In der Strafkolonie = In the Penal Settlement = In the Penal Colony, Franz KafkaIn the Penal Colony is a short story by Franz Kafkaو written in Germanو in October 1914, revised in November 1918, and first published in October 1919. The story is set in an unnamed penal colony. Internal clues and the setting on an island suggest Octave Mirbeau's The Torture Garden as an influence. As in some of Kafka's other writings, the narrator in this story seems detached from, or perhaps numbed by, events tha...

The Penal ColonyWe ask ourselves a few questions on the second page of this novel. Once the reading finishes and that several horizons offered to us, we feel more than lost; we are breaking our heads; the questions only fulminate. What does the author mean? What does this penal colony represent in reality, only a question of a machine described as a sort of modern guillotine? The device is itself doomed to all the praise by an officer, who makes a maniacal presentation to the traveller like a bu...

I had no idea what this was about going into it. I found this short-story for free online and thought "why not?" But goodness. It's about torture, and I was not ready to read about something like that, right now. Plus, the writing is okay. But the story itself is nothing special and I probably wouldn't have read it if it wasn't free.

The injustice of the procedure and inhumanity of the execution were incontestableThe very last words of In the Penal Colony move across my bewildered eyes, sitting in the Kafkaesque corner of my apartment, I feel numb since words refuse to come to my observant mind, the comatose feeling blinds my consciousness which fails to pick up words from cerebral saucepan. The prophetic fable of Kafka is full of Kafkaesque elements which would provide eerie dizzying delight to his fans. Set in a remote col...

I thought I was reading Edgar Allan Poe there for a moment. The torture/execution machine in this short story was worthy of Poe's imagination. What was it's purpose? To torture or to execute? Either one would be most cruel in it's application. But in this case it serves the dual purpose. It also had an Orwellian feel to it. Of course Kafka was sandwiched between these two writers so it's hard to say any influence existed.

One of my favorite Kafka stories. The nature of punishment and who punishes the punishers is a relevant issue today...one could argue that the relevancy of this issue has only grown as every country tries to deal with issues of terrorism and revolutionary movements.

The Penal Colony is a very powerful fable about a machine that is used on in a Penal Colony located on a pacific island to execute prisoners over a period of 12 hours. It is thus by any standards an extremely loathsome device and a very evil misapplication of human technology. However, the machine's inventor is so convinced of the machine's fundamental rightness that he casually places himself in it in order to be executed. The point seems to be that man has an extraordinary ability to ignore th...

Wow. I read a lot of Kafka in my time, but I think I missed this one.A dystopian chamber play with four actors and a prop, a torture machine fittingly called “the harrow”. And harrowing it is, the exchange between the visitor from a foreign country and the officer who is about to execute the prisoner after a non-trial and for no reason other than he failed to complete an impossible task.What a fucked up country K. has invented here! We’ve got to be grateful, living in a world in which such blata...

There is often menace and even horror in Kafka's works, but not usually blood and gore, as this has. Nevertheless, in many ways, it is quintessential Kafka, featuring abuse of the law, the mental horror of a helpless and uniformed protagonist, an outsider, a degree of surrealism, and some dry asides. The Harrowing HarrowThe plot is grim but simple. A traveller to a tropical penal colony is invited to watch their unique method of execution: a complex machine (the Harrow) engraves the words of the...

"He doesn't know the sentence that has been passed on him?" "No," said the officer again, pausing a moment as if to let the explorer elaborate his question, and then said: "there would be no point in telling him. He'll learn it on his body."Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” recounts the execution of a prisoner by means of an elaborate and strange machine that inscribes the broken law on the condemned man’s body. It is telling that there is never any explanation of the law that was broken. In

English: In the Penal ColonyTorture porn of the kafkaesque variety: A highly renowned explorer visits an island in order to do research on its peculiar legal system which revolves around an elaborate, monstruous execution machine that inscribes the (declared) wrongdoings of the condemned deeper and deeper into his skin until, after hours of torture, he finally dies. The officer who demonstrates the device to the explorer aims to convince him of the advantages and importance of the traditional ma...

Kafka is hard enough for me when I read him in my native language, let alone in German. And I'm not talking about the difficulties of reading in a foreign language, no. Although my German is definitely to be improved, this was not the problem. But I think that when you read him in the original the feelings created, that powerful sense of anguish and suffocation is magnified. The rhythm is steadier and the Kafkaesque absurdity more intense, I think. Anyway, linguistic observations aside, the stor...

8.7/10Franz Kafka, you eihter going to hate him or love him and in this case... you going to love him. Even if you have read something in the past and it was not your cup of tea (his style is weird ) i think that you going to like this book.A few kilometers away from a colony, in the middle of a desert, stands a killing machine. Near it there is a military officer, a soldier, a prisoner that is going to be executed soon ( for something he may have done ) and..... you. Well in the book says it's

It looks like a small and charming book, but it leaves you uneasy with its terrifying atmosphere and mysterious characters.

I first read this story (actually at least thrice, readings two and three immediately succeeding in turn after the first) when I was nine, in fourth grade (Mrs. Plotkin's class) in 1954. I was mad for short stories at the time and had bought a twenty-five cent small paperback anthology (even smaller than a Penguin, a size "They" haven't made for forty or fifty years) of which In the Penal Colony was the final story in the back of the book.I read it, and couldn't understand a thing. I could under...

In the Penal Colony is a short story by Kafka a little different than the others, yet not. There are four characters in the story, each symbolizing his own bit. The Traveler goes to an island to inspect a method of execution carried out by The Officer with the use of a strange, yet elaborate machine. There is also The Condemned Man and The Soldier present. Soon enough the reader realizes that the machine isn't just a means of execution but rather an inhumane instrument of torture.I don't want to...

This is a book for us victims of violence, verbal or otherwise. Cause Kafka shows the TRUE - and truly Horrible - face of our TORMENTORS. It is a face like that terrifyingly clinical portrait of the brutally cool and poker-faced Nazi War Criminal, Adolf Eichmann, in Hannah Arendt’s chilling Eichmann in Jerusalem. My grandmother gave it to me with the rest of her book collection.Villains are pretty bland in real life: Like “What - ME worry?”And like Eichmann, the Commandant of the torture device

Re-read Update, 2.6.18I will have to think about this for some time, to understand the subtle depths of Kafka’s message. I’m sure someone has written about it, and I can cheat and read someone else’s study. This was deep, intrusive, gory, shocking. Kafka goes into bloody detail about a torture chamber; he has a message for those who carry justice and abuse the power.A foreign “traveler” visits an officer in charge of a torture device and witnesses an execution. They strap a man down and it rolls...

It didn't really impress me ... Is it because it's a short story or Kafka wasn't as good as known to be or am just wrong lol