The Judgment
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- For other uses, see The Judgment (disambiguation).
The Judgment (Das Urteil) is a short story by Franz Kafka which depicts the conversation between a man and his father, where many conflicts arise. The story has been analyzed under the scope of psychoanalysis. The story was written on the night of September 22, 1912 and finished by the morning.[1] This coincides with the eve of the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur—the Day of Atonement—which is also known in Hebrew as Yom ha-Din, the Day of Judgment.[2] The story was written at a time when Kafka wrote some of his best known works (such as The Metamorphosis).
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[edit] Plot summary [3]
The story begins when a young businessman by the name of Georg Bendemann tries to write a letter to a friend of his living in Russia. Georg has not seen his friend in three years deeply contemplates and repeatedly analyzes whether or not he should discuss the details of his life with his friend. Georg has recently been engaged to a girl from a well-to-do family, and his business had grown quite dramatically in the last two years.
But Georg's friend has not been fairing well in Russia and, in Georg's words, "had resigned himself to becoming an incurable bachelor" with little to no commercial success. As a result Georg has kept most details of his life secret from his friend, including his engagement and commercial success. Georg rationalizes this by saying he's afraid his friend would get hurt, or that he might envy him.
But after contemplating on this issue for a while — and after remember how his fiancée had been offended by Georg keep their engagement a secret from his friend — he ends his letter with the news of his engagement to Fraulein Frieda Brandenfeld (his fiancée). He finishes the letter and goes to another room to consult his father about the situation.
Georg had not set foot in his father room for months (being busy with his business and fiancée). The room appears shokingly dark and the windows are closed, and the remains of his father's breakfast, not much of which had been eaten, stood on the table. To Georg's surprise, his father does not recall his friend in St. Petersburg. Detecting a certain weakness in his father, Georg reproaches himself for neglecting his father. He resolves to take care of him from now on and remove him from the miserable condition he's in right now.
Georg carries his father to his room and lies him on his bed. His father then draws the blanket especially high over his shoulders and asks him if he's well-covered. After Georg remarks "Don't worry, you're all covered up," his father suddenly jumps out of the bed and starts yelling at him.
In a dramatic show, the father explains that not only does he remember who Georg's friend is, but that he has been communicating with him secretly and "he knows everything". The father talks in an accusative way and ends his speech by saying: "So now you know what else existed in the world outside of you, before you knew only about yourself! Yes, you were a truly innocent child, but you were even more truly an evil man!—And for that reason, I hereby sentence you to death by drowning!"
Georg immediately runs to a nearby bridge, from which he throws himself to the river.
[edit] Interpretation
In the story, the exile friend in Russia exerts considerable power over the other characters—Georg, his father, and his fiancée, Frieda. In his diaries, Kafka wrote that the friend is the strongest connection between Georg and his father, for it is through this link that his father is able to reassert himself as paterfamilias and his son's enemy and that Georg is able to submissively accept him as such. Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates.[4]
[edit] Translation
A virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings. An example is the Kafka's use of the German noun Verkehr in the final sentence of the story. The sentence can be translated as: "At that moment an unending stream of traffic crossed over the bridge."[5] What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation."[6]
[edit] Trivia
- Kafka dedicated the story to his then-fiancée, Felice Bauer.[7]
[edit] Notes
- ^ p. ix The Trial, Penguin Classics 2000.
- ^ Kafka (1996), p. viii.
- ^ Kafka (1996), pp. 62–75.
- ^ Kafka (1996, xiii–xiv).
- ^ Kafka (1996, 75).
- ^ Kafka (1996, xi–xii).
- ^ Kafka (1996, xii).
[edit] References
- Kafka, Franz (1996). The Metamorphosis and Other Stories, trans. Donna Freed. New York: Barnes & Noble. ISBN 1-56619-969-7.
[edit] External links
| The Works of Franz Kafka |
|---|
| Novels: The Metamorphosis ǀ The Trial ǀ The Castle ǀ Amerika
Short Stories : "Description of a Struggle" ǀ "Wedding Preparations in the Country" ǀ "The Judgment" ǀ "In the Penal Colony" ǀ "The Village Schoolmaster (The Giant Mole)" ǀ "Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor" ǀ "The Warden of the Tomb" ǀ "A Country Doctor" ǀ "The Hunter Gracchus" ǀ "The Great Wall of China" ǀ "A Report to an Academy" ǀ "The Refusal" ǀ "A Hunger Artist" ǀ "Investigations of a Dog" ǀ "A Little Woman" ǀ "The Burrow" ǀ "Josephine the Singer, or The Mouse Folk" |
