studied law at the university there, and after receiving his doctorate took up a post in an accident insurance office. After a love affair, which ended disastrously, he fell ill, symptoms of consumption appeared, and for some time he lived in sanatoriums, in the Tyrol and the Carpathians, but finally left them for lodgings in a village in the Erzgebirge near Karksbad, which was to become the original of the village in the present book. Having partially regained his health, he went to live in the suburb of Berlin with a young girl who seems to have made him happy. Unfortunately the years of inflation came, food was scarce and bad, and he finally succumbed and was sent to a sanatorium near Vienna, where he died. Those last years before the collapse were the happiest of his life. The three unfinished novels which he left are an imaginative record of an earlier phase.
Of these novels two, The Trial and The Castle , are in a sense complementary, as Herr Brod points out at the end of this book. Both may be best defined perhaps as metaphysical or theological novels. Their subject-matter, in other words, is not the life and manners of any locality or any country; it is rather human life wherever it is touched by the powers which all religions have acknowledged, by divine law and divine grace. Perhaps the best way to approach The Castle is to regard it as a sort of modern Pilgrim’s Progress , with the reservation, however, that the “progress” of the pilgrim here will remain in question all the time, and will be itself the chief, the essential problem. The Castle is, like The Pilgrim’s Progress , a religious allegory; the desire of the hero in both cases to work out his salvation; and to do so (in both cases again) it is necessary that certain moves should be gone through, and gone through without a single hitch. But there the resemblance ends. For Christian knows from the beginning what the necessary moves are, and K. , the hero of The Castle , has to discover every one of them for himself, and has no final assurance that even then he has discovered the right ones. Thus while Bunyan’s hero has a clear goal before his eyes, and a well-beaten if somewhat difficult road to it, the hero of this book has literally