In this blog post, we’ll take a step-by-step look at everything from the power of the first sentence in Kafka’s “The Trial” to the nature of the law, the interpretation of the legend of the gatekeeper, and the background behind the work’s creation.

The Magic of the First Sentence

The first sentence of ‘Der Butt’ (‘The Flounder’), a work by Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, begins with “Ilsebill salzte nach.” The first three words of this 1977 novel—“Ilsebill salzte nach”—were recognized in 2007 by a panel of literary experts as the finest opening sentence in the history of German-language fiction. This was because the sentence prompts readers to reflect deeply. In this work—which takes the traditional folktale “The Fisherman and His Wife (Vom Fischer und seiner Frau)” as its starting point and traces the negative history of human culture perpetrated by men—the sentence “Ilsebill added more salt” embodies infinite possibilities for interpretation, serving to convey the significance of women. Thomas Busch, one of the six jury members, spoke of the magic inherent in the novel’s opening sentence as follows: “With the first sentence, the stone begins to roll. The first sentence is a promise, a compass, a riddle, and a flash of lightning. In short, it is the finely diced ingredient that determines the flavor of the entire soup that follows.” This view applies equally to Franz Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ (‘Der Prozess’), which we now have before us. In fact, Kafka’s works were frequently mentioned in the discussion above. Kafka’s opening sentences also exert a magical power, and in this regard, Kafka is often regarded as the precursor to Günter Grass.
The opening sentence of ‘The Trial’ lays bare the protagonist’s psychological state. It begins: “Someone must have slandered Josef K. After all, he was arrested one morning even though he had done nothing wrong.” This sentence, which conveys the extreme bewilderment to the reader, is a classic example of experiential narration, in which the inner states of both the narrator and the protagonist are directly depicted. This sentence functions at times as the narrator’s and at other times as the protagonist’s. In fact, it is closer to a soliloquy by the protagonist, K, than to the narrator’s words. The narrator speaks from a personal perspective rather than an omniscient one. There is virtually no gap between the narrator’s standpoint and that of the protagonist. Consequently, the narrator cannot definitively state whether K was actually framed by someone or not. He can only speculate. This is indicated by the modal auxiliary verb “musste,” which expresses possibility. However, the arrest is a fact. This is because the arrest is precisely described using the legal term “Verhaftung.” All the issues at the heart of this work are lurking within the very first sentence. In particular, the added remark—“even though he hadn’t done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning”—already provides the basis for K to mount a defense. Just as in the opening sentence of ‘The Metamorphosis’ (‘Die Verwandlung’): “One morning, Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams to find himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin,” the reader, too, is drawn into the framework of the first-person narrative as the protagonist is suddenly thrust into this situation. Trapped, how is the protagonist, Josef K, to escape this trap? The arrest is carried out by the court, and K’s self-defense begins with the question, “I haven’t done anything wrong, so why?” One perspective is from above, and the other is from below. Can these two perspectives ever meet? This process forms the central plot of the novel. But what about the ending of this work? “ ‘You’re a dog!’ he said. “The humiliation seemed likely to outlive him,” the work concludes. Between the beginning—a succession of shocks—and the end, what exactly does the protagonist go through? The existential dilemmas the protagonist faces in between are the conditions of life to which we must pay attention. Take Gregor Samsa from ‘The Metamorphosis’, for example: he remains consistently helpless and ultimately, unable to escape his spiderweb, is devoured by the spider of existence. Whether it’s Gregor Samsa or K, they are caught off guard the moment they rise from bed; the start of their daily lives—in stark contrast to the comfort of going to sleep—is this horrifying. Kafka’s protagonists are helpless victims who suffer without any warning. In terms of how they fully stimulate the reader’s curiosity, Kafka’s openings are often compared to those of detective novels. Since the protagonist has done nothing wrong, a happy ending should naturally be guaranteed. However, K’s approach to solving the problem bears no resemblance to that of a detective. Consequently, everything remains a mystery. While one might think that uncovering the invisible entity hidden behind K’s arrest would suffice, finding the key to that door is no easy task for him—just as it was for the protagonist of ‘Das Schloss’. It is akin to the agony of a fragile soul wandering through a nightmare. K’s conception of guilt does not align with the legal system’s definition of crime. This is where his fateful struggle begins. The first sentence’s first-person narrative draws the reader into K’s stifling, dead-end inner world, making them share in the protagonist’s suffering. “Arrest” can refer to an arrest under the law, but it also signifies being bound by something. The final sentence at the end of the work—“The shame seemed likely to outlive him”—clearly illustrates how the protagonist, K, viewed himself. In this sentence, which pierces the protagonist’s inner world through first-person narration, Josef K himself likely knows best what the nature of that shame is.

