The Trial

Franz Kafka began Der Prozeß (The Trial) in Prague in the summer of 1914, weeks after he broke off his engagement to Felice Bauer. The break happened at a Berlin hotel in front of her family and friends, and Kafka later called it a tribunal. Europe went to war that August. He kept his day job at a semi-public insurance institute, where he assessed workplace accident claims, and wrote at night in rented rooms.

The novel follows Josef K., a bank official who is arrested one morning by officials who never tell him what he is accused of. Kafka did not write it in order. He filled notebooks chapter by chapter, jumping around, and he wrote the first and last chapters early. Then he stopped, in early 1915, and never finished the middle. The manuscript stayed in a drawer.

Only one part reached readers in his lifetime: the parable Before the Law, published in 1915 in a Jewish weekly and again in a 1919 collection. Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, at forty. He had asked his friend Max Brod, a writer and critic, to burn his unpublished papers. Brod refused, because he believed the work was too good to lose, and he had told Kafka as much while Kafka was alive. Brod ordered the loose chapters into a sequence, cut what looked unfinished, and published Der Prozeß in Berlin in 1925.

The first edition sold poorly. Recognition came slowly, then overwhelmingly. Translations followed in the 1930s, notably the English version by Willa and Edwin Muir. The Nazis banned Kafka's books as Jewish writing, which pushed his readers and his surviving family into exile or worse. After 1945 the novel read differently. A man processed by an authority that never explains itself no longer felt like fantasy.

Scholars still argue over the chapter order, since Brod's arrangement was a guess. Newer critical editions restore the fragments and the gaps. Meanwhile the word Kafkaesque entered ordinary speech, used for tax offices and airport queues by people who have never opened the book.