Franz Kafka’s “Das Urteil” (1913) as Media History: Writing–Cinema–AI

In this essay, I read Kafka’s 1913 story, “Das Urteil”, as positing an anachronistic media history, with Georg the son representing the older medium of writing, while his father stands in for the newer medium of cinema. The father–son conflict is thus refigured as an intergenerational media war. In addition, I suggest that the end of the story points toward a non-human mediation, which resembles artificial intelligence as imagined by Friedrich Kittler’s media theory.