What is the true nature of the law?

If so, what is the law, and what is the true nature of the court? One day, the protagonist, K, awakens to an unusual morning. Everything unfolds differently than usual. Anna, Mrs. Grubach’s housekeeper, does not bring him breakfast as she normally does, and for some reason, only the figure of the old woman living across the street stands out vividly in his mind. “K waited a little longer, leaning back against his pillow and gazing across at the old woman living across the street. The old woman looked at him with a curious gaze, unlike her usual expression.” Why has he become a spectacle? Why is he the only one unaware of the situation—one that everyone else knows is going wrong? When he rings the bell, a strange man—not the housekeeper—enters. Surprisingly, the man is an inspector. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he informs K: “You cannot leave this place; you are under arrest.” While K accepts this situation, he also wonders if perhaps his coworkers are playing a prank on him. The scenario unfolding solely in his mind does nothing to improve his predicament, because he has no information whatsoever. He has no way of knowing the source of the information. Even the guards themselves do not know the details of why he has been arrested.
They are simply carrying out orders. Here, K becomes a man who knows little about the ways of the world. He doesn’t really understand what the law is or what a court is. He simply follows whatever the guard tells him. “We don’t set out to find those who have committed crimes; rather, we are dispatched—guards like us—because the system is biased toward those deemed guilty, as written in the law.” In fact, when reading this novel, there are more than a few things that leave one wondering. Everything defies common sense. The court does not “instruct” the defendant on exactly when and where to appear. The defendant must find his way there on his own. When he arrives, thinking, “This should be close enough,” the court tells him, “You should have arrived one hour and five minutes ago.” K personally tries to argue his case with the relevant authorities, but that doesn’t really get him anywhere. This is precisely the protagonist K’s perspective on the law and the court. From the moment of his arrest, his thoughts are entirely consumed by the situation of the lawsuit. Since he’s been arrested, this is only natural. However, it’s frustrating because he doesn’t know what he did wrong.
The court appears anonymously. It reveals absolutely nothing of its true nature. This novel merely allows for interpretations from various angles; it does not clearly present a single correct answer. The interpretation of the law we encounter most frequently is, of course, the protagonist K’s own. As the novel progresses, he consistently voices his sense of injustice through internal monologue. Yet even this lacks any sense of proactivity. Although he attends the preliminary hearing, he ultimately does not acknowledge its legitimacy. Instead, he attempts to argue his own point of view to the audience present there.
As you read the work, you find yourself asking, “What on earth is this?” Traditionally, we think of “the law” as something bright and fair. Yet in this work, the court is located in the attic of a building; the officials who come to enforce the law sneak bites of other people’s food; and the women working in court-related offices are all obsessed with seducing men, as if driven by lust. These characters are far removed from anything good or righteous. In particular, the scene where the guards haggle among themselves over K’s clothes—even though he has been arrested but not yet taken anywhere—is laughable. The author mercilessly mocks our common sense. In his view, the world of the law only breeds suspicion. The very premise feels as though it’s designed to take issue with something and mock it.
Is the law truly enforced fairly in our real lives? The essence of satire lies in laying bare the true nature of our hearts without reservation. How pathetic and ridiculous it all appears when we see with our own eyes not what is on the surface, but the reality hidden within. It is in this regard that we can understand why Kafka’s literature is regarded as representative of German Expressionism. This is because the exposure of the reality hidden within the human psyche is the very core of Expressionism. In the stifling courtroom, with its oppressive atmosphere, K is led out of the attic courtroom with support—what an absurd scene this is. It is the feeble image of a petty bourgeois who, overwhelmed by the atmosphere, is unable to handle his own affairs properly. Let’s look at that passage. “Suddenly, he felt the hand of the court attendant on one armpit and the hand of the young lady on the other. ‘Come on, get up, you weakling.’” K’s self-inflicted weakness evokes our sympathy and reveals that something within his heart is pulling him toward weakness. Nevertheless, he goes to see the painter Titorelli, who is painting portraits of the court judges, listens to all sorts of underhanded schemes, and agrees with a significant portion of them. For instance, K is taken in by the painter’s words: “I forgot to ask you first. What kind of release do you want? There are three ways: an actual acquittal, a superficial acquittal, or a delay in the verdict.” These so-called three methods are nothing more than sophistry and offer no help whatsoever in resolving K’s situation. In a way, it’s like a sick person going to the hospital but, instead of having the cause of the illness surgically removed, continuing to visit shamans for rituals, asking all sorts of people for advice, and wandering aimlessly on the fringes—only to make the illness worse. The painter’s tricks regarding the court’s verdict are truly a sight to behold. In this passage, Kafka showcases the charm of a quintessentially German-style debate. Terms like “a superficial acquittal” or “a delayed verdict” are fascinating in themselves. In such a situation, one can’t help but wonder even more deeply what the true nature of the law really is. The uncle who values the family’s reputation above all else; the lawyer introduced by the uncle, who merely uses his own status as a means to an end; the eccentric painter who sketches portraits of the judges; and the lawyer’s mistress, who throws herself at him at the slightest provocation—all of these are subjects for caricature and form a group of characters worthy of a montage. But does K have any way out of this situation? For him, there is neither an entrance nor an exit. In short, the law is portrayed as a force that drives reality. An unknown force that lives and moves within reality, controlling people’s thoughts and directing them in a certain direction—that is what the law is in this work.

