| "The Judgment" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Franz Kafka | |
 Cover of the Kurt Wolff edition in 1916 | |
| Original title | Das Urteil |
| Country | Austria-Hungary |
| Language | German |
| Publication | |
| Published in | Arkadia |
| Publisher | Max Brod |
| Publication date | 1913 |
"The Judgment" ("Das Urteil"), also translated "The Verdict", is a short story written by Franz Kafka in 1912, concerning the relationship between a man and his father.
The story begins with a young merchant, Georg Bendemann, sitting in his room writing a letter to his dear friend in Russia, who had left their hometown some years previously to set up a business that, though initially successful, is now failing. Georg is writing to tell his friend, amongst other things, that he is engaged to marry Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family.
Georg breaks out of his reverie and decides to check on his father. Though quite ill, Georg's father appears huge. Georg informs his father that he has just written a letter to his friend, updating him on his upcoming marriage. His father questions the existence of the friend in Russia, at which point Georg changes the subject. Georg's father accuses him of deceiving him about the happenings of the business. He claims the death of his wife (Georg's mother) hit him harder than it did Georg.
Georg insists on having his father lie down in bed for a while. Because of this, Georg's father claims his son wants him dead. Moreover, he admits to knowing his son's friend, and, in fact, to having been carrying on a correspondence with him concurrently with Georg's. He claims to have swayed the friend's loyalty from Georg to himself, and that the friend reads the father's letters, and disposes of Georg's without reading them. He makes Georg feel terrible, suggesting that Georg has ignored his friend ever since he moved away to Russia. The father does not appreciate Georg's love and care, maintaining he can take care of himself. Georg shrinks back into a corner, scared of his father and his harsh words.
Georg's father accuses him of being selfish and finally sentences him to "death by drowning". Georg feels himself pushed from the room. He runs from his home to a bridge over a stretch of water. He swings himself over the railing and plunges, apparently to his death.
Franz Kafka wrote "The Judgment" ("Das Urteil") at the age of 29. At this point in his life, Kafka had finished his studies of law at the Karl-Ferdinands-Universität of Prague five years earlier and had worked at various jobs, including working for an insurance company and starting an asbestos factory with his brother-in-law, Karl Hermann.
Kafka wrote "The Judgment" in a single sitting on September 22, 1912. In later writings, he described the creative outburst of "The Judgment" as “the total opening of body and soul,” saying that “the story evolved as a true birth, covered with filth and slime.” Kafka viewed the work as “one of his most successful and perfect literary creations” which he was able to write in a “semi-unconscious state of mind.” Kafka was incredibly enthusiastic after the work, and talked to his good friend, Max Brod, who edited and published much of his work. "The Judgment" was published in 1913 in the literary yearbook Arkadia. [1] The story was dedicated "to Miss Felice Bauer" whom he met just before writing it, and in subsequent editions simply "for F.". [2] Brod noted in his biography that the name of the main character, Georg Bendemann, alludes to Kafka (Franz has as many letters as Georg; Bende sounds similar to Kafka) and the name of the fiancée alludes to Felice (they have the same initials; Frieda as many letters as Felice; "Branden" may refer to Brandenburg around Berlin where Felice lived; "feld" (field) is related to "Bauer" (farmer)). [3]
The work has several key inspirations that can be traced to events around the time it was created. While Kafka was running his business, he was troubled because the time required for this job limited his literary creativity. This conflict inspired the character Georg Bendemann, the protagonist of "The Judgment". [4]
Interpretations of Kafka's short story range from simple parallelism between the lives of Georg and Kafka to more complex views concerning the notion of judgement itself. Heinz Politzer, for example, views the story as a means through which Kafka explored his thoughts about his romance with Felice Bauer, citing as evidence the impending marriages Georg and Kafka held in common. He argues that the severed relationship between Georg and his friend represented the bachelorhood that Georg, and therefore Kafka, would soon have to give up. [5]
Herbert Tauber, on the other hand, viewed the story as a commentary on the conflict between two separate worlds, shown through the conflict between father and son. The world of the son is a world of “vital existence in which probability and reservation rule” and that of the father is a world “in which every step has an incalculable importance because it is taken under the horizon of an absolute summons to the road”. [6]
Meanwhile, Russel Berman sees the story as a discourse on the nature of judgment in general, recognizing its depiction in the story as weak and illogical, yet simultaneously necessary. He also bemoans such a state of society as was suggested in the story that would foster degraded forms of writing and, more hauntingly, nurture extreme willingness to conform to orders without concern for consequences. [7] Berman additionally points out that Georg's need to rationalize why he does not want to invite his estranged friend to his wedding is a result of concerns he has pushed out of sight, but nevertheless still holds. He says Kafka shares this methodology of exploring the human psyche by analyzing the motivations behind actions and thoughts with the famed thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.
