The Trial — Commentary

In brief

Josef K., chief clerk of a large bank, wakes on his thirtieth birthday to find that his breakfast has not come and that two men in his lodgings say he is under arrest. Nobody tells him the charge, then or ever. He goes on working, attends a hearing in a tenement, hires a lawyer, sacks him, consults a painter, and hears a parable from a priest in a dark cathedral. On the eve of his thirty-first birthday two men in top hats walk him out to a quarry and kill him.

Franz Kafka left the book unfinished and asked that it be burned. What we read is a selection and an order made by his friend Max Brod, whose certainty about the novel’s shape is not in the manuscript. The free English text here is David Wyllie’s, following the ten chapters of Brod’s first edition.

The argument

The book’s law is stated early, by the guard Willem, who is a fool: “it’s the guilt that draws them out”. The court does not hunt offenders. It is summoned by guilt, so being noticed by it is already the verdict. K. at first answers in the language of a citizen, reasoning that he lives “in a free country, after all, everywhere was at peace, all laws were decent and were upheld”, and the book’s joke is how quickly that sentence stops meaning anything.

The usual readings split in two. One, begun by Brod and carried into English by Edwin Muir, makes the court divine and K. a soul seeking grace. The other makes it a prophecy of the police state and the file. Both let K. off too easily. My own view is that the novel is about a man who would rather be tried than questioned. He is vain about his position, grabs at women, patronises his uncle, and treats his case as a matter of management. Almost until the end he does not ask what he has done with his life. A court that names no charge is the only kind that could put that question to him, and he handles it as a scheduling problem.

That does not make the court just. It is filthy, corrupt and lecherous. The priest, who proves to be the prison chaplain, gives the last word on it: “The court doesn’t want anything from you. It accepts you when you come and it lets you go when you leave.” Taken literally, K. could walk away. He cannot, and that failure is his own as well as the system’s.

The ten chapters

Arrest and the lodging house

K. is held in his own rooms, questioned in Miss Bürstner’s, and sent off to work. That night he waits up to apologise to her and ends by kissing her throat.

First Cross-examination and In the empty Courtroom

Told only an address and a Sunday, K. searches a poor street for the room. The judge opens with “you are a house painter?”. K. makes a fine speech, and sees that the whole audience wears badges. A week later the court is not sitting; he reads “Entrance to the Court Offices” on a scrap of paper by the stairs, and nearly faints in the attic air.

Miss Bürstner’s Friend and The whip-man

The first is a brief fragment in which Miss Montag blocks his way to Miss Bürstner. In the second, the strangest scene in the book, in a junk room at his own bank, K. finds his two guards being flogged because he complained of them. He opens the door the next evening and nothing has changed.

K.’s uncle and Leni, Lawyer, Manufacturer, Painter and Block

The uncle brings him to the bedridden lawyer Huld, and K. slips away from the meeting with Huld’s nurse. The long seventh chapter holds the painter Titorelli’s airless room, whose hidden second door opens on to more court offices, and his menu: “There are three possibilities: absolute acquittal, apparent acquittal and deferment.” Then K. meets the tradesman Block, ruined after years of this: “He was no longer a client, he was the lawyer’s dog.” A note closes that chapter: it was left unfinished.

In the Cathedral and End

K. waits for an Italian client who never comes. A priest calls his name from the pulpit and tells him of the man from the country who waits all his life at the door of the law, until the doorkeeper shouts: “this entrance was meant only for you. Now I’ll go and close it.” They argue it like Talmudists, and the priest offers the book’s best joke about interpretation: “correct understanding of a matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter are not mutually exclusive.” The last chapter is short and exact: “Like a dog!”

Brod’s order, and the fragments

The novel’s shape is an editor’s decision, and Brod said so. His afterword, in the free German first edition, records that he took the untitled manuscript in June 1920 and sorted it at once. The chapter divisions and headings, he says, came from Kafka; the order did not: “Bezüglich der Anordnung der Kapitel war ich auf mein Gefühl angewiesen.” He relied, that is, on his feeling, and on his memory of Kafka reading much of it aloud. Kafka thought the novel unfinished, he adds, with more stages to come before the end, and since the trial was never to reach the highest court the book could go on “in infinitum”. A reader not told, he promises, “wird kaum seine Lücke fühlen”, would scarcely feel the gap.