Sexuality and the Power of Authority

K makes every effort to prove his innocence, but his relationships with the women he meets along the way raise doubts as to whether he is truly focused on the issue at hand. K’s behavior in the work is not entirely upright. His primary motivation for interacting with various women is to prove his innocence by any means necessary. One can glimpse his ulterior motive of using sex as a tool of power, starting with his relationship with Miss Bürstner, who lives in the same boarding house. “Having said that, K rushed forward and showered her with kisses, first on her lips and then all over her face. It was as if a thirsty beast had finally found a spring and was lapping at it with its tongue. Finally, he kissed her neck, pressing his lips there for a long time.” This behavior is a far cry from his original intention of seeking her acknowledgment of his innocence. His underlying motive is to draw her attention to his case, but the scene of his affair with the court clerk’s wife epitomizes how he is straying from the heart of the matter.
“And perhaps there was no finer revenge than snatching this woman away from the investigating judge and his cronies and making her his own. Then the investigating judge, after laboriously drafting a false report on K, would find the woman’s bed empty late at night. Why would the bed be empty? Because the woman had become K’s. Because that woman standing by the window now—that voluptuous, soft, warm body wrapped in coarse, thick fabric—had become his alone.” The same applies to his relationship with Leni, the young woman caring for the lawyer. The lawyer’s remark that Leni considers all the men she represents to be handsome men is amusing. Since K was also on trial, he must have seemed quite attractive to her. Although they exchange intensely passionate glances from the very beginning, their relationship is not true love. On K’s part, he actually seeks to use these women for the sake of his own lawsuit. That said, the court does not consider this grounds for guilt. This is because the court itself is steeped in corruption, malfeasance, and sexual desire. However, the women’s behavior is neither chaotic nor ambiguous—it is simply clear; it is only K’s consciousness that is shrouded in fog.

Is it a debate over the “Legend of the Gatekeeper,” or an awakening from self-deception or delusion?

