Jonathan notes: "I can't help feeling that 'retroactively Kafkaesque' applies both to the appearance of the writer depicted in the illustration, and to his human-insect colleague. I see from Wikipedia that the date of the illustration, 1908, happens to be when Kafka's first stories were published; but it doesn't seem like he was well-known yet, and 'The Metamorphosis' was yet to come."
From Lustige Blätter, 1908.