"The Judgment" (German: "Das Urteil"), also translated "The Verdict", is a short story written by Franz Kafka in 1912, concerning the relationship between a man and his father.

The story begins with a young merchant, Georg Bendemann, sitting in his room writing a letter to his dear friend in Russia, who had left their hometown some years previously to set up a business that, though initially successful, is now failing.

Georg is writing to tell his friend, amongst other things, that he is engaged to marry Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family.

He also bemoans such a state of society as was suggested in the story that would foster degraded forms of writing and, more hauntingly, nurture extreme willingness to conform to orders without concern for consequences.

[7] Berman additionally points out that Georg's need to rationalize why he does not want to invite his estranged friend to his wedding is a result of concerns he has pushed out of sight, but nevertheless still holds.

He says Kafka shares this methodology of exploring the human psyche by analyzing the motivations behind actions and thoughts with the famed thinkers Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

Kafka goes on to relate that the fiancée exists, in a tangential sense, only because of the father-son bond that the absent exile creates.

[citation needed] A virtually insurmountable problem facing the translator is how to deal with the author's intentional use of ambiguous terms or of words that have several meanings.

"[8] What gives added weight to the obvious double meaning of Verkehr is Kafka's confession to his friend and biographer Max Brod that when he wrote that final line, he was thinking of "a violent ejaculation.