a very negative sense, as unwelcome within German public life (<em>lebensraum</em>). Later, after Kafka´s death, this word would become pervasive in all forms of anti-Semitic expressions before and during the rise of the Nazi party in Germany.
