Das Urteil

Kafka wrote Das Urteil in a single sitting, from ten at night until six in the morning, on 22–23 September 1912, and dedicated it "to Fräulein Felice B." — Felice Bauer, whom he had met a few weeks before and would twice be engaged to. He considered it the story in which he had first broken through to his own way of writing. It is very short; this retelling follows it closely and condenses only a little. The translation is new.

Content note: the story ends with a suicide, told in a single sentence.

It was a Sunday morning in the very loveliest spring. Georg Bendemann, a young merchant, was sitting in his own room on the first floor of one of the low, lightly built houses that stretched in a long row along the river, hardly to be told apart except by their height and colour. He had just finished a letter to a friend of his youth who was now living abroad; he sealed it, playfully slowly, and then, with his elbow on the writing table, looked out of the window at the river, the bridge, and the hills on the far bank with their pale green.

He was thinking about this friend, who years ago, dissatisfied with how things were going at home, had practically run away to Russia. He had a business in St Petersburg now, which had prospered at first but seemed for a long time to have been at a standstill, as the friend complained on his ever more infrequent visits home. So he was wearing himself out to no purpose far away; his foreign-looking full beard hid the face Georg had known since childhood only badly, and his yellowish skin seemed to point to an illness that was developing. By his own account he had no real connection with the colony of his countrymen there, and almost no social contact with Russian families either, and so he was settling down for good as a bachelor.

What could one write to such a man, who had obviously gone astray, whom one could pity but not help? Should one advise him to come home, to transfer his life back here, to take up again all his old friendships — and to rely, at the same time, on the help of his friends? But that would only be telling him that his attempts so far had failed, that he must give them up, that he must come back and be stared at by everyone as a man who had come home for good, that only his friends understood anything, and that he was an overgrown child who should just obey his successful friends who had stayed at home. And was it even certain that all the pain one would have to cause him would do any good? Perhaps it would not even be possible to get him home at all — he said himself that he no longer understood conditions at home.

For these reasons, if one wanted to keep up the correspondence at all, one could not write him any real news. In three years the friend had not been home, explaining it, very inadequately, by the uncertainty of the political situation in Russia. And so Georg had written him only unimportant gossip, of the kind that piles up in one's memory when one thinks about it on a quiet Sunday.

Meanwhile a great deal had changed for Georg. His mother had died two years before, and since then Georg had lived with his old father; the friend had heard of it and had expressed his sympathy in a letter so dry that it could only be explained by the fact that grief over such an event is quite unimaginable at a distance. Since then Georg had taken hold of the business with more determination, as of everything else. Perhaps his father, while his mother was alive, had kept him from acting independently by insisting on his own views; perhaps since her death his father had become more reserved, though he still worked in the business; perhaps — and this was very likely — fortunate chance had played a far more important part. In any case, the business had grown unexpectedly in those two years; the staff had had to be doubled, the turnover had increased fivefold, and further progress was certainly ahead.