The manuscript itself is less reassuring. According to the editorial history, Kafka tore the pages from notebooks he was using for other work and left sixteen bundles, some whole chapters, some scraps, each with a slip noting its contents. He wrote the opening and the ending first and filled in the middle piecemeal. The main editions treat that as follows:

Brod, 1925. Ten chapters in the order above, and the fragments held back. Wyllie’s English and Gutenberg’s German both have this shape, with “Die Freundin des Fräulein Bürstner” as chapter four.
Brod, 1935 and 1946. The same, with an appendix of unfinished chapters and passages Kafka struck out.
Critical edition, 1990, edited by Malcolm Pasley. Brod’s sequence but for two changes: the first chapter is split in two, and “B.’s Friend” moves out among the fragments. There are six: B.’s Friend, Public Prosecutor, To Elsa, Struggle with the Deputy Director, The House, and Journey to His Mother.
Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle, 1997. Sixteen separate booklets in a box, with facsimiles, and no order at all, on the ground that the manuscript does not supply one.

Five fragments are therefore absent from the free English, including those in which K. travels to his half-blind mother after three years away, and ignores a court summons to visit Elsa. These cut across the slow tightening that Brod’s order produces. Scholars still rearrange the middle, and any order is an interpretation.

Prague

The word Prague appears nowhere in The Trial, in German or in English. There is an unnamed city with a cathedral, a tenement district, a bridge “in the light of the moon” and water dividing around “a small island”, and a quarry where the houses give way to fields. The one street named, Juliusstrasse, is given no location. A reader in Prague will fill in the rest, and should know that this is reading in.

Two identifications are often made. Guidebooks take the cathedral for St Vitus, a guess the text neither confirms nor denies. A literary walk goes further, taking K.’s last journey along Neruda Street and Úvoz past Strahov Monastery to a quarry on the site of the Strahov Stadium, while admitting that no town house stood there at the time. The route is suggestive and it is not Kafka’s word.

The Prague of the writing is firmer. The Kafka Museum’s list of his addresses gives the outline. In 1914 he left the family flat in the Oppelt House on Old Town Square (No. 6 then, No. 5 now), and for the first time lived away from his parents:

Bílkova 10, August 1914. His sister Valli’s flat, the month he began the novel.
Nerudova, now Polská, 48, September 1914 to February 1915. His sister Elli’s flat, and not the Nerudova of the walk above. Most of the book was written in these months.
Bílkova 10, February to March 1915. Back in the same house, as the work stalled.
Dlouhá 18, now 16, from March 1915. The Golden Pike House, until 1917.

By day he was at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia, at Na Poříčí 7, from 1908 to 1922. He held a law doctorate from the German university in Prague and had done his unpaid year at the city’s courts. The parody has an insider’s accuracy: K.’s office rivalries are observed from a real desk.

“Before the Law” first appeared in 1915 in Selbstwehr, the Prague Zionist weekly. At Liblice castle outside Prague in May 1963 a conference organised by Eduard Goldstücker brought him back into Czechoslovak discussion. To visit: the Kafka Museum at Cihelná 2b, Jaroslav Róna’s statue of 2003 on Vězeňská by the Spanish Synagogue, the birthplace at U Radnice 5, and the family grave in the New Jewish Cemetery at Žižkov. Harold Pinter’s 1993 film was shot in Prague and Kutná Hora.

The voice

The first sentence decides the book, and English has trouble with it. Kafka wrote: “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.” Verleumdet is a legal word, slandered. Hätte is a subjunctive, leaving open whether K. really has done nothing or whether that is only his account. Böses means something nearer evil than wrong.

The Muirs of 1937 gave “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning”, adding the fine morning. Breon Mitchell, in 1998, explained his struggle with the same words and wrote: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.” Wyllie has: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested.” That opening shows what is weak in the free text. It keeps the Muirs’ lies, drops the logic of “for”, settles the ambiguity by telling us what K. knew, and joins its clauses with a comma. It is complete and readable, and the plot survives.

