Juliusstrasse

Juliusstrasse is the street in a poor, remote suburb where Josef K. must report for his first cross-examination, and its bleak, crowded tenement buildings house the court's interrogation room and attic offices, embodying the squalid, labyrinthine nature of the judicial system that ensnares him. The street itself, which K. has never visited before, is a long, monotonous stretch of grey, tall blocks of flats occupied by poor people, lined with small shops below street level selling various foodstuffs. On the Sunday morning of the hearing, the windows are crowded with men in shirtsleeves smoking or holding small children, while bedding is piled on sills and dishevelled women appear briefly; people call out across the street, and a fruitmonger nearly knocks K. down with his cart. The building K. seeks is far down the street, its gateway tall and long, clearly intended for delivery wagons serving the surrounding warehouses, which are locked up and bear company names K. recognizes from his work at the bank. Inside the yard, a bare-footed man sits on a crate reading a newspaper, two lads swing on a hand cart, a weak young girl in a bedjacket looks at K. while water flows into her can, and washing hangs on a rope stretched between two windows. K. finds three stairway entrances and a small passageway leading to a second yard, and he decides to climb the stairs his thoughts choose by chance, recalling the policeman Willem's remark that the court is attracted by the guilt. On the first floor, he begins a search for a fictitious joiner named Lanz, asking at every flat and peering into the small, one-windowed rooms where women work at stoves with babies in their arms and half-grown girls run to and fro; many doors are left open, and children run in and out. He eventually reaches the fifth floor, where a young woman with black, shining eyes, washing children's underclothes in a bucket, points him to the open door of the adjoining room, and he steps into a crowded meeting that turns out to be the interrogation room. The air in the room is fuggy and oppressive, and the gallery above is filled with people bent down with their heads and backs touching the ceiling. Later, when K. visits the court offices in the same building's attic, he finds a long corridor with roughly made doors leading to separate departments, the light filtering through wooden bars that serve as walls, and officials sitting at desks writing or standing at the wooden frameworks watching the people on the corridor through the gaps. The accused sit on long wooden benches along both sides of the corridor, carelessly dressed but bearing the expressions and bearing of the upper classes, their hats placed under the benches. The offices are located in the attic because the court has little money, and the cramped, airless conditions—the sun burning down on the roof, the hot wood making the air thick and heavy, the washing put out to dry by tenants—make the atmosphere almost unbearable for first-time visitors like K., who suffers a dizzy spell and has to be helped out by the information-giver and a young woman. The court offices are also found in the attic of the building where the painter Titorelli lives, and a long corridor with benches extends from his studio, confirming that court offices are located in almost every attic. Juliusstrasse thus functions as the spatial anchor of the court's physical presence, a place of poverty, confusion, and suffocating proximity that mirrors the inscrutable, degrading, and inescapable nature of the proceedings against K.