Das Schloss [The Castle], Kafka’s third and last novel, is one of his most ambitious, elusive and subtle texts. It resembles many of Kafka’s other third-person narratives, including Der Prozess [The Trial], in the extent to which the narrative perspective provides intimate but at the same time potentially critical access to the consciousness of the central character, and in the way the surface meaning of the text seems to contain significant names and symbols, metaphors and cultural references which invite us to look for deeper meanings. The Castle has neither the broad picaresque canvas of the America novel, nor the dramatic urgency of The Trial, but instead presents us with a study of character and situation in which the smallest details acquire significance. Kafka began work on the novel (as a first-person narrative) in January 1922 while convalescing from a nervous collapse, and retired, on health grounds, from the Institute at which he worked in July of the same year. Work on the novel stopped shortly afterwards, and it remained a fragment. His friend Max Brod edited the manuscript and published a version of the novel in 1926, two years after Kafka’s death. A historical-critical edition, reflecting Kafka’s manuscript more accurately, was published in 1982.
K. arrives in the village and claims to have been summoned as a land surveyor. He learns that the affairs of the village are governed by the Castle, and after some hesitation, the Castle gives him permission to stay the night and on the following day sends him two assistants to help him with his work. On the second night, in the Herrenhof inn, K. and the barmaid Frieda make love. She subsequently becomes his betrothed and they set up house together. Frieda is said to be the mistress of Klamm, the most powerful Castle official. Her mother, Gardena, also a former lover of Klamm, becomes K.’s implacable enemy, and many villagers seem to view him with suspicion. K.’s efforts to enter the Castle, to gain access to its senior officials, and to understand its workings, are frustrated, and in pursuit of his goal K. neglects Frieda, finally losing her to one of the assistants. His quest brings him into contact with a number of villagers, including “the Barnabases”, an outcast family to which Barnabas, K.’s personal messenger sent by the Castle, belongs. Much of the novel consists in long conversations between K. and other characters on the subject of the Castle and its powers and practices, during which the affairs of the village are also discussed at length. In the course of the novel K.’s claim to be a land surveyor, which looked dubious to begin with, is pursued less and less. It becomes increasingly likely that this was a story invented by K. According to Brod, the novel was to end with K. being informed, on his deathbed, that the Castle had decided that, although his legal claim to live in the village was not valid, he would be allowed to live and work there nevertheless.
In many ways The Castle can be seen as a fictionalised critical review of Kafka’s life, embarked on in the knowledge that this life was now drawing to a close. The role of women characters in particular is quantitatively and qualitatively different from his previous novels. When tuberculosis of the larynx had been diagnosed in 1917, Kafka broke off his second engagement to Felice Bauer. In the intervening years he had briefly become engaged to a young girl, Julie Wohryzek, spent months in the Bohemian countryside convalescing with his favourite sister Ottla, and had an affair with his Czech translator Milena Jesenská. The end of this affair more or less coincides with the beginning of work on the novel.
The novel contains esoteric references to the Bible, Greek mythology, and Jewish mysticism, and is thought to reflect Kafka’s interest in Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, which had informed a series of aphorisms he had written in 1917-1918. Given the highly allusive nature of the text, it is perhaps not surprising that interpretations vary enormously. An influential contribution was made by Max Brod, who regarded Kafka as a homo religiosus and read his work in positive religious terms. In his Afterword to the first edition, Brod interpreted the Castle as a symbolic representation of divine grace (and the Court in The Trial as representing divine justice), these being “the two manifested forms of the Godhead” in the Jewish Cabbala. On this reading, K. is embarked on an impossible, Faustian mission, and is guilty of spiritual arrogance. Many commentators who do not see Kafka as a religious writer in Brod’s sense nevertheless tend to concur that the Castle represents a positive spiritual value, and that K. is a negative figure in his ruthless pursuit of some kind of ultimate truth. Kafka’s narrative is quite clearly designed to reveal K.’s deviousness and ruthlessness. By the end of the first chapter it is clear that K. has lied his way into the village. He claims to be a land surveyor, summoned to do work in the village, with two assistants following behind. But when the Castle sends him two assistants he has never seen before, who know nothing about surveying, K. accepts them as the (clearly fictional) assistants he has just been talking about. He also claims to have left a wife and family behind, yet he soon becomes engaged to Frieda.
Brod also identified a Jewish template for the novel, arguing that the novel is concerned with “the great tragic depiction of assimilation and its hopelessness”. This reading has stood the test of time, though Kafka’s technique of generalisation means that the novel continues to acquire new interpretive possibilities (K.’s situation reminds one of today’s asylum seekers and economic migrants). K.’s deviousness becomes a little more understandable if we see it in terms of his desperation to gain a foothold in the village. He presents a façade, invents a biography, misrepresents his right to be there, and his attempts to convert strangers into friends and allies lead to him being serially excluded from friendships and ejected from villagers’ homes. In the village, he has only Frieda, and eventually loses her. Gardena’s charge that his interest in her daughter is purely tactical seems to have substance. Too late, perhaps, K. finally seems to realise that in pursuing the impossible goal of the Castle, he has neglected love and friendship in the village.