The debate between K and the priest in the cathedral over the fable “Before the Law” is the highlight of this story. This legend serves as a crucial key to understanding ‘The Trial’ as a whole. Kafka cherished this short story so much that he recited it to several acquaintances and even included it in his self-compiled collection, ‘A Country Doctor (Ein Landarzt)’. It is precisely this legend that conceals sharp and bitter questions beneath its plain, unadorned prose. Although the narrative is unassuming, the content is irrational and difficult to comprehend. The questions it raises include: What is ultimately right and what is wrong? What goals should humans pursue? And does a truth that is truly beyond reproach even exist? From its very first sentence, the legend delivers its message to us in a forceful tone: “Before the Law stands a gatekeeper.” The simultaneous presence of the abstract concept of “law” and the concrete figure of the “gatekeeper” within the same space leaves the reader perplexed. Why is the countryman trying to enter this abstract world, and why is the gatekeeper trying to prevent him? The countryman asks if he can enter the realm of law now, and the gatekeeper replies that he cannot at this moment, though he adds that it might be possible later. It is a scene where enigmatic questions and answers are exchanged. The relationship between the first and last sentences of this legend is similar to that between the first and last sentences of the entire work ‘The Trial’. This is because everything unfolds between those two sentences. Everything is relative; nothing is certain in the present—it is simply open-ended. By placing a gatekeeper before the abstract “law,” the reader is led to speculate to some extent whether “law” is being used here as a metaphor for something else.
As the priest recounts this legend to K, he states bluntly: “‘You keep expecting help from others,’ the priest said in a disapproving tone. ‘Especially from women. Don’t you realize that’s not real help?’” This exchange, which takes place just before the novel’s climax, is K’s last chance to recognize his own guilt. It is at this very moment that the priest tells K the story of the gatekeeper. A spotlight is cast on K’s actions up to this point. Assuming he harbors no prejudice against K, the priest attempts to awaken K to his own prejudices. K refuses to understand this parable from the priest’s perspective. He tries to deny everything.
At the gate of the Law stands the lowest-ranking gatekeeper, and the deeper one goes inside, the more gatekeepers are lined up in tier upon tier. However, K and the priest put forward opposing views regarding this text. The crux of the matter is whether there was a delusion or deception. K believes that the gatekeeper deceived the man from the countryside. This is because of the gatekeeper’s statement that the Gate of the Law existed solely for the man from the countryside, and now that the man is dying, the gate must be closed. Upon hearing this, K concludes that he, too, had misunderstood the Law and its function. Regarding the interpretation of the text, the priest says, “Commentators on the original text say this about the matter: They say that grasping something correctly and grasping it incorrectly are not entirely mutually exclusive.” The fact that one interpretation is not entirely correct and another is not entirely incorrect points to the possibility of relative interpretations of the subject. However, K, believing that there must be something behind the delusion and deception, desires an absolute truth—that is, a clear point of reference that would sweep away all misunderstandings at once. K fails to clearly recognize that the very nature of the law or the courts is that they cannot define certain things, cannot interpret them—in short, that they are intangible. This is where K’s “sin” is revealed. K constantly tries to emphasize that others are at fault and refuses to admit his own wrongdoing. The structure of self-justification alone consistently dominates his consciousness. The passage that appears at the very end of “The Legend of the Gatekeeper”—“Finally, the man’s eyesight grew so weak that he could no longer tell whether his surroundings had truly grown dark or whether his eyes were merely playing tricks on him. Yet, in the darkness, the man now discerns a distinct ray of light emanating from the gate of the Law”—offers many insights. What was it that caused a man from the countryside to be so captivated by the lowliest gatekeeper before his eyes that he could see nothing beyond him and came to regard only that gatekeeper as the greatest obstacle?
Joseph K.’s “The Trial” is a process of interpreting his own guilt. It is difficult to interpret the nature of the law or the court in a single phrase. How does the law identify the guilty? “The saying that the court leans toward the guilty kept echoing in his mind. Because of this, he somehow felt that the room where the hearing would take place would be on the side of the staircase he had chosen.” Rather than pursuing someone, the court rushes toward those who are already conscious of having committed a crime—though it would be more accurate to say that the law is enforced directly through the words and actions of those who harbor such a consciousness. Guilt depends on whether the person acknowledges it or not. Therefore, whether K is guilty or not depends entirely on his own self-awareness. This perspective serves as the premise for interpreting Kafka’s “The Trial.” Consequently, interpretations of “The Trial” continue to generate only a multitude of possibilities without ever arriving at a clear answer. Consequently, various interpretive keys—such as existential and theological interpretations—emerge, and we can only strive in our own way to open the door to the law, much like the countryman in the legend of the gatekeeper.

The Biographical Background of “The Trial”

