Franz Kafka's "Das Urteil": An Interpretation

Abstract

Das Urteil is one of the few stories Kafka was proud of having written and continued to find satisfactory; with it begins the work of his maturity. It was composed in the night from 22 to 23 September 1912, and published later that year.' It is dedicated to F, Felice Bauer, whom Kafka had met for the first time that summer; the peculiar irony of the dedication is patent to any reader. I have chosen it for interpretation for three closely connected reasons. First, as an outstanding and outstandingly clear example of the way Kafka draws autobiographical material into his fictions.2 An interpretation of the story should therefore illuminate one side of his literary undertaking, the other side of which is the fictionalizing of his autobiographical and private writings. Secondly, the story is characteristic of a preoccupation central to the overwhelming majority of his writings and patent in their titles-his preoccupation with guilt, punishment, and the law according to which these are connected and assessed. It is, clearly, a moral preoccupation. Thirdly, the story is an early but accomplished example of a certain rather puzzling but if anything even more characteristic narrative manner of conveying that preoccupation: a way of writing which seems to be especially designed to insinuate and establish the connection between a certain kind of