OF ALL AUTHORS WRITING IN GERMAN, Kafka is the one whose works have particularly fascinated readers throughout the world. One result is a division between what may be called the lay readers of Kafka and the professional or academic readers. The two groups are divided, in particular, by their attitude to the widespread notion that Kafka’s works must in some sense prophesy the Third Reich and the atrocities of the mid-twentieth century. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement, and hence largely for a lay audience, in 1963, George Steiner asserted that Kafka “was, in a literal sense, a prophet.” He elaborated:

Something like this is still part of the common wisdom about Kafka. In any discussion of Kafka with a lay audience, the question is likely to be raised whether he foresaw the horrors to come. Alan Bennett’s intelligent and funny play Kafka’s Dick (1986) actually makes its protagonist say: “I dream the future.”

At this point academic readers of Kafka are liable to become impatient. They will point out — rightly, of course — that Kafka did not have extrasensory perception and could not see into the future. In any case, the future does not lie before us, invisible yet already fixed; it is still undecided. It is not there to be foreseen. Yet it is sobering to read that when Kafka’s works first became available in the Soviet Union, where a version of The Trial (Der Proceß, 1925) began circulating in samizdat in 1961 before being officially published in 1965, Russian readers were convinced that the author must be writing indirectly about the Stalinist terror and the great purges, when the invasion of one’s home early in the morning by men in strange uniforms was the real experience of many thousands of people.