Javier Aranda Luna: The Dance of Death of 1925: From The Trial to Mein Kampf, a Century of Shadows

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In 1925 two books were published that marked the 20th century, whose grim reverberations, more than 100 years later, still reach us with their macabre dance: an unfinished novel printed posthumously against its author's will, and an autobiography that includes the future plans of a convict. Both immerse us in a nightmare universe.

I'm referring to Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf , whose circulation in the millions was the prelude to an abyss. With the fall of the Nazi regime, its banning was inevitable. Thousands of copies were destroyed, and those who, decades later, dared to unearth and sell one of its first editions were imprisoned. In 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death, the book entered the public domain. The controversy, however, continues, as its circulation remains prohibited in some countries. You can surely imagine a necessary firewall for fear of rekindling the dark flame of Nazism, that ember that was thought to be extinguished.

The other book is Franz Kafka's The Trial , which was banned only by its author. He asked his friend Max Brod to destroy his diaries and manuscripts upon his death, but fortunately for us, he betrayed him. Without his disobedience, we would not have known The Trial or his novels America and The Castle.

Jorge Luis Borges, with his incisive genius, captured, in my opinion, the essence of Kafka: his gift for transmuting circumstances and agonies into fables , weaving sordid nightmares in a limpid style . For Borges, Kafka was no less than the great classical writer of our tormented and strange century . A Jew, paradoxically, in whose work he never allowed himself to pronounce the word Jew .

What would Kafka have written if he had met the macabre Netanyahu, determined to uproot Palestinian children from the face of the Earth? What would Max Brod, a journalist who, fleeing Nazism, settled in the then British Mandate of Palestine, now a vast extermination camp, have reported? The ethnic cleansing undertaken by the current Israeli government, which reduces Gazans to second-class human beings, is a faithful copy of the macabre dream of Mein Kampf applied to the Palestinians.

Neither The Trial nor My Struggle have lost their disturbing relevance. With different faces, different societies, and different actors, they seem like an endless remake that has been repeated throughout the century. We see it in the shadowy figures of Trump and Netanyahu, Milei, Meloni, Bolsonaro, and in the Kafkaesque procedures endured by detainees in California, Texas, New York, and Chicago. Or in the bleak scene of those evicted from the Multiforo Alicia, awakening from a musical dream to find themselves faced by 200 armed uniformed officers. All of them, Josefs K, thrown into an inexplicable and enigmatic judicial labyrinth, where reason vanishes.

The poet José Emilio Pacheco, with his lucid precision, reminds us how in The Trial Kafka breaks down the accumulation of fear, presenting in a hallucinatory way the classic model of the State transformed into an instrument of terror . He describes the anonymous machinery of a world in which everyone can be accused and guilty, the sinister insecurity that totalitarianism installs in human life, the faceless tedium of murderers, the furtive sadism .

According to Pacheco, ever since Kafka wrote The Trial, the night knock has sounded at countless doors. The number of those who, like Joseph K, have been arrested and dragged off to die like dogs is legion .

This unfinished novel has been praised by great thinkers, such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. But it hasn't captivated everyone. Julio Cortázar, for example, confessed: "I respect Kafka, but I don't have affection for him , because I find him almost inhuman at times ," a distance that reveals the harsh truth of his work.

In his enlightening postface to the edition published by Arca, Luis Fernando Moreno Claros very well summarizes the idea that The Trial is a novel about power: The power that overwhelms the individual, that subdues and shakes him at will, and that envelops him in nets from which he is ultimately unable to escape .

Josef K is any one of us. The one caught in the raids implemented by Trump or Netanyahu. Two monsters of that elusive power whose shadows darken the world, reminding us that the nightmares of 1925 are still alive and terrifying.