The Judgment (Kafka)

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The judgment (subtitle: A story for Felice B. ) is a novella by Franz Kafka written in 1912 (on the night of September 22nd to 23rd) and published in 1913 .

Summary

The story has the character of a novella and is about a father-son conflict .
Georg Bendemann, son of a merchant, engaged and about to get married, corresponds by letter with his - from his point of view - hapless friend in Petersburg . In order to spare him, Georg withholds much of his own successful life in his letters. But after much thought and eager persuasion on the part of his future wife, he decides to tell him about his upcoming wedding. When Georg goes to his father with the letter, there is a dispute. During the dispute, the son learns that his father has allegedly been in contact with his Petersburg friend for a long time and has long since informed him about everything. The father accuses Georg of having usurped the management of the business and to have chosen a disrespectful fiancée. He ends the argument with the words: “I am sentencing you to the death of drowning!” Then the son runs out of the house, rushes to the river, swings over the railing, “called softly: 'But dear parents, I have you guys always loved ', and let himself fall down. ”(In the first edition of 1913 it said:“ ... and let himself fall. ”)

shape

The surrealistic “unheard-of incident” makes it justified to assign the story to the genre “novella”. However, various interpreters also classify it merely as a narrative or, like Kafka in the subtitle, as a story .

The work can be divided into four scenes:

  • George with a letter at the window
  • Georg goes to his father
  • Dispute with the father
  • Judgment and Enforcement

Other classifications are also possible.

The narrative perspective reflects the thoughts of the son, but not those of the father. The father is portrayed through his criticizing, threatening and cynical utterances, which remain largely incomprehensible to both the son and the reader. The latter remains solely dependent on Georg's perception. The anonymous narrator's view of Georg is sober and apathetic. His look at Georg's fall from the bridge at the end of the story shows a dynamic in which the individual psychological moment is extinguished. It combines the impressions of big city life with the reflection of cinematic acceleration of movement and the agony of the protagonist.

background

According to Kafka's diary entry of September 23, 1912, he put the story on paper in just eight hours on the night of September 22nd to 23rd. This night is often seen as the birth of the world-famous man of letters. Kafka described the creation of the work as follows: “The story came out of me like a real birth covered with dirt and slime.” He used the metaphor of “birth” several times in his diaries and letters to illustrate his artistic creative process. A year before the verdict , he complained that he was unable to create a coherent story: “If I were to be able to write a larger whole, well-formed from beginning to end, then the story could never finally break away from me and I should be able to Listening to a healthy story of your lecture calmly and with open eyes as a blood relative, but every bit of the story runs around homeless and drives me in the opposite direction. "

The first edition contains the dedication “For Fraulein Felice B.” In the diary entry of February 11, 1913, he himself pointed out that Kafka had dealt with himself and his relationship with Felice in the judgment . In a letter he also asked her: "Do you find any meaning in the 'judgment' ... I cannot find it and cannot explain anything in it."

Indeed, Kafka's own remarks hardly help to interpret the story. He himself questioned the existence of the friend in Russia, saying that the friend was “perhaps more of what the father and Georg have in common.” He mentioned “Thoughts of Freud, of course,” without going into psychological contexts and looking for an explanation there.

Max Brod claimed that in the last sentence of the story with the "almost infinite traffic" over the bridge, Kafka had thought of a strong ejaculation . This also results in the surprising interpretation variant that the judgment justifies a symbolic separation of the cord from the parental home and represents becoming one with the “infinite intercourse” (the flow of life) in the outside world. This interpretation as a symbolic cutting of the cord is supported by further observations: Since there is no reference to an actual death of George in the story, the escape from the parental home can be understood as detachment. The jump from the bridge (a transitional medium) into the river, which has functioned symbolically as a place of rebirth since ancient times, is like entering a self-determined life at the side of the self-chosen woman, in short: a ritual rebirth.

people

It is noticeable that all the people appearing are subject to extreme changes and sometimes inexplicably represent divergent characters.

