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The Trial (German: Der Prozess) [A] is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader.
- Franz Kafka
- 1925
The Trial (Der Process in Kafka’s original German-language text) was written in 1914-15 but, like much of Kafka’s work, remained unpublished until after his death. He commanded his friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished material (and even his published work!), for reasons which remain a mystery.
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Topics For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
Franz Kafka is one of the greatest influences on Western literature in the twentieth century. He has inspired a whole range of artists from the creators of the detective story to writers of the television series Twilight Zone. He began work on The Trial in 1914 after a horrendous encounter with his fiancé, Felice Bauer, her sister, Erna Bauer, and ...
The first of six children, Franz Kafka was born in 1883. His father, Hermann Kafka, was an industrious man; he owned a dry-goods store in the Jewish ghetto in the city of Prague. Hermann was ashamed of his Jewish heritage and tried, as much as possible, to appear German. He married into a higher social class when he married Julie Loewy, Franz's mot...
The Arrest
At the start of The Trial, Joseph K. awakes on the morning of his thirtieth birthday. He is greeted by two warders, Franz and Willem, who tell him he's under arrest, and introduce him to the Inspector. He refuses to tell K. why he has been arrested. Confused, K. is surprised when they let him go with orders to come back for his trial. After work that evening, K. talks with his landlady, Frau Grubach, who is sympathetic to his plight. K. likes Fraülein Bürstner, whose room the Inspector had co...
First Interrogation
K. is told to present himself for a brief inquiry into his case. He goes to the address, only to find that it's a tenement house. A woman doing laundry directs him to the Court of Inquiry. The Court is sitting in a stuffy room, packed with bearded men in black. K. addresses the audience about the stupidity of the court. He is cut off by a man grabbing the laundry woman and shrieking.
The Offices
K. returns to the offices the following Sunday, but no one is there except the laundry woman. She is the wife of the Usher, and explains that the man who had grabbed her was a law student, Bertold, who has been chasing her. K. examines the books left on the table, only to find that they are pornography. The Usher's wife tells him about the Examining Magistrate, but Bertold enters and carries her off. The Usher returns and complains about Bertold, and he leads K. into the labyrinthine law offi...
Uncle Albert
K.'s Uncle Albert rushes into town after hearing from his daughter, Erna, that K. is on trial. He is extremely annoyed that K. is unconcerned with his predicament, "Josef, you've undergone a total metamorphosis; you've always had such a keen grasp of things, has it deserted you now?" K.'s uncle impresses upon him that the honor of the family is at stake. Albert represents the accomplished man and exposes the collective nature of K.'s actions.
Bertold
The "first student of the unknown system of jurisprudence" that K. meets is Bertold. "This horrible man" with bandy legs and a scraggly red beard, is in pursuit of the Usher's wife. At first it appears that he is pursuing her for himself but he carries her off to the Examining Magistrate.
Rudi Block
"Block, Block the merchant" is a little man. Before he divested all his holdings, he tells K., so as to focus himself entirely on his case, he was a successful grain merchant. When he meets K., he has illegally employed five petty lawyers, called hucksters, to his cause. His crime is unknown too. His relationship with Dr. Huld, however, is strange and masochistic. Mr. Block, from K.'s viewpoint is a dog with no self-respect.
"Say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I ever made!" So says Orson Welles, director of a 1963 adaptation of the novel to black and white film. Welles played the advocate opposite Anthon...Using a script by Harold Pinter, David Hugh Jones directed a 1993 remake of the film. Josef K. is portrayed by Kyle MacLachlan and Anthony Hopkinsplays The Priest.Throughout the 1990s, The Trialhas been adapted to the stage several times. Most recently, Ivan Rajmont used Evald Schorm's adaptation at the Theatre of Estates in 1998.Religion
A central element of Judeo-Christian theology is the belief that humans are guilty of original sin. There are various ways to deal with this situation but in many theological doctrines, redemption and entry to heaven depend upon people leading moral lives. For Protestants, salvation is gained when the individual confesses to God. Assistance in this task comes from the Bible as well as through the teachings of those who spend their lives studying the Bible. In Judaism, the book of God is the T...
Language and Meaning
K. views his trial as "no different than a major business deal" in which he must pay close attention to details such as how people exit or how people use words. The Inspector notices this obsession with details and cautions him. K. disregards the advice and berates himself whenever he loses focus. The scene that exemplifies K.'s failure to understand what is happening to him, despite his best efforts, is the conversation with the bank president and the Italian client. Despite his knowledge of...
Compare the several editions of The Trial(Brod's—if possible, Muir's and Breon Mitchell's—based on Pasley's German edition). How do interpretations of single words affect the story? What is the imp...Whether in literary forms, science fiction, movies, or television shows, Kafka has proved to be an infinite source of inspiration. Select a work which you feel is Kafkaesque and defend your choice.What do you think Kafka would think of the Internet? Or, more narrowly, how would Josef K. handle himself inside a Multi-User-Domain?Kafka's novel has often been interpreted as a religious commentary. How far do you think such a critique is supported by the text? Pick one creed—Calvinism, Catholicism or Judaism—and discuss the p...Parable
Parables are familiar teaching devices that reveal moral lessons through short and simple stories. A parable's simplicity lends it a timeless quality. For this reason, parables thousands of years old hold relevance today. Parables can also be enigmatic sayings or tales, which obviously contain a message though the precise meaning is anyone's guess. Kafka intentionally set out to write parables, not just novels, about the human condition. The Trialis a parable that includes the smaller parable...
Defamiliarization
The Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovski, formulated the term ostraneniein his 1917 article, "Art as device." This term has been variously adopted in the West as defamiliarization or, more popularly, by way of Bertold Brecht, as "the alienation effect." Quite independent of both, Kafka employs defamiliarization with unrivaled mastery. This process works by making the reader/audience perceive familiar, everyday reality in a new and unsettling way, hence the term "defamiliarization." The result,...
Symbolism
Every element of the story is pregnant with allegorical significance. The position of bodies and their size symbolize a person's value before the Law. The men of the court sit with their heads bent up against the ceiling of an attic because they are so close to heaven. An arrested person, however, hangs their head. A strong and free person stands tall and straight. Furniture exaggerates this body language. K. points out whether there are chairs for him to sit on and how this strips him of pow...
Bohemia
The earliest known inhabitants of the mountain-rimmed nucleus of the Czech Republic were the "Boii" people. Not much remains of them but the name, Bohemia, or, "home of the Boii." They integrated completely with a Slavic tribe called Czechs around the fifth century AD. By the fourteenth century, Bohemia was the most prosperous kingdom in Europe. In the next century, Jan Husmade Bohemia the center of Protestantism. In 1526, Ferdinand I's marriage transferred Bohemia to the Roman Catholic Austr...
There was no singular event that caused World War I. Several factors contributed to the conflict. It started when Austria-Hungary bungled relations with the Balkan States and, together with Germany, antagonized Russia. In addition, Britain was anxious about losing control of its empire and eager to cement an alliance with France. In 1908 Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina exacerbated the situation and angered Serbia. Austria-Hungary could have dueled with Serbia in 1909, when...
Anti-Semitism
The ghetto was an invention of Pope Paul IV, who, in 1555, decreed that all the Jews in Rome would live in a particular area of the city. Such decrees spread throughout Europe as anti-Semitic fervor waxed and waned. Many ghettos were abolished in the late nineteenth century. Alhough the Nazi program of genocide is several decades away, anti-Semitism was as natural in Eastern Europe as Jim Crow laws in the American South. Jews, by economic social circumstance, were forced to remain in the ghet...
Kafka has inspired many of the great novelists of the twentieth century. Consequently, there is an incredible amount of literary criticism devoted to his work. The critical material discussing The Trial falls between two poles. On the one hand, Kafka is viewed through a psychological or religious lens that sees the tensions of his work as derived f...
Oct 8, 2024 · The Trial, novel by visionary German-language writer Franz Kafka, originally published posthumously in 1925. Perhaps his most pessimistic work, this story of a young man caught up in the mindless bureaucracy of the law has become synonymous with the anxieties and sense of alienation of the modern age.
Jul 2, 2019 · In Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial, first published in 1925, a year after its author’s death, Josef K. is arrested, but can’t seem to find out what he’s accused of. As K. navigates a labyrinthine network of bureaucratic traps—a dark parody of the legal system—he keeps doing things that make him look guilty.
“The Trial” by Franz Kafka is a masterpiece of modern literature that has puzzled readers and critics alike for decades. The novel tells the story of a man named Josef K., who is arrested and put on trial for a crime that is never revealed to him.
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