Kafka's The Trial as Prophecy: Irrationality and Jewish Fate

Introduction: A World Without Why

"Here there is no why." — Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

Attempting to determine what Franz Kafka really meant in any of his stories is a difficult undertaking, given the absurdity and irrationality of the situations he describes and the characters who do not seem to function or react as normal human beings. This is especially true in his unfinished novel The Trial, where the young and successful bank executive Joseph K. is arrested and put on trial without charges and for no apparent reason, then taken out and murdered a year later. He never knows why any of this is happening to him, and perhaps Kafka's main point is that there is no "why" — no reason for any of it. The characters and the society Kafka portrays are not acting in a rational manner.

The Invisible Law and the Machinery of Destruction

This parallels the experience of Primo Levi in Auschwitz. When Levi was thirsty and broke off an icicle outside the barracks window, an SS guard grabbed it from him. When Levi asked "Why?", the only response he received was "Here there is no why." Under those circumstances, this was a perfectly sensible answer, given that the entire rational world had been overturned and inverted. Kafka seems to have anticipated that modern civilization was moving in this direction. Many of his characters are successful, assimilated German Jews who suffer from anxiety, depression, and alienation — perhaps because they have an intuition that things will not end well for them. Even though The Trial was written during the First World War and remained unpublished at the time of Kafka's death in 1924, he may well have been a prophet rather than merely a writer, with a sense of the direction the future would take in the decades ahead — a future in which war, genocide, and mass murder would become the norm, and the insane and irrational would be treated as sane.

In The Trial, the law, the courts, and the judicial system are invisible and irrational, operating by rules that the people caught up in the Process (Der Prozess) do not understand and that no one ever explains. Indeed, there may be no real rules or laws at all — just an ongoing process with no rational purpose beyond its own existence, like a machine or assembly line of destruction that keeps running on its own momentum. Joseph K. may be a victim of bureaucracy, but it is a far more sinister and murderous bureaucracy than that of the old Habsburg Empire.

Alienation, Identity, and the Assimilated Jewish Self

In the end, two officials from the Court take him out to a quarry and instruct him to commit suicide with a knife. They show no interest in his work, education, family life, or contributions to society. All of that is meaningless to them; they have a schedule to keep and orders to obey. To them, he is just another name on a list — and possibly not even that, but merely a number. People watching from nearby windows see that he is about to be killed but do nothing, much as most Germans did when they witnessed Jews being beaten, sent to concentration camps, or "resettled in the East." Joseph K. never learned what the charges against him were, never saw the judge or the court that condemned him. No one helps him or intervenes as the two officials drive the knife into his heart and twist it. His last thought is that he is being killed like a dog.

Kafka's writing could be described as existentialist or even surrealist, but it presents a portrait of highly alienated and unstable characters living in a sick, bourgeois society that is not progressing but rather regressing — sinking into irrationality and degeneracy. At the same time, this society is also highly repressive toward women, while minority groups such as the assimilated, successful Jews of Kafka's Prague seem to live in a state of anxiety and insecurity about the future — and, as events proved, rightfully so. His alienated modernist characters are always insecure and uncertain about their identity, fearful about the future, and seemingly trapped in a condition of unreality. Their problems might be resolved by suicide, as the officials wish Joseph K. to enact, but in the end he is unable to perform this self-destructive act and forces them to carry it out themselves. Caught up in the machinery of death and destruction, the only real choice left to him is an existential one — not whether he will live or die, but only how he will die. His death has no real meaning or purpose, and no reason is given for it. There is no hope of redemption, resurrection, or afterlife.

Kafka's parents spoke Yiddish, which he regarded as a purer form of German than the High German (Hochdeutsch) that became the standard language of modern times. They were among the recently emancipated and assimilated Jews who became citizens of the Habsburg Empire and were permitted to serve in the military, yet there was something surreal and impermanent about this situation, given the high levels of anti-Semitism that persisted in society. Kafka often reflected on these questions, including the idea that Yiddish was his true mother tongue rather than German, and he worried about the fate of assimilated Jews who had been cut off from their language and traditions. He and his characters — Joseph K. among them — existed uncomfortably as assimilated Jews, living in a chaotic era of revolution and global warfare, often despised and distrusted by the larger society. Even when they were superficially successful on the material level, his stories carry the same sense of doom, insecurity, and foreboding that runs through all of his work. Although Kafka died before Hitler came to power, he seemed aware that things were not going to end well for the Jews of Europe.