George

He is initially introduced as a very positive figure. Sitting by the window on a spring day, he writes a letter to his hapless friend in Russia. Georg got engaged and can look back on great business successes in recent years. But even in the considerations that he makes while writing this letter, one recognizes doubts, scruples and insecurities in him that do not correspond to the success described above. The doubts arise from an uncertain sympathy for the friend, because Georg seems to be not only on friendly terms with him, but rather to behave distantly.

Probably because of these doubts, Georg does not send the letter off immediately, but first goes to his father, presumably to get his approval. In the father's room, the son experiences him initially as a frail old man, to whom he immediately shows sympathy, whereby he resolves to take better care of him in the future. The father reacts to it unexpectedly and frighteningly. He rejects Georg's care as paternalism. He attributes the new business success to his own good preparation, but not to Georg's work. The fiancé, who, as far as she appears in the story, is portrayed as positive, he reviles as an ordinary person. The friend in Russia, with whom he has secret contacts, is a son after his heart. He describes his own son as a devilish person.

Georg is completely incapable of reacting to these monstrosities of the angry fatherly outburst. You can almost experience the dismantling of a personality from a successful person to a stammering child through the hypnotizing influence of the father. He always only reacts with short, confused objections, which his father also notices. Georg neither defends himself in his position as a son (or an independent person) nor does he defend his fiancée.

When his father condemns him to the "death of drowning", it only triggers panic in Georg, he feels chased out of the room and continues to hunt unconsciously to the bridge to drop into the river there. He is incapable of a cool intellectual assessment or even a rebellion against his father's judgment, which has no public legitimacy whatsoever, unlike a legal judgment. Why this is so is not explained in the story. Only the fateful ending is presented here.

It can be assumed that the reasons (if there are real reasons) lie in Georg's family history. His last saying: “Dear parents, I have always loved you”, refers to the earlier life and growing up with the parents. Deep feelings of inferiority and the desire to be still in tune with the father could be a possible key to why he submits to the judgment so unconditionally.

Georg's father

He is introduced as a pitiful, frail old man who lives in a small, dark room. His expressed doubts about the existence of his friend in Russia seem to have to be attributed to an age confusion. But then you realize that he has headed very specifically to reproach his son for the praise of this friend.

Suddenly George's father appears as a giant and a horror picture before whom he becomes very small, i.e. a child. It is not explained why the father despises the son's business performance and why he brings the fiancée close to a cancan dancer (= prostitute). The things that signal Georg's success at the beginning of the story are turned against Georg by the father. The father has great mental power over Georg. But his disgust for Georg is so strong that with the execution of the sentence he has the extinction of his clan - other children of the father are not mentioned - bring about.

With the announcement of the verdict, the father collapses as well, as Georg briefly registers as he rushes out.

The Petersburg friend

This is shadowy and only appears indirectly and without a name. Georg initially described it as a deplorable existence: emigrants to Russia, bad business, lonely, carrying an illness. However, the father declares that he appreciates this man much more than his own son, without giving any reasons. It seems paradoxical that the father prefers this joyless bachelor so much to his son.

In the beginning, the friend is the one to whom you only pass on knowledge in a filtered manner and thus make him inferior. Through the secret correspondence between friend and father, Georg is now in the situation of ignorance and deception, but the friend clearly overlooks everything. Kafka questioned the actual existence of the friend and only described it as an expression of the commonality between father and son. At the same time, however, the preference for the friend is the huge wedge that the father has long driven between himself and Georg.

