IN THE PENAL COLONY (In der Strafkolonie)
by Franz Kafka, 1919

In October 1914, Franz Kafka interrupted his work on the novel The Trial (Der Prozess) to write the novella titled In the Penal Colony (In der Strafkolonie), which was published by Kurt Wolff in 1919. Thematically, the novella is closely related to The Trial,which depicts Josef K. in search of the cause for his arrest. Josef K. gets lost in the impenetrable maze of a court system that he can neither comprehend nor locate in his bourgeois world, for the court in The Trial is not of this world. But the novella is also the novel's thematic counterpart in that it focuses exclusively on the processes of judgment and punishment, which are not described in the novel. Like Josef K., the man in the novella had no opportunity to defend himself, does not know the verdict, and does not know that he was condemned. Although the settings of the novel and novella are different—The Trial takes place in a large city such as Prague, whereas the novella is set in a French penal colony—it is obvious that both are allegories about the way in which the human relation to the metaphysical realm has been perceived and ordered within the Judeo-Christian tradition. The goal of the court and of the commandant in the penal colony is to administer justice, but the man's fate is never in doubt. An officer explains to the explorer who has come to witness an execution in the penal colony, "Guilt is never to be doubted," and the verdict is always that the man must die. Against the process of life—the trial—there is no defense and no appeal.

The story opens in medias res . An explorer visiting a penal colony is confronted with an apparatus for execution. Invented and constructed by the old commandant of the colony, it has fallen into disfavor with the new, more lenient commandant. It is now operated by the former president of the court, one of the last followers of the old commandant. The officer explains the tripartite structure of the machine to the explorer. After the naked prisoner is laid out on a vibrating bed covered with cotton, a harrow descends on him to tattoo a law into his body according to a blueprint stored in the designer above. The verdict is always the same: "Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow." Hence, it is not necessary to inform the condemned of the verdict, for "He'll learn it on his body." This saying is based on a German colloquialism and is a metaphor that Kafka takes literally in the deadpan fashion already employed in "The Metamorphosis."

In the case witnessed by the explorer the crime of the condemned, who is now chained to a soldier and waiting patiently, was the crime of Adam—disobedience. The law to be inscribed on him is the basis of any religion—"Honor thy superior." The more the officer explains, the more the explorer is offended by the old commandant's notion of justice. But the officer misreads the explorer's silence and tries to persuade him to take his side. The officer spells out an elaborate plan describing how the explorer should speak up in defense of the old system during an assembly to be held the next day. When the explorer refuses, the officer replies enigmatically, "Then the time has come." He frees the condemned, sheds his uniform, and prepares his own execution. He inserts the verdict "Be just!" into the designer and is fastened to the bed by the condemned. The machine starts working smoothly, but soon it disintegrates. Instead of inscribing the verdict into the officer's body, the harrow "was only jabbing." During the sixth hour of torture, the officer had claimed, the condemned begin to decipher the script on their bodies, and with understanding comes recognition, acceptance, redemption, and death. But this is not what is happening now. The explorer realizes too late that the machine has simply murdered the officer. In the dead man's face "No sign was visible of the promised redemption; what others had found in the machine the officer had not found." After a search for the hidden grave of the old commandant, the explorer leaves the island.

Although some critics have tried to see in the tyrannical old commandant a representation of Kafka's dominating father, it is obvious that Kafka was not simply "drawing on the story of his own personal life." As Malcolm Pasley has pointed out, "He was at the same time envisaging more widely the problem of emancipation from old codes and laws." More specifically, the novella can be read as an allegory of the transition from the stern, purifying notion of justice in Judaism to the softer, seemingly more charitable and humanitarian attitude in Christianity. Like Yahweh the old commandant, who had always been remote and has now been superseded, was "soldier, judge, mechanic, chemist and draughts-man," whereas the new commandant is surrounded by women like Christ. The officer carries around what Pasley calls "calligraphic commandments" that, like the Torah scroll, can be deciphered only by those trained in its language. Thus, he resembles Moses carrying the tablets of the Law inscribed by God. Many details—like the officer's hand washing, his ceremonial clothing, his reverence for the old commandant's handwriting, and the centrality of justice—are reminiscent of Jewish rituals and modes of thought, which Kafka knew well.

In The Trial and later in The Castle (Das Schloss), Kafka undertook to review the history of metaphysics in order to prove by way of literature the possibility of a purely spiritual existence. The narrative form he chose wavers between parody and allegory. We know that we have not yet fully deciphered Kafka's esoteric system of allusions. Taking time off from The Trial, Kafka explored a limited problem in his novella, namely, the possibility of capturing the Judeo-Christian view of the human relation to the world of transcendence. Kafka's choice of the judicial metaphor was in keeping with a tradition that considered human guilt to be predetermined, as in the doctrine of original sin, and punishment inevitable. Kafka moved on from there, but he encoded his view in a set of rebuses, such as the execution machine, that call for interpretation. Theodor W. Adorno said, "The reader who succeeds in solving such rebuses will understand more of Kafka than all those who find in him ontology illustrated."

—Susanne Klingenstein