In the story, the exiled friend in Russia exerts considerable power over the other characters—Georg, his father, and his fiancée, Frieda. In his diaries, Kafka wrote that the friend is the strongest connection between Georg and his father, for it is through this link that his father is able to reassert himself as paterfamilias and his son's enemy and that Georg is able to submissively accept him as such. Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates.[ citation needed ]
A virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. An example is Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of the story. 'Verkehr' can mean either traffic or intercourse in both the social or sexual sense. The sentence can be translated as: "At this moment an unending stream of traffic was just going over the bridge." [8] What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation." [9]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short-story writer based in Prague, who is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka and first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition. The novella has been widely discussed among literary critics, who have offered varied interpretations. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.
Max Brod was a Bohemian-born Israeli author, composer, and journalist.
Amerika, (German working title Der Verschollene, "The Missing") also known as The Man Who Disappeared (Amerika), Amerika: The Missing Person and Lost in America, is the incomplete first novel by author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), written between 1911 and 1914 and published posthumously in 1927. The novel originally began as a short story titled "The Stoker". The novel incorporates many details of the experiences of his relatives who had emigrated to the United States. The commonly used title Amerika is from the edition of the text put together by Kafka's close friend, Max Brod, after Kafka's death in 1924.
The Castle is the last novel by Franz Kafka. In it a protagonist known only as "K." arrives in a village and struggles to gain access to the mysterious authorities who govern it from a castle supposedly owned by Count Westwest.
"The Burrow" is an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka written six months before his death. In the story a badger-like creature struggles to secure the labyrinthine burrow he has excavated as a home. The story was published posthumously in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer by Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor. The first English translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. It appeared in The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections.
Sir John Malcolm Sabine Pasley, 5th Baronet, FBA, also known as Malcolm Pasley, was an eminent British philologist and literary scholar.
"Description of a Struggle" is a short story by Franz Kafka. It contains the dialogues "Conversation with the Supplicant" and "Conversation with the Drunk".
"Eleven Sons" is a short story by Franz Kafka.
Letter to His Father is the name given to a letter Franz Kafka wrote to his father, Hermann, in November 1919.
Letters to Family, Friends, and Editors is a book collecting some of Franz Kafka's letters from 1900 to 1924. The majority of the letters in the volume are addressed to Max Brod. Originally published in Germany in 1959 as Briefe 1902-1924, the collection was first published in English by Schocken Books in 1977. It was translated by Richard and Clara Winston.
Franz Kafka, a German-language writer of novels and short stories who is regarded by critics as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century, was trained as a lawyer and later employed by an insurance company, writing only in his spare time.
Heinz Politzer was an internationally recognized academic and writer. As a young man he was forced to flee Nazism first to Palestine and then to the United States, where he taught German language and literature as a professor at the Bryn Mawr College, Oberlin College, and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a literary scholar, published poet, and prominent editor, particularly of Franz Kafka. As a close associate of Kafka's protégé, Max Brod, Politzer coedited with Brod the first complete collection of Kafka's works in eight volumes, published initially by the Schocken publishing house of Berlin during the early years of the Nazi dictatorship and subsequently by the successor firm Schocken Books in New York.
Hugo Salus was a medical doctor, writer and poet from Austria-Hungary.
"On Parables" is a short story fragment by Franz Kafka. It was not published until 1931, seven years after his death. Max Brod selected stories and published them in the collection Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer. The first English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. It appeared in The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections.
Felice Bauer was a fiancée of Franz Kafka, whose letters to her were published as Letters to Felice.
The Zürau Aphorisms are 109 aphorisms of Franz Kafka, written from September 1917 to April 1918 and published by his friend Max Brod in 1931, after his death. They are selected from his writing in Zürau in West Bohemia where he stayed with his sister Ottla, suffering from tuberculosis. His friend Max Brod titled the book "Betrachtungen über Sünde, Hoffnung, Leid und den wahren Weg".
"My Neighbor" is a short story by Franz Kafka. It was written in 1917 and published in 1931 in Berlin by Max Brod and Hans-Joachim Schoeps. The first English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. It appeared in The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections.
A Country Doctor is a collection of short stories written mostly in 1917 by Franz Kafka, containing the story of the same name. Kurt Wolff published it in 1919 as the second collection of stories by Kafka, after Betrachtung.
Reiner Stach is a German author, biographer of Franz Kafka, publisher, and publicist. Stach lives and works as a freelancer in Berlin.