Past that sentence the narrator stays almost wholly inside K., sharing his errors, so that we find out what he has missed only when someone laughs. Kafka’s friends reported that he laughed aloud reading his work to them, and the book is much funnier than its reputation: the guards eating K.’s breakfast, the judge’s law books that turn out to hold pornography, the repeating flogging.

The people

Josef K.

Josef K. is thirty, single, ambitious and proud of being busy, with a weekly appointment with Elsa, a waitress. He is rarely likable and never quite a villain.

Miss Bürstner

Miss Bürstner, a typist in the lodging house, is the woman K. presses himself on in chapter one and may be the figure he follows on the way to the quarry. Critics note that her initials match those of Felice Bauer, the woman Kafka had just failed to marry.

Huld and Leni

Huld’s name means grace or favour, a joke the theological reading took too seriously. He lies in bed, claims high connections and keeps clients on their knees. Leni, his nurse, shows K. the flap of skin joining two fingers and seems to desire every accused man she meets.

How it was made

In July 1914, in the Askanischer Hof hotel in Berlin, Kafka’s engagement to Felice Bauer was broken off in front of her sister and her friend Grete Bloch. He called the scene a court of justice. War came within weeks. By August he was writing the novel, and it ran fast for two months, reaching some two hundred manuscript pages, before he turned aside to “In the Penal Colony”. By early 1915 he had stopped.

Kafka died near Vienna on 3 June 1924, with instructions that everything unpublished be burned. Brod refused, explained why in the afterword, and published Der Prozess with Die Schmiede in Berlin on 26 April 1925. Kafka’s own spelling was Process. Brod carried the papers to Palestine in 1939, just ahead of the German occupation. The manuscript later went to auction and is now in the German Literature Archive at Marbach.

Readers and critics

Elias Canetti’s Der andere Prozeß (1968), on the letters to Felice, is the classic case for the biographical origin. For the theological habit and its costs, read J. M. Coetzee’s “Kafka: Translators on Trial” (1998), which reviews Mark Harman’s The Castle and shows how far Edwin Muir’s forewords, leaning on Brod, shaped the English Kafka.

Afterlives

The adjective “Kafkaesque” is now used for any queue, which undersells the book. On stage: Gide and Jean-Louis Barrault in 1947, Gottfried von Einem’s opera, Steven Berkoff. On film: Orson Welles’s The Trial (1962) with Anthony Perkins, and David Jones’s 1993 version from Pinter’s screenplay, with Kyle MacLachlan.

How to read it

What is free. In the EU the German has been out of copyright since 1995, life plus seventy from Kafka’s death in 1924; in the United States the 1925 edition entered the public domain in 2021. Gutenberg’s German is Brod’s first edition, afterword included. Wyllie’s English is not public domain: Gutenberg marks it as copyrighted, and it is free to read by his permission.
What is not. The Muirs’ translation of 1937 remains in copyright in the EU to the end of 2040, seventy years after Willa’s death, and in the United States to the end of 2032 at the longest. All later English versions are in copyright everywhere.
Which paid English. Breon Mitchell (Schocken, 1998), from the restored text and with the fragments, is the one to buy. Idris Parry (Penguin, 1994) and Mike Mitchell (Oxford, 2009), a different Mitchell, are the other modern choices. The Muirs have the beauty and the slant. Mark Harman has translated The Castle, Amerika and the stories, but no Trial of his is listed.
Then the fragments. Read “To Elsa” and “Journey to His Mother” in Mitchell afterwards, and notice how much less sealed the novel feels.

Franz Kafka, The Castle (1926). Also unfinished and edited by Brod: a stranger cannot get in where K. cannot get out.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk (1921–23). The same Prague and Austrian officialdom, met by a man who takes it as a joke.
Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1853). Chancery as a fog and a lifelong waste, by a novelist who still believes reform might help.
Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones (1944). Borges wrote “Kafka and His Precursors” in 1951, and his Library of Babel keeps the same hours as this court.