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16 January 2014updated 28 Aug 2024 10:45am

Death by data: how Kafka’s The Trial prefigured the nightmare of the modern surveillance state

We live in a world of covert court decisions and secret bureaucratic procedures and where privacy is being abolished – all familiar from Kafka’s best-known novel, The Trial.

By Reiner Stach

A 1915 portrait of Franz Kafka. Image: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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