1927, Synthesis: Dualism and Uncertainty

The new feeling of life in modern times is characterized by an underlying unease, a basic feeling of uncertainty. Of all the works that deal with this topic, Franz Kafka’s The Castle is possibly the most expressive. The Castle, published just a few months ago, is a strange, surreal novel. Depicting a system of bewildering complexity over which even its leaders no longer have control. A completely impersonal surveillance system that serves the sole purpose of maintaining its own power, what Hannah Arendt described as “tyranny without tyrants.” Kafka’s work gave rise to the modern term “Kafkaesque,” which describes an unnecessarily complicated bureaucracy, the benefits of which are no longer clear even to the officials who run it. Kafka’s characters always strive to escape the labyrinths in which they live, but the disorientation that his works describe is always a cry for a new connection to a world that seems to have lost its former, its natural, its old meaning.