New Course: 100 Great Books (Book 6: Franz Kafka's The Trial)
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning.”
This is the sixth book of our new course on 100 Great Books. You can read the brief about why the course exists and check out previous editions. Before we dive in, watch HBS graduate Abhilasha Sinha discuss the pros and cons of building a global career in today’s macro environment.
Who was Franz Kafka?
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trained in law at the German University of Prague, Kafka worked for over a decade at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute, where he inspected factories and wrote legal memoranda.
Kafka began The Trial in 1914 as World War I broke out. The same year Max Weber described the “iron cage” of rationalized modern life, and Freud published his reflections on repression and the unconscious. Where Weber analyzed bureaucracy as a social system and Freud as a psychic one, Kafka turned it into a moral and existential drama.
By the time Kafka died, he had published only a handful of short works and left explicit instructions that his manuscripts be destroyed. His friend Max Brod ignored him, edited the unfinished drafts, and published The Trial in 1925.