Kafka S The Trial

A novel of such ambiguity will inevitably lend itself to a diversity of interpretation, but in The Trial you can at least be sure to find every element of storytelling now defined as Kafkaesque.

Ulrich Hargenau testifies against fellow members of a German terrorist group in order to save himself and his wife, Paula, and contemplates the nature of his German heritage.

This edition contains the English translation and the original text in German. "The Trial" (original German title: "Der Process", later "Der Prozess", "Der Proceß" and "Der Prozeß") is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 but not published until 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader. Like Kafka's other novels, "The Trial" was never completed, although it does include a chapter which brings the story to an end. Because of this, there are some inconsistencies and discontinuities in narration within the novel, such as disparities in timing. After Kafka's death in 1924 his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. In 1999, the book was listed in "Le Monde"'s 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century. "Der Process" (auch "Der Prozeß" oder "Der Proceß", Titel der Erstausgabe: "Der Prozess") ist neben "Der Verschollene" (auch unter dem Titel "Amerika" bekannt) und "Das Schloss" einer von drei unvollendeten und postum erschienenen Romanen von Franz Kafka.

This volume contains the great works of fiction as well as the complete diaries and thus gives the reader considrable insight into the mind of this strange and powerful man.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel? At once a brilliant biographical portrait of Kafka and Brod and the influential group of writers and intellectuals known as the Prague Circle, Kafka's Last Trial offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts - brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political - that determined the fate of the manuscripts Brod had rescued when he fled with Kafka's papers at the last possible moment from Prague to Palestine in 1939. It describes a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; of a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose national obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in a fascinating and hotly contested trial. Ultimately, Benjamin Balint invites us to question: who owns a literary legacy - the country of one's language and birth or of one's cultural and religious affinities - and what nation can claim a right to it.

Kafka's novel The Trial, written from 1914 to 1915 and published in 1925, is a multi-faceted, notoriously difficult manifestation of European literary modernism, and one of the most emblematic books of the 20th Century. It tells the story of Josef K., a man accused of a crime he has no recollection of committing and whose nature is never revealed to him. The novel is often interpreted theologically as an expression of radical nihilism and a world abandoned by God. It is also read as a parable of the cold, inhumane rationality of modern bureaucratization. Like many other novels of this turbulent period, it offers a tragic quest-narrative in which the hero searches for truth and clarity (whether about himself, or the anonymous system he is facing), only to fall into greater and greater confusion. This collection of nine new essays and an editor's introduction brings together Kafka experts, intellectual historians, literary scholars, and philosophers in order to explore the novel's philosophical and theological significance. Authors pursue the novel's central concerns of justice, law, resistance, ethics, alienation, and subjectivity. Few novels display human uncertainty and skepticism in the face of rapid modernization, or the metaphysical as it intersects with the most mundane aspects of everyday life, more insistently than The Trial. Ultimately, the essays in this collection focus on how Kafka's text is in fact philosophical in the ways in which it achieves its literary aims. Rather than considering ideas as externally related to the text, the text is considered philosophical at the very level of literary form and technique.

A windfall for every reader: a trove of marvelous impossible-to-find Kafka stories in a masterful new translation by Michael Hofmann Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades and two of them have never been translated into English before. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages). “Franz Kafka is the master of the literary fragment,” as Stach comments in his afterword: "In no other European author does the proportion of completed and published works loom quite so...small in the overall mass of his papers, which consist largely of broken-off beginnings.” In fact, as Hofmann recently added: “‘Finished' seems to me, in the context of Kafka, a dubious or ironic condition, anyway. The more finished, the less finished. The less finished, the more finished. Gregor Samsa’s sister Grete getting up to stretch in the streetcar. What kind of an ending is that?! There’s perhaps some distinction to be made between ‘finished' and ‘ended.' Everything continues to vibrate or unsettle, anyway. Reiner Stach points out that none of the three novels were ‘completed.' Some pieces break off, or are concluded, or stop—it doesn’t matter!—after two hundred pages, some after two lines. The gusto, the friendliness, the wit with which Kafka launches himself into these things is astonishing.”

In the end, out of nothing at all, an enormous fabric of guilt will be conjured up. One morning Josef K. is arrested for a crime he did not commit. In fact, he is never even told the nature of the offense. His life is thrown into turmoil as he becomes enmeshed in a struggle to prove his innocence. As the confounding case unfolds, K. is ultimately powerless - battling against a remote and uncaring bureaucracy. This edition features a new translation by Isabel Tucker. Due to its posthumous publication, The Trial 's original text is largely unedited and Tucker emends certain details while retaining the enigmatic and surreal style which marks Kafka's brilliance. Filled with psychological tension and disconcerting parallels with the modern world, The Trial is a dystopian masterpiece by one of the greatest writers in the German-language.