Justice for Josef K.: Bringing Myth to an End in Kafka’s Trial Christopher Conti No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. —T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Hamlet has long afforded us a gratifying image of ourselves as moderns. In revolt against the establishment, Hamlet’s daring, expressive individuality wrings the heart brazed by “damned custom” and plays the befogged royal court, and its “king of shreds and patches,” for the fool (3.4.38, 104). The archetype has had a few wardrobe changes in its passage down to us. Morally refned by Henry Mackenzie and William Richardson in the eighteenth cen- tury, Hamlet trod the boards in Goethe’s Weimar possessed of a pure and noble soul “unft” for the bloody duty laid on it. 1 A few miles east of Weimar, in the intellectual ferment of Jena, Hamlet was crowned prince of irony on the basis of this unftness, when wavering was elevated to a principled rejection of the world by German Romantics like Friedrich Schlegel. Schlegel’s Romantic irony was a coolly intellectual response to the fall of metaphysics and the cos- mic roles of God and man that metaphysics underwrote. With the old synthesis New German Critique 124, Vol. 42, No. 1, February 2015 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2824297 © 2015 by New German Critique, Inc. 99 My thanks to Matthew Holt for his comments on an earlier draft of this article. 1. Goethe’s idea that Hamlet represents “the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unft for the performance of it” (eine große Tat auf eine Seele gelegt, die der Tat nicht gewachsen ist) is from Wil- helm Meisters Lehrjahre, in Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy (New York: Norton, 1992), 154. All citations of the play refer to this edition. New German Critique Published by Duke University Press