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The Trial
8.5Franz Kafka
Kafka's novel of a man arrested and prosecuted by an inscrutable authority for an unspecified crime — the twentieth century's defining nightmare of guilt without transgression.
GBM Assessment (Score: 8.5/10)
In The Trial, Franz Kafka created a prophetic narratives of the twentieth century, depicting a man arrested and prosecuted by an inscrutable authority for an unspecified crime. The novel's nightmarish vision of guilt without transgression and law without justice has proven eerily prescient of totalitarian show trials and modern bureaucratic alienation alike.
Published posthumously in 1925 against Kafka's own wishes, The Trial emerged into a Europe that would soon validate its darkest imaginings through the rise of fascism and Stalinism. Orson Welles's celebrated 1962 film adaptation brought the story's existential terror to an even wider audience, solidifying the word 'Kafkaesque' in the modern vocabulary.
Weimar Culture, 1924-1926
The Weimar Republic's golden years. Mann publishes The Magic Mountain. Kafka's works appear posthumously. Hitler writes Mein Kampf in prison. The Bauhaus flourishes. Fitzgerald captures the Jazz Age. Woolf invents stream-of-consciousness narrative. Pound begins publishing The Cantos, his lifelong modernist epic, while living in Italy and increasingly drawn to Mussolini's regime. Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and the Paris expatriate scene define the Lost Generation.
Awards & Adaptations
Orson Welles film (1962).
Recommended Edition
Willa & Edwin Muir (1937)
