Das Urteil; The Judgement

Das Urteil; The Judgement [UK]; The Judgment [US] (written 1912, published 1916)Kafka regarded this story, written in a single night, as his literary breakthrough. A father condemns his son to death. Why? The son carries out the sentence. Why? The answers are left to us, the readers, to search for. Of course there are parallels with the unsent letter Kafka wrote to his father (‘Brief an den Vater’). But if we focus on Kafka’s biography then we will miss the incredible refinement of this story.

The mundane beginning – Georg Bendemann writing a letter on a Sunday afternoon – and the matter of fact style seem to promise clarity, but we need to read between the lines. If Georg is so keen to conceal his engagement from his friend, then why does he keep mentioning an engagement in his letters? Georg is behaving here – and elsewhere – in a contradictory manner, making it hard to decide if he is motivated by genuine concern for his friend or by selfishness.

Georg believes that in order to remain friends with his friend in Petersburg, he must hide the truth from him. But this concealment diminishes the friendship by emptying it of genuine content, making communication superficial and meaningless. Georg’s justification is that he wants to spare his friend’s feelings, but this justification may be spurious. The inauthenticity of this friendship – this is a ‘friend’ Georg never bothers to name, a friend Georg admits to having denied ‘wenigstens zweimal’; ‘at least twice’ – makes the father’s question: ‘Do you really have this friend in Petersburg?’ so disturbing. If the friendship is a lie, then it seems likely that everything else in Georg’s life is a lie too, including his engagement to Frieda Brandenfeld. Georg’s friend in Petersburg is important because the relationship has a pattern which seems to be repeated throughout Georg’s life. Frieda’s words suggest a real problem: if Georg’s relationships are so dysfunctional, then perhaps he should not have got engaged at all.

Georg’s evasiveness is suspect. We know he hides things from his friend; perhaps he has a lot more to hide. He avoids answering his father’s question and tries to talk about his father’s infirmity instead. Is he really showing concern for his father or is there a sense of Schadenfreude here? Perhaps the father is correct in seeing Georg’s wish to cover him up with a blanket as an Oedipal rebellion. Of course this does not justify a death sentence.

‘The Judgement’ is the story of a power struggle which no one wins. The use of free indirect speech distances readers from both Georg and his father. The narrative often uses modal verbs and the subjunctive mood which is used to express desires, fears and conjectures. The narrative is also full of adverbs such as ‘vielleicht’ (perhaps) and ‘wahrscheinlich’ (probably), which adds to the uncertainty.

Georg had intended to observe his father precisely, but he does not seem very good at observing himself or others. Perhaps the reader can do better.

Further Reading

Russell A. Berman, ‘Tradition and Betrayal in “Das Urteil”’, in A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, ed. by James Rolleston (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), pp. 85-99

Benjamin Bennett, The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 289-93

Marcus Bullock, ‘Falling Motion, Endless Moment: Reading to the End of Kafka’s “Das Urteil”’, Monatshefte 102 (2010), 479-507

Stanley Corngold, ‘Kafka’s The Judgment and Modern Rhetorical Theory’, Newsletter of the Kafka Society of America 7 (1983), 15-21

Angel Flores, The problem of the Judgment: eleven approaches to Kafka’s story (New York: Gordian Press, 1977)

Richard T. Gray, Stations of the Divided Subject (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), Chapter 7 on The Judgement

Jörg Häntzschel, 'Zu den Gebärden in Franz Kafkas Erzählung "Das Urteil"', Poetica 26 (1994), 153-68

David Pan, ‘The Persistence of Patriarchy in Franz Kafka’s “Judgment”’, Orbis Litterarum 55 (2000), 135-60

Roy Pascal, Kafka’s Narrators: A Study of his Stories and Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 21-32 on 'Das Urteil'

James Phelan, 'Progression, Speed, and Judgment in "Das Urteil"', in Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading, ed. by Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg and Ronald Speirs (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 22-39

Paul Reitter, ‘Bad Writing in Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil”’, Seminar 38 (2002), 134-41

Ronald Speirs, ‘Movement, Time, Language: Forms of Instability in Kafka’s “Das Urteil”’, Forum for Modern Language Studies 23 (1987), 253-64

Ronald Speirs, ‘The Dynamics of Narration in Betrachtung, “Das Urteil”, and Kafka’s Reflections on Writing’, in Franz Kafka: Narration, Rhetoric, and Reading, ed. by Jakob Lothe, Beatrice Sandberg and Ronald Speirs (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2011), pp. 196-231

Martin Swales, ‘Why Read Kafka?’, Modern Language Review, vol. 76 (1981), 357-66

Martin Swales, ‘The Real and the Self-Evident: Franz Kafka’, in Martin Swales, Studies of German Prose Fiction in the Age of European Realism (Lewiston and Lampeter: Mellen, 1995), pp. 137-61

Web Links in German

https://annotext.dartmouth.edu/texts?language_id=10000

Das Urteil in German; click on a word for the English translation

http://www.vorleser.net/kafka_urteil/hoerbuch.html

Free audio download of Das Urteil