Being justified, says Martin Walser, was once the most important thing. States legitimize themselves through laws, governments through elections. But the individual? For example, Josef K. in Franz Kafka's "The Trial." For Martin Walser, the book is a novel of conscience exploration, a search for justification, just as Josef K. is for him the last novel hero who experiences the absence of justification as a drama and ultimately perishes because of it. In contrast, we have long lived without the need for justification, indeed, without even questioning it. Justification is replaced by being right. Martin Walser calls it a deprivation that it is enough for us to be right. To make clear what we have lost, he goes back into the past: from Kafka to Augustine; to Luther, Calvin, and Max Weber; to Nietzsche and Karl Barth, where the book reaches its climax in their juxtaposition.