The Trial

Imagine waking up to find two men arresting you. It remains unclear what you are being charged with. You attempt to gain access to the courts, to find a way to defend yourself (against what, precisely?), to secure a regular trial, yet you are denied all of these things. Statements, encounters, locations, hopes – everything contradicts itself, remains diffuse, unpredictable, and, above all, impenetrable.

What sounds like a grotesque nightmare was captured by Franz Kafka in his unfinished 1915 novel "The Trial": The opacity and arbitrariness of a state and its bureaucracy—a system in which one’s very existence, along with the rights attendant upon it, remains perpetually open to negotiation and subject to change. The question regarding the vulnerability of the “transparent human being” and of our own constitutional state is more explosive than ever: Do human rights and international law still serve as the common denominators upon which we can agree?