A number of crucial questions subtly present themselves in the novel, and it is not an easy matter to answer them. What does the Castle signify? If we are to see deeper meaning in it, is it as a metaphor (e.g. for divine grace, as Brod suggested) or as a metonym (as a site of earthly power)? Is there really a distinction between village and Castle? The village schoolmaster actually tells K. that there is no such distinction, but K. persists nevertheless in imagining the Castle as a separate, higher entity. Why is the Castle apparently a male domain? Is it benevolent or – as K. believes – corrupt? Are K.’s motives altruistic or self-serving? Does he want to overthrow the Castle’s rule or simply find a niche within it? Is he a hero or a villain? Does he develop during the novel, and if so, does he become a better person? Does he in the end accept the authority of the Castle, or is he simply worn out by his struggle? Reading the novel, one finds oneself obliged to read more carefully, to revisit one’s first impressions, and to take nothing for granted. The narrative is impelled not only by K.’s inner voice, to which we have privileged access, but also by the words and deeds of the characters from the village and the Castle, from which readers, independently of K., can begin to cumulatively piece together their own view of the village and the Castle, and hence their own assessment of K.’s actions and intentions. Some readers come to share K.’s scepticism of the Castle’s legitimation, as its practices in the village are revealed in the course of the novel: a hierarchical, neo-feudal social system (despite occasional trappings of modernity such as the telephone), an official ethos of selfless public service which may conceal a self-serving bureaucracy, the sexual abuse of power in a variation on the “law of the first night” (droit de seigneur), giving Castle officials the right to sleep with young virgins and to summon the women of the village at will. K. appears in this context as the voice of modernity, potentially at least, bringing the values of humanism and enlightenment to bear on these arrangements. As an outsider, he is able and willing to ask questions which no one in the village would dare to, or would even think of.
K. engages in a series of long conversations with villagers, many of whom, particularly the women characters, have their own voice to an extent not found in Kafka’s earlier novels. But the novel is dialogical in the more important sense that the text is orchestrated as a contest of discourses and perspectives, alternately supporting and subverting the claims of the Castle on the one hand, and its critics on the other. Of these, the most serious and significant is arguably not K., but Amalia. Kafka devotes about a fifth the extant text, the best part of seven chapters in the middle of the novel, to the pariah “Barnabas family”. Although we meet members of this family early in the novel, it is only when K. spends hours talking to Olga that we learn, with K., the full story of their social exclusion, in which W.G. Sebald saw “a synoptic history of the Jewish people”. The family have been reduced to abject poverty following Amalia’s rejection, three years earlier, of Sortini, a highly-regarded Castle official who had crudely propositioned her. The villagers soon withdraw their custom from the family shoe-repair business and the whole family suffers as a result of the disgrace Amalia has brought on it. The parents age prematurely, her sister Olga tries to placate the authorities by sleeping with hundreds of the Castle’s minor officials, and the young son Barnabas is offered to the Castle as an unpaid, unofficial servant, his first duty being to bring messages to K. No one in the novel utters this family’s name, they are referred to only as the “Barnabases”, after the most innocent of their number. There is one chance for the reader to learn the family’s real name, but K., whose closeness to Frieda means that he shares her contempt for them, significantly fails to ask Olga this question. In this and other respects, K.’s challenge to the status quo is deeply flawed. Amalia, however, is unwavering in her rejection of the Castle’s law. It may be significant that the most consistent critic of (and threat to?) the Castle is a woman, and there is a profound irony in the fact that K. shares the general contempt for her. Meanwhile, the reduction of the “Barnabases” coincides rather neatly with the social and economic rise of Brunswick, a minor character who remains in the background. Formerly an apprentice to “Father Barnabas”, and a vocal critic of the property distribution in the village, he takes over the family’s business and home.
The Amalia/Sortini episode and the ensuing degradation of the “Barnabases” presents the interpretive dilemma Kafka constructs in this novel at its most intense. Those commentators for whom the Castle represents a higher, spiritual or existential truth, read the episode metaphorically, as did Brod, who first pointed to the parallels with Kierkegaard’s distinction between religious and ethical values in Fear and Trembling, in defence of God’s apparently unethical request of Abraham, that he should sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). Amalia’s pride cuts her off from the community, and from having children, which is her religious and existential duty. Her unnatural estrangement from this law of God and nature (rejecting her sexual role) ends the family line. Against this symbolic reading, a literal reading of the episode seems designed to scandalize the modern reader, for whom Amalia’s right to reject unwanted sexual advances is self-evident.
Although containing important autobiographical and Jewish sub-texts, The Castle is not constructed on a unitary autobiographical or allegorical frame. It is not possible, for example, to see a simple correlation between the women in Kafka’s life and the women characters in the novel. The problem for an interpretation lies in the way we relate the foregrounded events narrated in the text – mundane, unexceptional, even perhaps tedious – to the vistas of historical, mythological, religious and political meanings which appear to open up as we read. Just before starting the novel Kafka noted in his diary that his writing was a kind of kabbala, an “assault on the final earthly frontier” which in addition was undertaken “from below, from the world of people”. Equally, he noted, his work could be described as an “assault from above, coming down towards me”. These images encourage us to see The Castle as an imaginative reflection on a life of Faustian striving to breach the “final earthly frontier” – whether from below or from above the earthly horizon – presented with irony, self-reproach, but also some self-justification, in which K. transcends his autobiographical origins to serve as a model and a warning to like-minded seekers.
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Citation: Dodd, William J.. "Das Schloss". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11503, accessed 10 June 2026.]