One can also see the friend as Kafka's alter ego. The friend lives the way Kafka propagates that you have to live as an artist: lonely, little gainful employment, no marriage. It is significant that the friend Georg wanted to move to Russia too. The figure of the distant friend is reminiscent of the lonely man in the Russian railway station from memories of the Kaldabahn . But it is also reminiscent of the ascetic bachelor figure of the prayer in that early story by Kafka, which often anticipates "The Judgment" in detail, namely in " Description of a Struggle ". There the “fat man” speaks of him as “my friend who prayers”, and this “fat man” also falls into a river. “My friend who prayers” becomes the “Petersburg friend” of almost the same name, and the fat man becomes Georg Bendemann.

Variety of interpretations

The judgment is probably Kafka's most frequently interpreted work, perhaps even in German-language literature. Well more than 200 published German-language attempts at interpretation are now known, and an end is not in sight. In view of the fact that this brief history with its extremely changing people and contexts led the most varied of methods of literary theory (including hermeneutics , structuralism , reception aesthetics , discourse analysis ) to a variety of interpretations, the American critic Susan Sontag even speaks of Kafka being the victim of a Mass rape by an army of performers. Compare also the interpretation of his complete works.

Kafka, too, has dealt with the judgment in various ways in letters and diary entries . His summary sentence is characteristic: "But I'm not sure of that either."

Biographical interpretation

The story can be interpreted autobiographically and can be traced back to both Kafka's conflict with his father and a similar case among his friends. There are three main readings that assume an inner relationship between Kafka and his character Georg:

  • On the one hand, the story touches on the subliminal battle of feelings between father and son, which, as is well known, burdened Kafka all his life. His self-esteem depended on the judgment of his father, who kept telling him that Kafka's successes were void and that it would end up badly for him. So Kafka developed the guilty attitude towards life of a deceiver, a falsehood that the father blames the son in his judgment . Kafka's existential feeling of guilt (also fed from other sources), which sometimes expressed itself in an almost masochistic desire for self-destruction, finds its counterpart in the narrative in the unopposed acceptance of the accusation speech and the compliant self-execution.
  • On a second level of meaning, the story touches on the sin of life of emotional coldness, which Kafka accused himself of inwardly and which in his lovelessness and heartlessness towards other people (here: the friend, the betrothed and the father) and in his too narrow self-centeredness (Kafka's marriage problems) saw. The father throws these sins of life (more or less coded) at Georg's head, and his complaintless acceptance of the judgment suggests that this corresponds to a deadly act of self-recognition (Georgs and Kafkas).
  • The third reading focuses on the fact that Georg's friend shares many of his attributes with the author Kafka: He has no business acumen, lives in isolation and has no female relationship - like an alter ego Kafka. The narrative thus embodies an inner-personal confrontation between two parts of Kafka's personality, with Georg rather representing the ideal image of the son desired by Kafka's real father (interested in business, socially eloquent, willing to marry), while the friend who is apparently closer to the fictional father embodies Kafka's actual characteristics. As an author, Kafka, to a certain extent, lets himself into the thought game that he, as Georg, is this father-conforming businessman that he could not actually be. At the same time, he imagines the fulfillment of a wish that his father basically just loves his unworldly son. What is characteristic of his story is that Kafka punishes this self-betrayal of his dominant, unworldly self fatally.
  • A story is told here that can no longer only be read as a communicative father-son conflict, but rather unfolds model scenes of an intra-family power struggle for life and death, which is not only verbal but also physically like a choreography (kneeling down of the son, carrying the father, covering the father, raising the father up). In the “family” apparatus of power, the social, erotic and economic structures are inextricably linked as determining factors of bourgeois existence. Due to the death of the mother on the one hand and Georg's marriage intentions and business successes on the other, the family power structure changes, which the father restores at the price of the extinction of the family.

Kafka's letter to his father , which was written seven years later, is illuminating for the “judgment” . Various motifs from the “judgment” can be found here, for example the son's strong, speech-inhibiting uncertainty, the gigantic nature of the father and the fiancée portrayed as offensive by the father. In the same year, 1919, Elf Söhne also appeared , in which the partly latent, partly open rejection of the eleven different sons by an ultimately unhappy father is discussed. There are also references to the novella The Metamorphosis , which was written shortly after the judgment . There, too, a son who does not live up to his family's demands is asked to disappear in the end and dies.

