One autumn day a hundred years ago, a small Berlin publishing house brought out a modest book that passed almost unnoticed. Its author was unknown—and, to make matters worse, already dead by the time of publication.
Today, Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial feels more urgent than ever. It opens with a line that has become one of the most unsettling in world literature: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”
In its year of publication, 1925, the theme was already recognizable. Europe was sliding into an era of oppression and insecurity. That same year, Adolf Hitler was writing Mein Kampf in a Bavarian prison, and Josef Stalin was tightening his grip on power in the Soviet Union. Kafka had captured what was soon to become the fate of millions: to be accused without knowing why, and to die without ever being heard.
He had drafted the manuscript as early as 1914, but instead of sending it to a publisher, he tucked it away in a drawer. Shortly before his death ten years later, he instructed that all his writings be burned. But his friend Max Brod thought otherwise. He preserved the manuscripts—a fortunate act of defiance, for today The Trial is regarded as one of the most important novels of modern literature.
Kafka was born in Prague in 1883, then part of Austria-Hungary. He grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family, caught in the tensions between Czech, German, and Jewish cultures. His relationship with his father was marked by fear and feelings of inferiority. Though he never knew material hardship, he felt lonely and estranged. Trained as a lawyer, he became intimately acquainted with the routines of bureaucracy and its inhuman face.
In The Trial, we meet Josef K., a seemingly successful bank official in his thirties. One morning he wakes to find two guards in his apartment. They tell him he is under arrest but refuse to say what the charge is. He is given no trial and, for the time being, left to his own devices.
From there we follow Josef K.’s descent into a series of absurd scenes. He is summoned to a hearing in a dilapidated house, the room crowded with spectators—some asleep, others watching with indifference. A judge sits at a table but offers no explanation. Josef K. tries to defend himself but is not heard. “It was a court not only unjust,” Kafka writes, “but one that condemned the very man who sought the truth.”
Along the way he turns to a sickly, passive lawyer who promises help but never delivers, only prolonging the ordeal. Later, Josef K. consults a painter who boasts of his influence with the court, yet admits that no one has ever been acquitted—the struggle is hopeless.
Through Josef K.’s wanderings, we encounter one office after another, a maze of bureaucratic chambers tucked into attics and dark backstreets. The atmosphere is stifling, claustrophobic, oppressive. In the end Josef K. is seized by two men. Without any sentence pronounced, he is taken to a place resembling a quarry. There he is pinned down and stabbed in the heart. His last words, “Like a dog!”, convey both shame and despair.
The manuscript was never completed; the chapters were left in loose sequence. Yet in the form Brod arranged them, a clear dramatic arc emerges—from arrest to execution.
At first, The Trial was far from a bestseller. Its publisher, Die Schmiede, was a small avant-garde press, but the book did attract some attention in literary circles in Berlin, Vienna, and Prague. With the rise of Nazism, however, countless writers were persecuted and blacklisted, Kafka among them. In 1933 his books were thrown onto the bonfires in Munich and Berlin, denounced as “degenerate literature.”
From that year on, Kafka’s works were banned throughout Nazi-controlled Europe; his name disappeared from bookshops, libraries, and universities. Hitler preferred traditional German literature and virulent antisemitic pamphlets. Writers like Kafka, who dealt with alienation, fear, and senseless systems, were considered dangerous because they challenged the Nazi worldview.
Under Stalin, Kafka was branded “decadent” and “bourgeois.” Only in the 1960s were some of his works, including The Trial, cautiously introduced to Soviet and Eastern European readers.
In the West, however, the novel gained a significant following. After the Second World War it was translated into many languages. Though readers often found it cryptic and diffuse, its themes struck home. Europe was now divided by an invisible Iron Curtain, and Jews and others were struggling to recover from the brutal war years. In Kafka’s Trial, they recognized themselves.
A hundred years on, the novel still mirrors our age. Everywhere, society is becoming more complex, ensnared by the labyrinths and traps of technology. In China, the courts are subject to the Communist Party, and any flicker of opposition is crushed with force. With the aid of surveillance technology, citizens are tracked from cradle to grave. In Russia and many other states, the judicial system serves merely as a façade.
Even the United States is not exempt. Under Donald Trump, people have been snatched off the streets, handcuffed, and shoved into unmarked vans, whisked away to unknown destinations. Before they can even ask a question, they are locked up in newly established detention centers in Texas and other states. Some are sent to prisons in El Salvador. The Trump administration openly declares its aim to deport up to a million undocumented immigrants each year.
For Kafka, the point is not the verdict but the process itself—the victim’s endless struggle to be heard. In today’s America we see something similar: investigations, hearings, and trials that are not mere legal procedures but the very stage for political combat. The process itself becomes the punishment, just as for Josef K.
And yet there is one decisive difference. Josef K. had no defense lawyer who might aid him, no free press to ask questions, no higher court of appeal. The United States still has all of these—but they are under strain.
Franz Kafka reminds us what is at stake.
