Politics on Trial 100th Anniversary Special: Franz Kafka’s The Trial

Past Present Future

D&HR Media Ltd

History, Politics, News, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.7 • 747 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today’s episode in Politics on Trial is about the most famous trial in literature and one that never actually takes place. David talks to writer and literary scholar Ian Ellison about Franz Kafka’s The Trial, first published in 1925. What is the meaning of a book about a legal process that never happens? How was it inspired by Kafka’s failed love life? Why has it given rise to so many different understandings of what makes our world Kafkaesque? And how did a work of fiction that is full of weird and wonderful ideas get associated with mindless bureaucracy? If you’d like to get tickets for the first screening in our autumn film season at the Regent Street Cinema in London on 5th September – Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, followed by a live recording of PPF with the crime writers Nicci Gerard and Sean French – they are available now https://www.ppfideas.com/events Coming Next: a PPF+ Highlights Special Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, my name's David Runderman, and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas
0:14.7	podcast. In today's episode, in our series Politics on Trial, an unusual trial, in that it's one that never happens,
0:24.4	and it never happens in a work of fiction. I'm talking to the writer and Kafka expert, Ian Ellison,
0:32.3	about Kafka's The Trial, which was published 100 years ago this year.
0:38.2	Why does the world we live in now feel so Kafkaesque?
0:43.2	And do we know what we mean when we use that word?
0:49.2	Ian, we're talking about the 100th anniversary of Kafka's The Trial.
0:53.7	That is the 100 anniversary of its publication, but that is not the 100th anniversary of Kafka's The Trial. That is the 100 anniversary of its publication,
0:56.0	but that is not the 100th anniversary of its being written. Like much, but not all of Kafka's work,
1:01.7	it was published posthumously. It's more like the 110th or 111th anniversary of Kafka's writing it.
1:10.2	So we should probably start with the circumstances
1:12.0	in which he wrote this book. And we will talk later on about how it came to be published
1:16.5	and whether the thing we read is what Kafka imagined the book was, because it was published
1:22.4	after his death. Is it possible to say how Kafka came to write this book?
1:28.6	What was going on in Kafka's life?
1:31.8	Or maybe even who was he in 1914, 1915, when this book was being written?
1:38.0	That's a big question.
1:39.6	France Kafka was born into a family of assimilated Jews in 1883 in Prague in the Austro-Hungarian
1:45.8	Empire and he died just outside Vienna as a citizen of Czechoslovakia at the age of 40 in
1:51.1	1924 from complications to do with tuberculosis. So this is a time and a place where history
1:57.3	and geography are swirling around him and rearranging themselves.
2:03.9	He and his family were a minority within a minority.
	...

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