The Trial () is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of the crime of which he is accused revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Some similarities between The Trial and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov suggest their possible influence on it, and Kafka went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending.

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. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

Development

Kafka drafted the opening sentence of The Trial in August 1914 and worked on the novel throughout 1915. This was an unusually productive period for Kafka, despite the outbreak of World War I, which significantly increased the pressures of his day job as an insurance agent.

Having begun by writing the opening and concluding sections of the novel, Kafka worked on the intervening scenes in a haphazard manner, using several different notebooks simultaneously. His friend Max Brod, knowing Kafka's habit of destroying his own work, eventually took the manuscript for safekeeping. It consisted of 161 loose pages torn from notebooks, which Kafka had bundled together into chapters. The order of the chapters was not made clear to Brod; nor was he told which parts were complete and which were unfinished. Following Kafka's death in 1924, Brod edited the work and assembled it into a novel to the best of his ability. Further editorial work has been done by later scholars, but Kafka's final vision for The Trial remains unknown.

  • Hesperus Press Limited, 2005, Translation: Richard Stokes,
  • Dover Thrift Editions, 22 July 2009, Translation: David Wyllie (2003),
  • Oxford World's Classics, 4 October 2009, Translation: Mike Mitchell,
  • , 15 September 2012, Translation: Susanne Lück and Maureen Fitzgibbons,

Adaptations

Stage

  • The writer and director Steven Berkoff adapted several of Kafka's novels into plays and directed them for stage. His version of The Trial was first performed in 1970 in London and published in 1981.
  • Israeli director Rina Yerushalmi adapted The Trial (paired with Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies) for a production called Ta, Ta, Tatata presented in June 1970 at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club.
  • Chicago-based writer Greg Allen wrote and directed K., based on The Trial. After award-winning runs in Chicago and New York, it was produced by The Hypocrites and ran for several months in 2010 at The Chopin Theater in Chicago.
  • Joseph K, written by Tom Basden and based on The Trial, takes place in modern-day London, with the protagonist cast as a city banker. It ran at the Gate Theatre, Notting Hill, London, in late 2010.
  • Gottfried von Einem wrote an opera, Der Prozeß, based on the novel. Its American debut was directed by Otto Preminger.
  • The writer Serge Lamothe adapted The Trial for the stage. Directed by François Girard, his version of The Trial was first performed in 2004 in Montreal and Ottawa, Canada, and published in 2005.
  • Between June and August 2015, The Young Vic theatre in London staged a version of The Trial adapted by Nick Gill and starring Rory Kinnear as K.
  • Jean-Louis Barrault and Andre Gide adapted the novel for the stage, performed in Paris in 1947.
  • An opera based on The Trial by Philip Glass was premiered by Music Theatre Wales in October 2014.
  • K, a Talmudic vaudeville show inspired by The Trial and other Kafka works under the direction of Barrie Kosky premiered at Berliner Ensemble in September 2025.

Radio

  • On 19 May 1946, Columbia Workshop broadcast an adaptation of The Trial by Davidson Taylor with an original musical score by Bernard Herrmann and starring Karl Swenson as Joseph K.
  • In 1982, Mike Gwilym starred as Josef K. with Miriam Margolyes as Leni in an adaptation on BBC Radio 4 dramatised for radio by Hanif Kureishi.
  • Sam Troughton starred as Joseph Kay in a new adaptation by Mark Ravenhill titled The Process directed by Polly Thomas and broadcast on 10 May 2015 on BBC Radio 3's Drama on 3 program.

Film

  • In the 1962 film adaptation by Orson Welles, Josef K. is played by Anthony Perkins and the advocate by Welles.
  • The 1993 film The Trial was based on Harold Pinter's screenplay adaptation. Directed by David Jones, it starred Kyle MacLachlan as Josef K. and Anthony Hopkins as The Priest.

Graphic novel

  • A graphic novel adaptation by Chantal Montellier (illustrations) and David Zane Mairowitz (adaptation) appeared on April 15, 2008.

Notes

References

Further reading

  • Kartiganer, Donald M. "Job and Joseph K.: Myth in Kafka's The Trial". Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1962, pp. 31–43.
  • Lesser, Simon O. "The Source of Guilt and the Sense of Guilt—Kafka's The Trial. Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1962, pp. 44–60.
  • JSTOR
  • , translated by David Wyllie
  • Der Prozeß, original text in German
  • Kafka's parable "Before the Law", Herbert Deinert, May 1964, Cornell University