One hundred years ago, driven by an act of pure love and a deep-seated faith in the power of genius, writer Max Brod published what turned out to be the last novel Franz Kafka worked on before his death in 1924.
Das Schloss, or The Castle in English translation (the German word also means “lock”), remains one of the German master’s most enigmatic endeavours, a peculiarly twisted tale of alienation and absurdism like many others he wrote, which he struggled to finish as tuberculosis ravaged his mind and body in the last months of his short life.
Kafka began the novel the day he arrived at the mountain resort of Spindlermühle, now in the Czech Republic, in January 1922, hoping to recover from the illness that was gnawing at him. By September, he wrote to Brod that he was giving up on the book. Indeed, the novel stops mid-sentence, which contemporary translations stay true to. By June 1924, Kafka was dead, at the relatively youthful age of 40, but burdened with the wisdom of an ancient soul.
Like most of his writings, The Castle would have never seen the light of day had Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, not made the fortuitous decision to defy his friend’s instruction to destroy all his papers after his death. Instead of setting fire to the manuscript—along with the scores of unpublished diaries, notebooks, letters, stories, and novels Kafka left behind—Brod decided to resurrect The Castle with his extensive edits and rewrites. In the process, he ended up largely ignoring the structure Kafka had in mind and, most likely, his intent, too.
Brod’s singular concern was to let the brilliance of his dear departed friend be known far and wide and he did everything in his power to make the work appear flawless. The novel was finally published in 1926 under Kafka’s name.
Four years later, when the Scottish couple, Willa and Edwin Muir, prepared the first English translation of the novel, they based it on Brod’s text and ended up perpetuating the many liberties he had taken while finalising it. Especially egregious was the latter’s choice of framing The Castle as a work of religious allegory, an idea that also appealed to the Muirs. The couple’s German was also out of its depth with Kafka’s acerbic turns of phrase in places, and their English flattened some of the novel’s intransigent modernist nuances.
Critics and translators complained about the discrepancies and infelicities in the 1930 edition for years, until, in 1961, scholar Malcolm Palsey got hold of the original German manuscript and deposited it at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, UK. Since then, some of the best re-translations of the novel, by Mark Harman in 1998 and Anthea Bell in 2009 for instance, have referred to the Palsey manuscript to give the reader as authentic a flavour of it in English as Kafka would have wanted.
Ahead of his time
The Castle isn’t an easy read, especially a century after its publication, when the frailty of our attention span had made it a struggle to follow complicated syntax, keep up with an involuted plot line, and inexplicable gaps of logic. Yet, as Harman points out in his preface, such stylistic quirks are part of a deliberate design. “The flowing handwriting in the manuscripts with relatively few corrections suggests the intuitive certainty of a somnambulist,” he remarks.
Harman also goes on to correlate the circumstances of the protagonist K.’s inner life with the shifts in Kafka’s style. The “tempo of the prose charts the state of the central character,” he points out in the preface. “When K. is agitated, (the prose) is choppy. When K. loses himself in the labyrinth of his paranoid logic, it is tortuous and wordy. When the emphasis is on K.’s actions rather than on his thoughts, the prose becomes terse.” The contemporary writer who seemed to have understood Kafka’s real mastery is László Krasznahorkai, whose debut novel Satantango (1985; translated 2012) is an uncannily close echo of the oppressive world, and style, invoked in The Castle.
Kafka’s novel begins with the arrival of K. in an unnamed village as a land surveyor. The owner of the Bridge Inn, where he goes to seek shelter at first, tries to rebuff him, though K. isn’t to be easily thwarted. But a worse fate awaits him at the Gentleman’s Inn, where his presence unleashes mayhem. K. ends the night in the arms of the barmaid Frieda, who leaves Klamm, an elusive official from the Castle, for him. Although Frieda had been Klamm’s mistress, it is difficult to gauge her feelings for her former lover. Except for K., nearly everyone in the novel is a skilled equivocator, or adept at spinning yarns that confuse and manipulate the reader’s understanding.
If there is an aura of godless menace spread all over The Castle, as it is in Krasznahorkai’s novel, contemporary readers are likely to relate with its more secular messages. Primary among the latter is Kafka’s feral loathing for bureaucratic fluff, which pushes ordinary citizens into the seemingly endless spirals of bathos that is life in the village. The Castle, which is closer to a township, and its mysterious inhabitants co-opt and brainwash the villagers, forcing them to exist in a state of limbo, where their judgement about right and wrong become warped.
K.’s greatest wish, all through the novel, is to find his way up to the Castle, which looms over the ordinary mortals, spawning wild rumours about its goings-on and remaining forever out of reach. But each of his attempts to get there, or even to pass on a message to the officials who sit there, is spurned. To make things worse, the villagers continue to fuel his frustration by justifying the mysterious ways of the powers that be, expecting him to defer to the rules, such as they are, since nothing is in anyone’s control.
In an article in The Guardian in 2011, William Burrows called it “a mistake to view The Castle… as being concerned with bureaucracy and unfair process.” Such readings, he went on, “trivialise Kafka’s artistic project, and are, essentially, reductive. Kafka writes about simple and important things: aloneness, pain, the longing for human companionship, the need to be respected... and the struggle of being employed.” The finely-attuned reader will agree with this sentiment, but there is also something to be said for the sheer revulsion of bureaucracy that Kafka inspires in our hearts, especially circa 2026.
As the world gets mired in an ever-expanding web of obtuse rules—from ICE agents rounding up random suspects challenging their right to live in the US to arbitrary regulations closer home that rob people of their vote or to simply to claim Indian citizenship—a novel like The Castle holds a mirror to a dysfunctional reality Kafka presciently anticipated. Like K.’s futile search for answers from the Castle, the majority of humanity now live at the mercy of governments that can, at whim, turn on them, making them stateless.
Deeply aware of the rising tide of anti-Semitism during his time, Kafka painted a clinical portrait of official systems that are designed to exclude, which mislead people by luring them into their labyrinths, and destroy their belief in the world and in themselves. Reading him 100 years later, we are merely reminded how far ahead he was of his time.