The Castle

The Castle

By Franz Kafka.

Translated by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir.

Table of Contents

1. Titlepage
2. Imprint
3. Introductory Note
4. The Castle
   1. I
   2. II
   3. III
   4. IV
   5. V
   6. VI
   7. VII
   8. VIII
   9. IX
   10. X
   11. XI
   12. XII
   13. XIII
   14. XIV
   15. XV
       1. Amalia’s Secret
       2. Amalia’s Punishment
       3. Petitions
       4. Olga’s Plans
   16. XVI
   17. XVII
   18. XVIII
5. Additional Note
6. Endnotes
7. Colophon
8. Uncopyright

Imprint

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Introductory Note

To the First American Edition

Franz Kafka’s name, so far as I can discover, is almost unknown to English readers. As he is considered by several of the best German critics to have been perhaps the most interesting writer of his generation, and as he is in some ways a strange and disconcerting genius, it has been suggested that a short introductory note should be provided for this book, the first of his to be translated into English.

Kafka died in 1924 of consumption at the early age of forty-one. During his lifetime he published only a few volumes of short stories and novelettes, all of them characterised by extreme perfection of form, and most of them wrung out of him by the persuasion of his lifelong friend, Herr Max Brod, the well-known novelist. Before he died he destroyed a great number of the manuscripts he had been engaged on, but he left, among other things, including a number of aphorisms on religion, three long unfinished novels, America, The Trial and The Castle. He left explicit instructions as well, however, that these, along with all his other papers, should be burnt. As his executor, Herr Brod was in a very difficult position. In a note appended to The Trial he has given in full Kafka’s dying instructions, and set out with the utmost candour his reasons for not following them. These reasons are entirely honourable, and his decision to publish the three novels has been approved by every responsible critic in the German-speaking countries. The novels themselves, however, provide the best data for judging the wisdom of a choice so difficult; for they are the most important of Kafka’s writings, and two of them are masterpieces of a unique kind.

Herr Brod’s courtesy has provided me with a few particulars about Kafka’s life. He was born in Prague in 1883 of well-to-do Jewish parents, studied law at the university there, and after receiving his doctorate took up a post in an accident insurance office. After a love affair, which ended disastrously, he fell ill, symptoms of consumption appeared, and for some time he lived in sanatoriums, in the Tyrol and the Carpathians, but finally left them for lodgings in a village in the Erzgebirge near Karksbad, which was to become the original of the village in the present book. Having partially regained his health, he went to live in the suburb of Berlin with a young girl who seems to have made him happy. Unfortunately the years of inflation came, food was scarce and bad, and he finally succumbed and was sent to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. Those last years before the collapse were the happiest of his life. The three unfinished novels which he left are an imaginative record of an earlier phase.

Of these novels two, The Trial and The Castle, are in a sense complementary, as Herr Brod points out at the end of this book. Both may be best defined perhaps as metaphysical or theological novels. Their subject-matter, in other words, is not the life and manners of any locality or any country; it is rather human life wherever it is touched by the powers which all religions have acknowledged, by divine law and divine grace. Perhaps the best way to approach The Castle is to regard it as a sort of modern Pilgrim’s Progress, with the reservation, however, that the “progress” of the pilgrim here will remain in question all the time, and will be itself the chief, the essential problem. The Castle is, like The Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory; the desire of the hero in both cases to work out his salvation; and to do so (in both cases again) it is necessary that certain moves should be gone through, and gone through without a single hitch. But there the resemblance ends. For Christian knows from the beginning what the necessary moves are, and K., the hero of The Castle, has to discover every one of them for himself, and has no final assurance that even then he has discovered the right ones. Thus while Bunyan’s hero has a clear goal before his eyes, and a well-beaten if somewhat difficult road to it, the hero of this book has