There is an irony to Georg's words when he makes the decision to write the letter: he feels he cannot bend to suit what his friend would want to see in him, that his friend must take him as he is: for at that moment he is bending to other people's opinion.

He is being prevailed upon by Fr. Brandenfeld, whose argument is a little peculiar. What does she mean by "With friends like that, you should never have got married"? The implication is that in order to get married Georg must already have a set of friends to whom he can always tell the truth and with whom there is therefore no problem about discussing his marriage. In appearance at least she is being unnecessarily strict. This previews the kind of moral standards which will be applied in this story.

The Judgement is about reaching maturity, but so in their various ways are all of Kafka's stories. Before the Law, according to the priest, requires that the man from the country have reached maturity first. They all describe what happens in maturity.

Georg thinks on his friend's behalf and yet is untrue to him. He does not tell him the truth, for tactical reasons. It is almost a tiny thing, a white lie, but it assumes colossal proportions in this instance. As so often in Sophocles a tiny almost invisible detail proves the decisive stumbling-block. It is also typical of Kafka, who so often concerns himself with the way the tiny unimportant concerns of human life come to dominate and prevent one from doing anything. When his father says, "You haven't got a friend in St Petersburg," he means that the person Georg knows in St Petersburg is not a friend. That is one view. We could also decide that he is making a joke, pretending not to know that Georg has this friend.

Georg reads his own loneliness into his friend. He is overly sensitive about his friend's feelings, implying that he is hiding his own feelings. "Alone!" he exclaims to his fiancée, "Do you realise what that means?" Later he pictures his friend abandoned in an empty warehouse in Russia - why did he have to go away? Georg feels abandoned by his friend. But he couches this in terms of how embarrassed he would be to show up his friend by having more success in business and getting married.

Georg lives on his father's strength, and consequently he is worried in case anything happens to him: "What if he falls and smashes himself to pieces?" But he is the one 'going to pieces'...

Georg suffocates people by thinking for their benefit.

In The Judgement Georg puts his father to bed quite naturally, as though it is perfectly routine, even though he is performing the action for the first time.

If one overlooks this detail, one might not notice how much Mr Bendemann senior is playing a comedy or how odd Georg's behaviour is.

The relationship between father and son is less easy to define than it looks. Georg is not necessarily innocent. On the other hand his guilt is difficult to determine.

The way the father reads evil into Georg is of particular interest. Everything that Georg does becomes a criticism that can be levelled against him. This phrasing reminds me of Kafka's last diary entry, which argues that the spirits are able to use every word he writes against him.

The father's view that Georg has been an innocent child but still more truly a devilish human being is a comment on the nature of childhood innocence; classed as adults, children do indeed behave in a devilish manner. That is a feature of growing up. In Investigations of a Dog the narrator observes that to a child everything is forgiven.

In everything the father says about Georg we could agree that he has a point, but without having to read everything from his point of view. We are presented with two different points of view and there is no final way of deciding between them. It is like the debate in The Trial over the Legend: we can angle things in favour of the doorkeeper as much as we can in favour of the man from the country. In the same way it is impossible to decide between Georg and his father.

The father pretends to read his newspaper but has really been watching Georg all the time. He has been concerned about nothing else. This is like the village schoolmaster in The Giant Mole, who seems more interested in the movements of the narrator than he is in the question of whether the mole exists. In The Judgement also we see the deceitfulness of old people, in Georg's father.

Gabriel Josipovici, in The Lessons Of Modernism (1977), identifies the subject of the story as a struggle, which he relates to that in Josephine the Singer, between Josephine and the people over the former's wish not to have to work. In either case it is a struggle in which the parties never come to blows. Another way of describing this is the 'standing assault' or the 'running without getting anywhere', as Kafka once characterised his writing to Felice. If the father assaults the son it is a standing assault, literally given that he is standing up, but also in being purely verbal. Georg's response, complete capitulation, is no less an assault. That happens in the following way.

Set up 07 March 1999

Last updated 07 March 1999

© R. Millar 1999