On the morning of his thirtieth birthday, a bank clerk named Josef K. wakes up to find two strange men in his rented room, eating his breakfast and informing him that he is under arrest. They will not say what for. They do not take him anywhere. He is told to continue his ordinary life, and that the court will be in touch. Across the next year, it is.
Kafka began Der Process in 1914 and abandoned it unfinished in 1915, the year he wrote The Metamorphosis. He told his friend Max Brod to burn the manuscript when he died. Brod published it instead, in 1925, and it became one of the foundational novels of the twentieth century. It is a court case in which the defendant is never told the charge.
Kafka wrote in the same precise bureaucratic German as The Metamorphosis — short clauses, unsentimental verbs, the voice of an insurance clerk in 1915 Prague. Storica's A2+ adaptation preserves that voice and walks through Josef K.'s first arrest, the strange initial hearing, the painter Titorelli, the lawyer Huld, and the parable of the man before the law in the cathedral.
Same Kafka, same voice as The Metamorphosis. Short sentences. Common verbs. The strangeness comes from the situation, not the language. A2+ German with past, present, future and basic dialogue is enough. If you read The Metamorphosis, you can read this — and you will recognise the same bureaucratic logic running everything.
Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
Yes — every book in the Storica catalog is available in all seven supported languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. The Trial was originally written in German, but you choose your reading language when you start.
A2+. Late elementary. You can read longer chapters with light support. Past, present, and future tenses are comfortable. Idioms still trip you up.
About one month at fifteen minutes a day. The adaptation runs to 25 short chapters — short enough to read before bed, long enough to actually move your level.
No. Storica's adaptation is the version you read. We keep the characters, plot beats, and tone of the original — and rewrite the language to fit the level. If you've read the original before, you'll recognise the story; if you haven't, the adaptation is a complete reading of the book.
Pick up where you left off. There are no streaks, no penalties, and no notifications begging you back. Day 12 is still Day 12 a week later.
The Trial is rated A2+, so we'd suggest starting with one of our A0 or A1 books first if you're brand-new to your target language. Check our shelf at /library/ — the readers there are short, gentle, and built specifically for week one.
Your first 30-day book is free. No card. No streak. Just a passage every morning.
Read it free for 7 days →A small group of readers working through classics in their target language — Kafka in German, Camus in French, Bovary in Spanish. Leave your email and we'll send your invitation.
Use this code in the app for 30% off your first year of Storica Pro.