Perhaps Josef K. was guilty after all

If you’re an English speaker you probably believe that Josef K., the protagonist of Kafka’s novel, The Trial, was innocent.

But Paul Reitter, writing in The Hedgehog Review, says that’s a common misunderstanding due to the difficulty of translating Kafka’s ambiguous German prose into English.

The first sentence of The Trial reads, in German, “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben, denn ohne daß er etwas Böses getan hätte, wurde er eines Morgens verhaftet.” (“Someone must have slandered Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.”) The subjunctive form is “hätte,” which, when paired with a past participle (e.g., “getan”), would most often be translated as “would have” or “had,” as in “if he had done something wrong, we would have found out,” or “if only he had done something wrong.” Neither a condition nor a wish nor a request in the case at hand, it signals, unobtrusively but importantly, that we don’t have here an unambiguous statement of fact. Josef K. may have “done something wrong” (“etwas Böses getan”), or maybe not.

English translations of The Trial, such as the translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, long considered the standard, may have led you astray.

In the Muirs’ translation, Josef K. is … introduced as someone who was arrested one morning “without having done anything wrong.” He’s presented as a victim, in other words, and Anglophone readers have tended to see the book as being about an innocent man who is arrested and punished by a bizarrely opaque and capricious legal system.

Instead, Kafka may have been guilty after all, and thus deserved his fate.