The Trial

• 1. Introduction

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  The Trial opens on the morning of Josef K.'s thirtieth birthday, and before breakfast is over, strangers have arrived to arrest him for a crime no one will name. Franz Kafka wrote those first lines in August 1914, at the very moment Europe was tearing itself apart in the opening weeks of World War I. The novel that followed became one of the defining works of the twentieth century, a story in which guilt is assumed, justice is invisible, and the accused can never quite locate the court that is judging him.

  Kafka never finished it. He died in 1924 without authorizing its publication, and the manuscript his friend Max Brod salvaged consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, their order uncertain and their completeness unknown. What reaches us today is partly Kafka's vision and partly Brod's editorial reconstruction. That ambiguity feels fitting for a book where nothing is ever fully explained.

  The questions the novel raises are still alive. Who is the authority that arrests Josef K.? What is the crime? And why does K. keep cooperating with a system he knows is absurd? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Manuscript Rescued

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  Kafka drafted the opening sentence of The Trial in August 1914 and kept working on it throughout 1915, a stretch he sustained despite the pressures of his job as an insurance agent during wartime. He wrote in a peculiar order, beginning with the opening and closing sections first, then filling in the middle scenes across several different notebooks at once.

  The habit that made this dangerous was one Kafka had practiced before: he destroyed his own work. Max Brod, who had been his friend for years, recognized the risk. He quietly took the manuscript for safekeeping before Kafka could act on that impulse. What Brod found when he finally sat down to edit it after Kafka's death in 1924 was 161 loose pages, torn from their notebooks and bundled loosely into chapters. The chapter order had not been explained to him, and he could not tell which passages were finished and which were abandoned mid-thought.

  Brod assembled the novel as best he could, and the Berlin publisher Verlag Die Schmiede brought it out on the 26th of April 1925, less than a year after Kafka died. Later scholars would return to those same pages and attempt further editorial work, but the question of what Kafka's final version would have looked like has never been resolved. The original manuscript is now held at the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach am Neckar, Germany.

• 3. Josef K. and the Invisible Court

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  Josef K. is the chief clerk of a bank, a man whose professional life is built on order, procedure, and legibility. His arrest upends all three. Two agents appear on the morning of his thirtieth birthday, occupy the room of his fellow lodger Fräulein Bürstner, and inform him he is under arrest for an unspecified crime. He is not imprisoned. He is told to go about his business and wait.

  The court, when K. finally locates it, is hidden in the attic of a dilapidated working-class tenement block. He is rebuked for arriving late and mistaken for a house painter rather than the bank official he is. He delivers what he calls a passionate plea against the absurdity of the proceedings, still ignorant of the actual charge, and manages only to arouse the assembly's hostility. He also notices that every person in the room wears a pin on their lapel, which he interprets as a mark of membership in a secret organization.

  Each subsequent attempt K. makes to engage the system produces a similar result: more complexity, no clarity. His uncle Karl, worried about family reputation, introduces him to a bedridden lawyer named Huld, whose young attendant Leni immediately pulls K. away from the very meeting intended to help him. The court painter Titorelli can offer K. only two options: indefinite postponement, or a temporary acquittal that could at any moment become re-arrest. Outright acquittal, Titorelli tells him, is not possible.

  K. eventually dismisses his lawyer and tries to take control of his own case. At Huld's office he meets a merchant named Rudi Block, whose case has run for five years and reduced him from a successful businessman to someone nearly bankrupt and wholly dependent on Huld and Leni. The lawyer mocks Block in front of K. for his dog-like subservience. K. watches and draws his own conclusions.

• 4. Before the Law

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  Near the end of the novel, K. is sent to escort an Italian client through the city's cathedral. The client never arrives. What does arrive, instead, is a priest who calls K. by name from the pulpit and draws him into a conversation about his case.

  The priest tells K. a fable, a text that Kafka had published separately under the title "Before the Law." In it, a man from the country spends his entire life waiting for permission to pass through a door that was made only for him, and is never admitted. The priest explains that this parable is an ancient text of the court, and that generations of court officials have interpreted it in contradictory ways. The conversation offers no resolution, only further layers of ambiguity.

  On the eve of K.'s thirty-first birthday, two men come to his apartment. They walk him through the city, and K. catches a brief glimpse of Fräulein Bürstner. At a small quarry outside the city, the two men kill him, stabbing him through the heart with a butcher's knife while strangling him. His last words, as Kafka wrote them, are: "Like a dog!"

• 5. Kafka, Dostoevsky, and the Blood Relative

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  Kafka was explicit about one literary debt. He called Dostoevsky a blood relative, a phrase unusual enough in its intensity to have drawn sustained critical attention. Scholars have noted real similarities between The Trial and two specific Dostoevsky novels: Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. Both Russian works circle questions of guilt, confession, and justice, though they approach those questions through confession and spiritual crisis rather than through Kafka's unresolvable opacity.

  The comparison also holds in structure. Like Kafka's two other unfinished novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed. All three were published posthumously from manuscripts Brod rescued and edited. The Trial at least includes a chapter that appears to deliberately bring the story to an abrupt ending, even if it was never declared final by its author. Whether that chapter represents Kafka's intended close or simply the last scene he drafted is one more question the novel refuses to answer.

  The book's standing was confirmed by later critical consensus. In 1999 it was listed among Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, and ranked as the second-best German-language novel of the twentieth century.

• 6. A Century of Adaptations

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  Willa and Edwin Muir produced the first English translation in 1937, published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. Since then, at least seven other translators have rendered the novel into English, including Breon Mitchell for Schocken Books in 1998 and Idris Parry for Penguin Books in 1994.

  Orson Welles brought the story to film in 1962, casting Anthony Perkins as Josef K. and playing the advocate himself. A second film followed in 1993, directed by David Jones from a screenplay by Harold Pinter, with Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K. and Anthony Hopkins as the Priest.

  On stage, the novel has attracted sustained attention across decades. Jean-Louis Barrault and Andre Gide adapted it for the Paris stage in 1947. Steven Berkoff directed his own stage version, first performed in London in 1970 and published in 1981. Composer Gottfried von Einem wrote an opera from the novel, whose American premiere was directed by Otto Preminger. A later opera by Philip Glass had its premiere in October 2014 through Music Theatre Wales. In 2015, the Young Vic theatre in London staged a version starring Rory Kinnear as K.

  For radio, a 1946 broadcast on Columbia Workshop featured an original score by Bernard Herrmann, with Karl Swenson as Josef K. In 1982, an adaptation by Hanif Kureishi for BBC Radio 4 starred Mike Gwilym as K. and Miriam Margolyes as Leni. A graphic novel adaptation, with illustrations by Chantal Montellier and an adaptation by David Zane Mairowitz, appeared on the 15th of April 2008. As recently as September 2025, a show called K, a Talmudic vaudeville drawing on The Trial and other Kafka works under Barrie Kosky's direction, premiered at the Berliner Ensemble.