Financed in Germany and filmed in New York, Class Relations is adapted from Franz Kafka's unfinished novel Amerika. Christian Heinisch plays a bourgeois German forced to leave his homeland after a scandal. He accepts his uncle's invitation to move to America, where he takes a succession of "Joe Jobs." Heinisch tries, but he is unable to shake off his old-world customs. Worse, the class structure in Europe never prepared him to have to actually use his hands to make a living. Rather than tack on an ending of their own, writer/directors Daniel Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub conclude Class Relations in the same manner that Kafka left Amerika behind when he died--with the hero's ultimate fate still in limbo.
~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide