The Trial

The Trial (Der Process), Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel, written in 1914–15 and published posthumously by Max Brod in 1925 against its author’s instruction to burn it, begins with one of the most famous opening sentences in literature: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.” Over the following year — it is a year, from his thirtieth birthday to the eve of his thirty-first — the respectable chief clerk of a bank is drawn into a vast, invisible, inaccessible legal system which will not tell him the charge against him, whose officials are petty, venal and in thrall to sex and paperwork, and whose verdict, when it comes, is carried out by two men in frock coats who take him to a quarry and stab him through the heart “like a dog”. The novel has been read as a parable of guilt, of bureaucracy, of totalitarian justice, of the law of God, of the self-incrimination of the neurotic, of the Jewish condition in Europe, of modern alienation itself. The adjective Kafkaesque — a nightmare of menacing, incomprehensible authority — comes from it. See Franz Kafka.

Composition and text

The manuscript

Kafka began The Trial in August 1914, in a burst of work after breaking off, for the first time, his engagement to Felice Bauer, at a hotel hearing — he later called it “the tribunal in the hotel”. He worked on it until early 1915, writing chapters out of order into a series of notebooks and then abandoning it. He never numbered the chapters or fixed their order, and he wrote the last chapter, the execution, first, so that the book’s ending was settled before the middle was written. Several chapters are unfinished, and many fragments were set aside.

When he died of tuberculosis in 1924, Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his unpublished manuscripts. Brod refused, arranged them as he thought best, and published The Trial in 1925; The Castle followed in 1926 and Amerika in 1927. Brod’s chapter order, with its tidy ending, has been challenged by later editors (Malcolm Pasley’s critical edition of 1990 adjusted it), and the English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir (1937) is itself an interpretation, softening Kafka’s flat language and giving it a religious cast. Newer translations (Breon Mitchell, 1998; Mike Mitchell, 2009) are more faithful.

Life and fiction

Kafka, a Czech Jew writing in German in Prague, a lawyer who worked for an insurance institution, wrote the book while contemplating his marriage (to Felice) and in a spirit of guilt towards his domineering father (Letter to His Father). The hero shares his initial, “K.”, and his age; the “trial” is his own inner court. He once wrote that writing was “a form of prayer”.

Plot summary

The arrest

On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, Josef K., chief financial officer of a bank, is arrested in his boarding-house room by two warders, Franz and Willem, who eat his breakfast and cannot say what he is charged with. They are sent from an authority which they cannot name, “the Law”, and they say that K. is “under arrest”, but is free to go to work: his arrest is “not a matter of putting him in jail”. An inspector tells him that a first hearing will be held on Sunday. K.’s landlady, Frau Grubach, is shocked. His neighbour, Fräulein Bürstner, a typist, returns late; K. tells her about the arrest, acts it out in her room, and, carried away, kisses her.

The arrest is, from the first, ambiguous: K. is free; he can go to the bank; his colleagues know nothing; and yet his life is changed. He is told nothing; he finds himself unable simply to ignore it. He decides to treat the proceeding “as a joke” — and then cannot. His first instinct is to treat the whole thing as a mistake that can be corrected by reason; his tragedy is that he treats the Law as a logical system when it is something else.

The first hearing

On the Sunday, K. goes to a district of poor tenements where, in an attic above a laundry, he finds an overcrowded courtroom. He makes a long speech in his own defence, attacking the whole system of corruption and secrecy; the audience applauds, but it turns out they are all officials of the court, who have been applauding on cue. The examining magistrate scolds him: he has lost an advantage. Behind the stage he sees the magistrate’s law books, which turn out to be pornographic novels. A court usher’s wife, who washes the clothes of the officials, is carried away by a student, Berthold, who works for the magistrate — the court’s offices are in attics all over the city and its officials are at the mercy of sex.

The whipper and the offices

At the bank, K. opens a lumber-room door and finds the warders who arrested him being whipped by a flogger for his complaint — K. had told the magistrate they had asked for bribes. He is horrified, but the scene is repeated next day, and he leaves.

At the court’s offices, in a tenement attic where the air is stifling, K. feels faint, and is helped out by a sympathetic young woman; he finds that all the accused are expected to haunt these corridors in tired, sick attitudes, like people at a hospital. The officials are “the ones with the best seats”. It is an immense, sprawling bureaucracy and K. cannot find the way out.

The uncle and the lawyer

K.’s uncle Karl, hearing of the case from K.’s niece Erna, takes him to the advocate Huld, an old, ill, bedridden lawyer who, in his hotel-like house, is nursed by Leni, a young woman with webbed fingers who is drawn to accused men. Huld tells K. long, pompous stories of the court’s workings — the real power lies not with the judges but in a hierarchy of unseen high officials; one never knows who is “above” or how many ranks lie above — and keeps submitting petitions that, he says, nobody reads. K. is lured away from the dying lawyer’s office by Leni, with whom he has sex while his uncle waits.

K. grows frustrated by the lawyer’s inaction. He dismisses him, but is warned by a prosperous manufacturer, Block, who has been Huld’s client for five years and is reduced to cringing like a dog at his bedside. At last K. decides to take his case into his own hands.

The painter Titorelli

A client at the bank tells K. of a court painter, Titorelli, who has influence. K. visits his tiny, hot room in a seedy tenement, among a crowd of loitering little girls peering through the cracks. Titorelli explains that there are three possible outcomes of a trial: definite acquittal, which is almost never granted; ostensible acquittal, in which one is freed but can be re-arrested at any time; and protraction, in which the trial is kept in its lowest stages. Titorelli sells K. landscape paintings and declares he can arrange only the second or third. K. walks away convinced of nothing, with armfuls of the heathscape paintings he does not want.

The cathedral and the parable

K. is told by his bank to show a visiting Italian client around the city’s cathedral; the client does not come. He is about to leave when a priest, the prison chaplain, calls his name from the pulpit: “Josef K.!” The priest tells him that his case is going badly and that he is thought guilty. K. protests that it is all a mistake; the priest tells him the story of the doorkeeper: (Before the Law). A man from the country seeks admittance to the Law, but the doorkeeper says he cannot enter now. For years he waits, bribes the guard, grows old, nearly blind, and at last, as he is dying, asks: “Everyone strives to reach the Law, so how is it that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?” The doorkeeper shouts in his ear: “No one but you could ever have been admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

The priest and K. then argue the interpretation: Was the doorkeeper deceived — or the man? Is the doorkeeper the servant of the Law and so superior to the man? Is the man free? The priest adds that the commentators say: “One need not accept everything as true; one must only accept it as necessary.” K.: “A melancholy conclusion. It turns lying into a universal principle.” The priest ends: “The court wants nothing from you. It receives you when you come and it dismisses you when you go.”

The execution

On the eve of his thirty-first birthday, two pale, fat men in frock coats and top hats arrive at K.’s room, courteous and ceremonious. K. dresses, and goes with them. They lead him through the empty night streets — when a policeman asks, he tries to run, then submits — to a deserted quarry on the outskirts of the city. They take off his coat and shirt, lay him against a stone, and pass a butcher’s knife back and forth over his head, to see which of them will use it. K. sees a light go on in a window near by and a figure lean out: “Who was it? A friend? A good man? Someone who sympathised? Someone who wanted to help? Was it one person? Was it everybody? Was help still possible?… Where was the judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court, to which he had never penetrated?” One of the men holds his throat, the other thrusts the knife into his heart and twists it twice. “Like a dog!” said K.; it was as if the shame of it should outlive him.

Interpretations

Guilt without crime

The novel’s central mystery is: of what is K. guilty? The text gives no answer, but offers hints — K. is arrogant, treats others as instruments, is preoccupied with his career, takes an automatic superiority over those around him, has a disdain for the poor, and a casual, manipulative sexuality (Fräulein Bürstner, Leni, Elsa). Several scholars read the book as a story of moral awakening that fails. In the interpretation of the priest, “the verdict is not pronounced all at once; the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict.” Others stress that the guilt is existential: the sense of being guilty simply by being — Kierkegaard’s “sin” or Heidegger’s primordial Schuld (guilt/debt) (Anxiety, Dasein), or, as in the Jewish tradition, the guilt that is “from birth”.

The Law

The Law is everywhere and nowhere. Its courts sit in attics; its offices are in tenement lofts; its officials are corrupt, lazy, lustful; behind each stands a higher authority, and behind that another, in endless regress. Interpretations include: the modern bureaucratic state (Max Weber’s “iron cage”, the Habsburg administration Kafka knew from the inside); totalitarian justice (the Stalinist and Nazi show trials seemed to fulfil the novel); God and religious law, as in the “Before the Law” parable — the mystic’s pursuit of a gate made for him alone; the unconscious and its inner censor; and the law of the Father.

Before the Law

The parable is the book’s key. Kafka published it separately in 1915 as “Before the Law”. Its commentators — in the priest’s debate and beyond — include Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida (whose essay “Before the Law” reads it as the structure of all law’s authority) and Giorgio Agamben. The Jewish tradition of Talmudic exegesis is present in the debate: each interpretation is answered by another.

Modernity and alienation

K. is a representative modern man: a functionary, a cog, a man whose identity is his job, alienated from himself and from others. The trial interrupts his routine and reveals its emptiness. Camus, in an appendix to The Myth of Sisyphus, read Kafka as the supreme novelist of the absurd — the individual confronting an incomprehensible world — and the book is a counterpart to The Stranger, in which Meursault is condemned by a court for something other than his crime.

Comedy

Kafka laughed when he read the first chapter to friends. The book is full of black comedy: the warders who eat K.’s breakfast, the lawyer with the whimpering client, the court officials crammed in lofts, the law-books that are pornography, and the executioners’ politeness. The humour makes the horror more precise.

Characters

• Josef K. — a stiff, ambitious, self-satisfied, anxious banker; he is not simply a victim but a man whose illusions of control are exposed.
• Fräulein Bürstner — his neighbour, who shows him a possibility of ordinary love, and then fades.
• Leni — Huld’s nurse, whose webbed fingers and attraction to the accused make her a half-comic Eve.
• Huld — the bedridden lawyer; the system’s mouthpiece.
• Titorelli — the court painter, a purveyor of illusions.
• Block — the tradesman, a ruined, cringing client.
• The priest — the prison chaplain, and teller of the parable.
• The two executioners — courteous, expressionless, interchangeable.

Adaptations and influence

Orson Welles’s film of The Trial (1962), with Anthony Perkins, set the story in a vast, empty, modernist architecture and called it his best film. Steven Berkoff’s stage version, Harold Pinter’s screenplay (1993, directed by David Jones), Philip Glass’s opera (2014) and Peter Weiss’s play (The Investigation, which it presaged) are among many. In literature its influence is everywhere: Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Borges (“Kafka and His Precursors”), Orwell’s 1984, Heller’s Catch-22, García Márquez, Murakami, Coetzee, Bulgakov. The word Kafkaesque has entered every language.

The Trial in conversation

The opening sentence — “Someone must have slandered Josef K.” — is shorthand for any bureaucratic nightmare. The parable of the doorkeeper — “this gate was made only for you” — is the most-quoted passage. And the last line, “it was as if the shame of it should outlive him”, is the sharpest way to say that some humiliations survive even death.