The Judgment

The story mirrors key tensions in Kafka's life during this period - his strained relationship with his domineering father, his recent engagement to Felice Bauer, and his conflicted identity as a Jewish businessman-by-day, writer-by-night. The protagonist Georg Bendemann shares Kafka's predicament of being caught between filial duty and personal ambition, between the demands of bourgeois society and artistic calling. The mysterious friend in Russia echoes Kafka's own sense of exile within his native Prague, a German-speaking Jew in a predominantly Czech city.

Kafka considered The Judgment one of his most successful works, calling it "legitimately myself." The text's brutal efficiency - moving from realistic family drama to surreal psychological execution in mere pages - established the trademark Kafkaesque progression where everyday reality warps into nightmare without clear transition points. Georg's strange compulsion to carry out his father's death sentence foreshadows themes Kafka would develop in later works like The Trial and The Metamorphosis - the individual's bewildering complicity in their own destruction at the hands of authority. The story's original German publication included a dedication to Felice Bauer, though their tumultuous engagement would eventually collapse under pressures similar to those that destroy Georg Bendemann.

The tale culminates in Georg’s tragic act of self-destruction, following his father’s pronouncement of a death sentence. This ending resonates as a symbolic enactment of Kafka’s broader concerns with guilt, judgment, and submission to inscrutable authority. The narrative’s surreal logic—where domestic interactions escalate into metaphysical proclamations—foreshadows Kafka’s later works. When viewed in the context of Kafka's life, The Judgment demonstrates the writer’s ability to transmute private turmoil into a universal, haunting vision of human fragility under oppressive forces.

This modern translation from the original German is a fresh, accessible and beautifully rendered text that brings to life Kafka's great literary work. This edition contains extra amplifying material including an illuminating afterword, a timeline of Kafka's life and works alongside of the historical events which shaped his art, and a short biography, to place this work in its socio-historical context.