Short Story: The Judgment

Overview
Franz Kafka’s 1912 short story The Judgment follows Georg Bendemann, a prosperous young merchant in Prague, whose attempt to write an honest letter to a distant friend triggers a catastrophic confrontation with his domineering father. In a single morning the fragile balance between filial duty, personal happiness, and long-nursed guilt collapses, ending in a ritual-like self-destruction that reads as both legal sentence and psychological compulsion.

Georg’s Dilemma
Georg has built up his business after his mother’s death and is newly engaged to Frieda Brandenfeld. He corresponds regularly with an old friend who emigrated to St. Petersburg and has struggled there in business and health. In his letters Georg has kept things cheerful and vague, hiding unpleasant realities and, most recently, delaying the news of his engagement. On a spring Sunday he drafts a letter that would finally disclose the engagement, but hesitates over how much truth to send and whether the revelation would wound the friend whose life seems stalled in bachelor loneliness.

The Father’s Challenge
Seeking moral clearance, Georg visits his elderly father, whom he treats as frail and dependent. He asks if he should write to the friend about the engagement. The father, initially slumped in a nightshirt, resists being managed. Georg speaks of the friend with a mixture of superiority and pity, but the father suddenly contradicts him, asserting intimate knowledge of the friend and implying that Georg has hidden the engagement out of vanity and fear. What begins as a routine consultation turns into a cross-examination. The father accuses Georg of neglect, of trying to replace him in the business and in authority, and of falsifying the family’s reality in his letters to preserve a favorable self-image.

The Reversal of Power
In a startling transformation, the father rises from apparent weakness to imposing vigor, climbing onto the bed like a judge on a dais. He claims secret correspondence with the friend and names him as his true ally, even his “true son,” while deriding Frieda as a seducer and Georg as a hypocrite who has driven his mother to the grave. The domestic room becomes a courtroom; the father’s words take on juridical force while Georg shrinks into a childlike posture, weeping and pleading. Power belongs to the father’s absolute, almost mythic authority, not to the economic successes or adult plans of the son.

The Judgment and Its Execution
The father declares sentence: death by drowning. Without protest Georg rushes from the apartment, driven as if by the verdict itself. He runs through the streets to a bridge over the river, vaults the railing, and in mid-fall cries out, “Dear parents, I have always loved you.” The city’s heavy traffic rolls overhead, indifferent and continuous, as the sentence completes itself. The story ends with Georg’s leap, collapsing private judgment and public execution into a single motion.

Ambiguity and Motifs
The friend in Russia may be real, a projection, or a contested authority the father appropriates to strip Georg of autonomy. The father’s sudden restoration of strength reads as both supernatural assertion of patriarchal law and as the eruption of Georg’s internalized guilt. Bridges, letters, and rooms function as thresholds between private and public, adult and child, self and other; each attempt to cross them is policed by judgment. The title names not only the father’s pronouncement but the story’s governing dynamic: a world where familial bonds are inseparable from accusation, and where a son, seeking permission to live, finds only a sentence he must carry out himself.