The year 1912 is generally regarded as the period in Kafka’s life when his literature and personal life began to interact in a closely intertwined manner. The event that came to the forefront of Kafka’s life during this period was his engagement to Felice Bauer. On August 13 of that year, Kafka visited the home of his friend Max Brod and met her—a twenty-five-year-old woman four years his junior—for the first time. Felice had dropped out of business school, which she had started in 1908, due to her father’s financial circumstances; she worked as a stenographer and typist at a record company in Berlin before moving on to a large firm called Karl Lindström, where she continued her career. By the time she met Kafka, she was already working as a business representative. After two engagements and two breakups, the couple finally parted ways for good in Prague in 1917. During this period, Kafka sent her letters amounting to over 500 printed pages.
Details regarding his engagement to Felice are well documented in Kafka’s diary. In particular, a draft of a letter he wrote to her father captures Kafka’s inner turmoil as he wavered between literature and social life; this conflict, which contrasts with the voice of the suitor pleading for his daughter’s hand, contains an innocence that draws our attention. “The position I hold is too much for me to bear. It conflicts with literature, which is the only thing I want to do in this world and my calling.
Without literature, I am nothing and can be nothing else; and because I refuse to be anything else, no matter how much my job tries to pull me in, it is futile, and in the end, I alone will be completely ruined.” An engagement born of such conflict could not possibly be smooth. To say that one wishes to pursue literature and cannot endure one’s job is tantamount to rejecting even the everyday life of marriage and voicing one’s negative views on marriage itself. Feliziter Bauer had to exercise a great deal of patience, because Kafka was negative about getting married and starting a family. Although he didn’t feel much romantic love for Feliziter Bauer at first, the feelings that gradually developed were also hindered by his thoughts on literature. For Kafka, a soul wandering between literature and his professional life, marriage to a woman was yet another humiliation and burden. In fact, a strong antisocial streak lay deeply latent within Kafka’s nature. Reaching a final decision on whether to marry or not was no easy task for him. His diary entry dated July 21, 1913, even contains a passage where he systematically weighed the pros and cons of marriage, listing them one by one. Yet his deliberations failed to reach a resolution. Instead, he simply concluded that everything he had achieved was the product of solitude. He believed that everything other than literature was shallow. In fact, Kafka often felt jealous of outstanding literary works and writers rather than of other men who were socially successful. This was because he himself wanted to be literature. As the one who conceived and gave birth to his works, he was, in a sense, literature itself.
Regarding his breakup with Felice Bauer (July 1914), Kafka used the term “courtroom,” and in a letter written in mid-October 1914 to her friend Grete Bloch, he suggests that this engagement was the very motivation behind writing ‘The Trial’. “She looked like a female judge presiding over me at the Askanis Hof Hotel, but in reality, I was the one sitting in her seat and had never relinquished it.” This passage describes his difficult relationship with his fiancée, Felice Bauer, and reveals that everything depended on his own direction. Because he clings to it with such desperate longing, he cannot leave the scene of “the most pointless thing in the world”—a situation he could easily abandon and walk away from. If so, the execution at the end of the play must be seen as an execution he inflicted upon himself. This can be inferred from the scene where he agonizes over whether he should seize the executioners’ knives and stab himself in the chest. He has committed some wrongdoing and is willing to bear the sacrifice for it himself. If we transpose K onto Kafka, we can make the following observation. In Kafka’s life, that wrongdoing was precisely the guilt he felt over the death of Felice Bauer’s father, which occurred during the process of their broken engagement. His thought that he would only find peace of mind by shouldering all the guilt for ruining an entire family is recorded in his diary entry dated December 5, 1914. Ultimately, however, Kafka’s heart lay with literature. He staged his own life through literature.
It is estimated that he began writing ‘The Trial’ on August 11, 1914—one and a half years after he had set aside work on ‘The Missing Person (Der Verschollene)’. On May 30, 1914, after much deliberation, Kafka traveled to Berlin to become engaged to Felice Bauer. However, the very fact that he had reached this decision only caused him further anguish. The conflicting emotions—his desire to marry and his anxiety about marriage—led him to make the following note in his diary entry dated June 6 of that same year:
I’ve returned from Berlin. I feel as if I’ve been tightly bound with ropes like a criminal. Even if I were actually shackled, shoved into a corner, and placed under police surveillance, I don’t think I’d feel this tormented.
The psychological strain resulting from the engagement proved to be an unbearable burden not only for Kafka but also for Felice Bauer. On July 20, he visited Berlin again and met with Bauer at the same Askanis Hof Hotel. After discussing various matters, he ultimately announced the breakup of their engagement. His state of mind at that time is dramatically revealed in his diary entry dated July 23, through expressions such as “the hotel’s courtroom” and “guilty despite being innocent.” Given the circumstances described above, Kafka frequently used legal terminology—particularly terms associated with criminals—to describe his own life. While this reflects his studies in law, it also reveals the immense guilt he was tormented by. The thought that he could not fulfill the civic duties associated with marriage—which, in a sense, are utterly ordinary—led him to define himself as a criminal deserving of punishment. The nature of this proxy war waged through writing is revealed in this section. In a sense, this becomes a “lawsuit.”
Kafka, then thirty years old, began writing “The Trial” in August 1914. The protagonist, K, is executed on the night before his thirty-first birthday. In fact, this work is based on manuscripts written between August 1914 and January 1915. The manuscript, which includes several unfinished chapters, was published in 1925 by his friend Max Brod after the author’s death. The story spans exactly one year, from Josef K’s thirtieth birthday to the night before his thirty-first—that is, just before his execution. Ultimately, the trial is a drama staged by K himself. So, did Kafka kill K out of love for literature? Or did he kill K for failing to fulfill his social obligations? Whatever the reason, the fact that Kafka wrote the first chapter—dealing with Josef K’s arrest—and the final chapter—depicting the execution scene—first carries significant implications for the interpretation of the work, both biographically and literarily.

