" The Trial " deeply disturbed the famous Italian- Jewish survivor of the Holocaust Primo Levi. He seemed to have the flashing insight that state bureaucracy was the EVIL essence even of Nazism. People obeying RULES and ORDERS and THE LAW like robots is always scary to witness.
Just re-read the last scene in Theodore Dreiser's classic " An American Tragedy " where young Clyde Griffiths is led to the electric chair with ALL DUE PROCESS , even the NICE governor shaking his head at appeal while Clyde's pious Christian mother cries. His obviously cracked minister " friend " does lead Clyde gently from the agony of electrocution to the ecstasy of heavenly hallucination.
Clyde says final " Good Bye " to Mom
[“In his essay ‘Translating Kafka’, included in Volume Three, Levi relates how his translation of The Trial in 1982 left him more terribly involved than he could have imagined. Originally he had hoped to improve his German, but found only bleakness in Josef K., who is arrested for a crime he probably did not commit. Levi wonders in the essay if he has any ‘affinity’ at all with Kafka. Yet the more he immersed himself in the work of ‘St Franz of Prague’, the more he saw uncomfortable parallels. Kafka lived an unremarkable life as an insurance clerk in Prague, rarely travelling beyond his home or that of his parents; Levi believed he was similarly constricted in his own life as the manager of a paint and varnish factory outside Turin. Moreover, Kafka’s three sisters had all perished in the Nazi gas chambers – victims of a grotesque bureaucratically structured system foreshadowed by their brother two decades earlier in The Trial. Kafka must have had ‘astounding clairvoyance’, Levi comments, to have looked so accurately into the future.”]
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