I am very grateful indeed to Humphry and Molly
Trevelyan for their great encouragement when I first
began writing this book. I also wish to thank Harold
Mason for his careful scrutiny of the manuscript. The
Colloquium of the German Department in the Uni-
versity of Cambridge supplied valued comment.

Grateful acknowledgements are due to Messrs
Schocken Books for permission to translate from
Kafka's work. All quotations have been translated by
me; those from Das Schloss are based on the third
edition, published by Messrs. Schocken in New York
in 1946.

CAMBRIDGE R. D. G.
October 1955

Readers who were first introduced to The Castle by
Mr Edwin Muir translation of 1930, or by any of
the three later editions of it up to 1947, may be
surprised to find that a great deal of the present
commentary deals with passages not contained in that
translation. To them some explanation is due. The
first German edition, published in 1926, was fully
translated by Mr Muir. The second German edition,
however, apart from adding some variant readings,

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