On the “Unfinished Chapters” and the Work’s Editions

Confronting the realities of life constantly drove Kafka to write new works. His decision to halt work on ‘The Missing Person’ and plan a new, large-scale novel can also be understood from this perspective. It appears he intended to psychologically come to terms with the process of engagement and breakup through literature. This method of continuously restarting his work in fragments became established as Kafka’s new writing style. This is precisely the approach he employed in writing ‘The Trial’; as he put it, “if the first sentence is difficult to handle,” he would sit on several sentences at once, “trying to overcome this difficulty by any means necessary.” Thus, he consistently applied this method—starting a new chapter whenever he hit a wall while writing an existing one—to the composition of ‘The Trial’, continuing his work until the end of January 1915. As mentioned earlier, writing the first and last chapters first served to prevent, in advance, the result of this endless process from leaving all his writings as fragmented pieces.
Kafka ultimately sorted through these separately written fragments and rearranged them in his own way. First, he divided them into completed and unfinished sections, assigning titles to each completed group. He attached covers with brief summaries to the unfinished sections. In this way, the completed and unfinished chapters are clearly distinguished within the work. Of course, it was editors—including his friend Max Brod—who arranged these various chapters in this manner after Kafka’s death. In the Pasley edition, the historical-critical edition used for this translation, works such as “B’s Girlfriend,” “The Prosecutor,” “Going to Elsa,” “The Fight with the Deputy Manager,” “The Government Building,” and “Visiting Mother” were included in the section of unfinished chapters.
Upon Kafka’s death, Brot took charge of his manuscripts. Seeking to establish Kafka—who had been known during his lifetime primarily as the author of relatively short works—as a writer of full-length novels, Brot planned a publication strategy focused on his novels and first organized Kafka’s works in the order in which they were written. Taking various circumstances into account, the first work to be published was ‘The Trial’. Thus, in 1925, ‘The Trial’ was first published under his supervision by the Berlin-based publishing house Die Schmiede. Prior to that, in 1921, he had described this text in one of his writings as “Kafka’s greatest work” and affirmed that it was a “completed” work. However, as early as 1919, while Kafka was still alive, he had already told Kafka, half-jokingly, “I’ll finish your ‘The Trial’ myself.” It appears that Brot, believing he knew Kafka better than anyone else in the world, had been carrying out his own editorial work. Consequently, he arranged the parts of the narrative that were clearly defined in the order dictated by their content, while omitting the unfinished chapters—which he deemed “not particularly important to the plot’s development”—from the initial publication altogether.
About ten years later, Brot republished the work; this second edition was released in 1935 by the German publisher Schocken as the third volume of the “Complete Works.” It was at this time that the so-called “unfinished chapters” were printed for the first time. Then, in 1946, the same publisher—which had since relocated to New York—published a third edition. This edition was a facsimile of the second edition and included a postscript by Brod. In this postscript, he directly addresses the issues he faced in editing the manuscript. Subsequent editions have followed this version exactly.
Meanwhile, in 1975, work began on finalizing a historical-critical edition of Kafka’s complete works, and in 1990, ‘The Trial’ was also published anew for the first time by Malcolm Pasley. This project involved examining Kafka’s manuscripts from a textual-critical perspective to accurately determine the period during which the text was produced. While there is no significant difference from Brot’s work, the chapter that Brot referred to as the “first chapter” was divided into two chapters, and “B’s Girlfriend” was classified as an unfinished chapter and included as an appendix.