A fortnight after these festivities, Kafka wrote a letter to Felice’s friend Grete Bloch, attempting to

explain his strange behaviour and ‘obstinacy’. ‘I have to refer everything to my lack of health,’ he
explained. ‘If I were healthier and stronger, all difficulties would have been overcome.’ In that case, he
would be ‘sure’ of his relationship with Felice; indeed, he would be ‘sure of the whole world’. As it
stood, however, he was certain of only one thing: ‘Undoubtedly,’ he suffered from ‘an enormous
hypochondria, which however has struck so many and such deep roots within me that I stand or fall with
it.’

As this statement makes clear, Kafka’s ‘hypochondria’ was something far more than a fear of illness. It
was the way his entire world was made meaningful, every detail significant. Nothing could be taken for
granted; everything had to be weighed, viewed from every angle. Big or small, everything was material
for the interpretations of a consciousness that was both expansive and pedantic.

Soon after he’d written to Grete, Kafka was summoned back to Berlin. It seems that Felice and Grete had
spoken. Felice decided to put an end to things and, alongside her sister and Grete, Felice confronted
Kafka in a suite at the Askanische Hof Hotel. Kafka experienced this as a painful humiliation, a blow from
which it was difficult to recover. In his diary he would characterise the encounter as a ‘tribunal’.

Back in Prague, Kafka moved into the apartment that had been abandoned by his sister and her
husband. The First World War had erupted in Europe the day before. For the very first time in his life, he
was living alone. He had achieved ‘complete solitude’, save for a noise: the endless chatter of his
neighbours. In his diary, Kafka wrote: ‘In one month I was to have been married. The saying hurts:
you’ve made your bed, now lie in it.’

As it happened, over the coming months, Kafka would spend more time at his desk than in bed. In this
cold and solitary apartment, burrowed away from a world that was falling apart, he continued the long
work of retrospection. Sitting at his desk until five, six, seven o’clock in the morning, he began work on a
novel that would become The Trial (though, like ‘The Burrow’, it remained incomplete, and was edited
and published by Brod only after Kafka’s death in 1924).

The Trial is the story of a man, Josef K., who is accused of an unnamed crime. He is ruthlessly persecuted
and eventually executed by an unknown authority, while being kept in ignorance of his guilt. What he
finds unbearable, above all, is this enforced ignorance, and hence the senselessness of the accusation
against him: what is K. supposed to have done?