The fact that Kafka dedicated the “judgment” to his new girlfriend Felice Bauer was not without risk. The woman in the story with the initials F. B. is portrayed as vulgar by the father. The relationship with her is one of the recognizable reasons why the father rejects Georg so much. How Felice related this is not known. After the later betrothal, Kafka obviously destroyed all of her letters.

What speaks against Kafka's overly autobiographical identification with Georg Bendemann, however, is that Kafka's father and his son did not have the problem that he wanted to suppress or dominate him. The exact opposite was true.
By the way, Kafka was an excellent acrobatic swimmer. A jump from a great height into a river would have been a sporting feat for him, but hardly a safe suicide method. On the other hand, for Kafka, as portrayed years later in the fragment The Great Swimmer , the idea of ​​a swimmer who attained great sporting honors, but actually couldn't swim at all, was present.

So the end of the story contains both the fatal failure and at the same time a secret escape from the father's verdict.

Quotes

"But if he really followed the advice [...] he would remain in a foreign country despite everything, embittered by the advice, and even a little more estranged from his friends [...] would not find his way around his friends and not without them, would suffer." Shame, really no longer have a home or friends; wasn't it much better for him then, he stayed in a foreign country as he was? "

- Georg about the friend

“He carried his father to bed in his arms. He had a terrible feeling when he noticed during the few steps to the bed that his father was playing with his watch chain. "

“So now you know what else there was outside of you, until now you only knew about yourself! You were actually an innocent child, but actually you were a devilish person. - And therefore know: I am condemning you now to the death of drowning! "

- The father

reception

Arkadia from 1913, in which The Judgment first appeared
Original paperback of the first single print in 1916
  • Stach (p. 115 ff.) Emphasizes the positive, confirmatory effect of the judgment on Kafka as a man of letters. It was his first work from a single source that was created in a single productive batch without various fragmentary stages.
  • Rieck (p. 32/33), on the other hand, emphasizes that Kafka's early story “Description of a Struggle” already contains practically all of the important characters and plot elements of the “Judgment”, which can explain its emergence in just one night. According to Rieck, both texts and also Kafka's main work are the description of the struggle between two irreconcilable, problematic parts of the personality: one ascetic and one vital.
  • Alt (p. 324) writes that a fight is staged in which the gestures and postures illustrate a separate order of power.
  • Sudau (p. 57): “If in Georg's father, as in the doorkeeper Before the Law, the ridiculous and the sublime, the wickedness and the impression of the representation of God are present at the same time, then every prospect of a clear legibility of the world - and a clear interpretability of Kafka's texts - put to shame. "
  • Jahraus (p. 417/418): “'The judgment' provides an analysis of social power and social power struggles and thus an analysis of the 'power economy of the bourgeois world'. It shows what power is and how power is defined socially, economically and erotically. The appropriation of power by one subject can only take place through the disempowerment of the other subject. "
  • Drüke (p. 31 f.) Emphasizes that Kafka nowhere describes Georg's death and that a kind of rebirth in the river or on the bank is also possible (outside of the text). Georg then used his father's command to bid farewell to life as a son at the side of that father, whom he called "comedian" in the decisive dialogue, whom he made faces and whom he even wished to die ("if he fell and smashed now." ! "). By opposing the judgment, the son "breaks away from the old commander and becomes his own: he will grow up".
  • In his 1998 novel Agnes , Peter Stamm appropriated the end of the novella in a productive way : According to one possible interpretation of the novel, the narrator kills his partner by “dictating” to her “death by freezing” in an internal story. Accordingly, the young woman executes the “suicide order” by obeying it (comparable to Georg Bendemann's behavior) “as if in a trance”.

