SOURCE: “A Fairy-Tale Motif in Kafka's ‘The Judgment’,” in The International Fiction Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, 1979, pp. 118–20.

In the following essay, Fickert discusses the theme of the two brothers—the good brother and bad brother—in “The Judgment,” maintaining that the motif is borrowed from the fairy-tale genre.

Franz Kafka claimed that he wanted to write fairy tales, but couldn't.¹ Nevertheless, the element of magic, the occurrence of the inexplicable, which prevails in fairy tales, has a prominent place in Kafka's fiction, and occasionally motifs are directly borrowed from the Märchen. The appearance of a brother and sister (she is Grete) in “Metamorphosis,” for instance, points unequivocally to one of the most famous stories in the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Less ambiguously employed and more pertinent to the development of the plot is the fairy-tale topos of the two brothers which figures in “The Judgment.”

This motif...