This year, 2025, marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka.
One may often feel the world has gone nuts. In 2025 we hear that the 47th President of the United States is going to make Canada the 51st State, annex Greenland and turn Gaza into a luxury Mediterranean resort (after compulsorily expelling the Palestinian people who live there). A few years previously (on 7 April 2022) The United States had been one of 143 nations to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a flagrant breach of international law. (United Nations General Assembly Resolution ES-11/4 – Wikipedia) No nation should arbitrarily invade the sovereign territory of another. The nation apparently exempt from this principle is – The United States. Everything you thought constituted the rational basis of your world dissolves into a menacing phantasmagoria. Crippled with impotent rage, one is left bewildered in the face of unfathomable events.
It is a comparable sense of bewilderment that Franz Kafka (A Short Biography of Franz Kafka) captured in ‘The Trial’ (1925). The novel is the deeply upsetting account of a respectable bank clerk, Josef K., who is brought before the law courts accused of an unnamed crime whilst entirely convinced of his innocence. K. is not a perfectly moral character. He is unnecessarily rude to his landlady, Mrs Grubach, and takes advantage of his neighbour Miss Burstner in the opening chapters. This depiction gives him a human dimension but doesn’t account for the fate which envelops him. The law progresses implacably, steered by the semi-abstract figures of the “Examining Magistrate” and the “Advocate”.
The reader soon understands that acquittal is an impossibility, and is drawn into a suffocating nightmare coloured by quirky dialogue and bizarre imagery.
‘The Trial’ is highly self-reflexive and is shot through with techniques of exegetic commentary, particularly of Jewish Rabbinic hermeneutics as found in The Talmud. The tribulations of Cain and Abel, of Abraham and Issac, and of Job haunt Kafka’s vision of tragic horror. Their moral vexations have left a primordial stain on the conscience of Western civilization. The law, judgment and the application of law are its central themes. Guilt and a sense of failure are also prominent. Kafka brings the sense of sin to such a pitch that to be alive, and to engender life, becomes inherently sinful. Life itself is a punishment endured as a consequence of the fallen spiritual state.
We are left with the bleak statement of The Chaplain: “The Court wants nothing of you. It receives you when you come, and dismisses you when you go”.
One hundred years since publication, ‘The Trial’ reads as urgently relevant to our condition as ever.
Check if this modern classic is in stock at your local library here Home | South Lanarkshire Libraries (sllclibrary.co.uk)
Brought to the screen in 1962 by Orson Welles with Anthony Perkins as the hapless protagonist Josef K. (The Trial (1962) – IMDb)
Listen to the BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ podcast about ‘The Trial’ here. BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Kafka’s The Trial Chaired by Melvyn Bragg. Guest contributors are Elizabeth Boa (Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham), Steve Connor (Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge) and Ritchie Robertson (Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford).
To deepen understanding of Kafka reach for The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (2002) edited by Julian Preece. (The Cambridge Companion to Kafka (Cambridge Companions to Literature) : Preece, Julian: Amazon.co.uk: Books)
Originally published in German as ‘Der Prozess‘ in 1925
208 pages in Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN-13 : 978-0241197790
