The Trial

Franz Kafka was born in 1883 to a Jewish family in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He studied law at university and became an insurance agent. His diaries and letters reveal a deep sense of disillusionment and inadequacy that plagued him throughout his life. He had several love affairs but never married. When he was 34 years old, Kafka was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a condition that would ultimately lead to his death at 40.

Kafka began writing at a young age, though he published little during his lifetime. Among the few works Kafka did complete and publish before his death are his novella The Metamorphosis and the short stories “The Judgment” and “A Hunger Artist.” He was notoriously self-critical and destroyed most of his work. Before he died, he asked his close friend and executor, Max Brod, to burn all his remaining works unread. Brod disregarded this request, however, and as a result several of Kafka’s most famous works—including The Castle and The Trial—were published after the author’s death.

Though Kafka’s works initially attracted little attention from either readers or critics, they are now counted among the most important works of 20th-century literature, displaying elements of realism, existentialism, and even fantasy. Kafka’s writing is characterized above all by its intricate and labyrinthine narrative structures and its depiction of puzzling and surreal situations. Kafka’s works often blur the line between reality and illusion, inviting readers to contemplate the complexities of the human condition and the existential dilemmas of daily life. So unique is Kafka’s place in world literature and culture that the adjective “Kafkaesque” has emerged to describe needlessly complex and opaque bureaucratic procedures like those described in The Trial and several of his other works.

Kafka worked on The Trial between 1914 and 1915. During this time, the outbreak of World War I led to significant tensions between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and much of Europe. The chaos of the times did not stop Kafka from being extremely productive. Often haphazard or scattered in his approach, he used several different notebooks at the same time as he wrote his novel. Kafka never finished The Trial, though the final chapter of the manuscript does include the ending (which seems to be deliberately abrupt). When Kafka died in 1924, The Trial was among the works he instructed Brod to burn. Instead, Brod cobbled the novel together from 161 pages torn from various notebooks, publishing the work as The Trial (Der Prozess in the original German) in 1925.

Brod’s version of The Trial omitted several sections that Brod regarded as unfinished. Kafka himself did not leave any detailed information on which parts were finished and which were not and did not even clarify the order of the chapters. As Kafka’s works gained more and more public attention, however, the “fragments” of The Trial were published too, and these are now studied by literary scholars alongside the main text of the novel. Today, the most authoritative editions and translations of Kafka’s works include the main text as well as the “fragments” of his novel.