literature

expenditure

  • The judgment. A story by Franz Kafka. In: Max Brod , Kurt Wolff (Ed.): Arkadia. A yearbook for poetry. Leipzig 1913 ( first edition )
  • Paul Raabe (Ed.): Franz Kafka. All the stories. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Hamburg 1970, ISBN 3-596-21078-X .
  • Roger Herms (Ed.): Franz Kafka. The stories. Original version. Fischer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-596-13270-3 .
  • Wolf Kittler, Hans-Gerd Koch, Gerhard Neumann (Hrsg.): Franz Kafka: Prints during lifetime. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1996, pp. 41-61.
  • Franz Kafka: The verdict . With illustrations by Karel Hruška. Vitalis 2005, ISBN 3-89919-087-4 .
  • Franz Kafka: The judgment and other prose . Reclam, 2012, ISBN 978-3-15-009677-2 .

Secondary literature

Film adaptations

Cornelia Köhler: The verdict. School film, DVD, Germany 2015.

Web links

Wikisource: The Judgment  - Sources and Full Texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.inhaltsdaten.de/kafka/das- Judgment /
  2. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 324.
  3. ↑ a b Kafka's “Judgment” and literary theory. Ten model analyzes. Reclam, p. 97 Stefan Neuhaus.
  4. ^ Franz Kafka: Erzählungen II. S. 34, Cerstin Urban.
  5. ^ Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short prose / stories. 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 52 f.
  6. ^ Peter-André Alt : Kafka and the film. Beck, 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-58748-1 , pp. 75-76.
  7. ↑ Diary entry from February 11, 1913.
  8. ↑ Kafka Handbook Life-Work-Effect ed. Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahraus 2008 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 , p. 409ff. Year out
  9. ↑ Diary entry from November 5, 1911.
  10. ↑ Further information on Kafka's relationship with Felice Bauer can be found in the article Franz Kafka .
  11. ^ "Franz Kafka Diaries" u. a. Malcolm Pasley Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, ISBN 3-596-15700-5 , p. 491.
  12. ↑ a b c d literary knowledge Franz Kafka. Reclam, p. 74, Carsten Schlingmann.
  13. ↑ Joachim Pfeiffer: Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis / The Letter to the Father. Oldenbourg Interpretations , ISBN 3-486-88691-6 , p. 126, Thomas Anz
  14. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 310.
  15. ↑ Volker Drüke: High time for Georg Bendemann. In: Transitional Stories. From Kafka, Widmer, Kästner, Gass, Ondaatje, Auster and other quick-change artists. Athena-Verlag, Oberhausen 2013, ISBN 978-3-89896-519-4 , pp. 25-32.
  16. ^ Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short prose / stories . 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 54.
  17. ↑ a b Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short Prose / Stories. 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 43.
  18. ^ Gerhard Rieck: Franz Kafka and literary studies. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 978-3826023323 , p. 33.
  19. ↑ Kafka's “Judgment” and literary theory. Ten model analyzes. Reclam
  20. ↑ Kafka's “Judgment” and literary theory. Ten model analyzes. Reclam, p. 29
  21. ↑ a b Ralf Sudau: Franz Kafka: Short Prose / Stories. 2007, ISBN 978-3-12-922637-7 , p. 38.
  22. ↑ Kafka Handbook Life-Work-Effect ed. Bettina von Jagow and Oliver Jahrhaus 2008 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht ISBN 978-3-525-20852-6 , p. 414 Jahraus
  23. ^ Peter-André Alt: Franz Kafka: The Eternal Son. A biography . Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53441-4 , p. 206.
  24. ↑ Reiner Stach : Kafka - The years of knowledge . S. Fischer, ISBN 978-3-10-075119-5 , p. 402
  25. ↑ Cornelia Köhler: The judgment . Anne Roerkohl Documentary, Münster 2015, ISBN 978-3-942618-15-1 ( documentarfilm.com ).