Who owns great works of literature? Can anyone ever really "own" them - even the writer? That is the basic question of Benjamin Balint's fascinating book Kafka's Last Trial. On his deathbed Kafka had ordered his friend Max Brod to burn all of his unpublished manuscripts along with his diaries and letters. Not only did Brod fail to carry out his friend's final request, he risked his life to smuggle the papers out of Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Brod's betrayal of his great friend Franz Kafka is one of the great miracles and gifts to modern literature. But who owns the rescued treasure trove of Kafka's papers? Did Max Brod, who after all, rescued the documents and then gave them to his secretary Esther Hoffe? Did they belong to the young state of Israel that provided sanctuary to Brod and appropriated Kafka as an essential contribution to modern Jewish cultural heritage? Or was it the Federal Republic of Germany that claimed Kafka as the greatest 20th century writer of the German language ?
Balint covers a lot of ground in his book. We learn about Kafka's difficult relationship with his father, his encounters with anti-Semitism, Max Brod's flight from the Nazis, his frustrations in Jerusalem. Balint takes us into the Tel Aviv District Court where attorneys for the National Library of Israel and for Eva Hoffe argue their cases for possession of Kafka's writings. But at the center of the story is Kafka's deep friendship with Max Brod. Brod went to extraordinary lengths to support Kafka while he was still alive and only redoubled his efforts to promote his friend after Kafka's death in 1924 - often at the expense of his own career as a writer and composer. Max Brod is often dismissed as a mediocrity whose only achievement was rescuing Kafka for posterity, but this book changed my perception of the man, and I look forward to learning more about Brod's own works.
Balint doesn't take sides in the legal dispute surrounding Kafka's writings. He conducts lengthy interviews with representatives of the German Literature Archives in Marbach as well as with librarians at the National Library of Israel. He visits several times with Eva Hoffe, the daughter of Esther, who inherited the Kafka papers. But Balint makes clear that Israel's claim on Kafka was tenuous, at best. Kafka did not consider himself a Jewish writer. Despite Brod's efforts, Kafka never warmed to Zionism. He learned Hebrew only in his thirties, but never wrote anything in Hebrew. When the German Literature Archive in Marbach acquired Kafka's personal library there were very few Jewish works. Instead, there were books by Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer and other German classics. Kafka studied at a German university practiced German law. Until recently there were virtually no Hebrew translations of Kafka's works, nor were there any Kafka scholars in Israel. So why should the National Library of Israel acquire Kafka's works?
"Each of Kafka's three sisters - "who loved and honored him as a sort of higher being," as the writer's niece Gerti Hermann recalled - fell victim to the Third Reich. Elli (the oldest, who reminded Kafka most of himself") and Valli (the middle sister) were deported to the Lodz ghetto in late 1941, and sent to the gas chambers of Chelmno in September 1942. Ottla, the youngest and most vivacious of the Kafka sisters, was deported from the Terezin ghetto 30 miles south of Prague to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in October 1943. Max Brod's only brother Otto, who also knew Kafka well, was deported from Terezin to Auschwitz in late October 1944, where he perished together with his wife and daughter.
There were other victims of German crimes: Kafka's lover Milena Jesenska, a Czech dissident married to a Jew in Vienna, murdered in the Ravensbrūck concentration camp; Kafka's second fiancée, Julie Wohryzek, killed in Auschwitz in 1944; Kafka's favorite uncle, Siegfried, who killed himself on the eve of his deportation to Terezin in 1942; and Kafka's friend Yitzhak Löwy, the Yiddish actor, who perished in Treblinka. At least five of Kafka's high school classmates were murdered in concentration camps."
Had he not died prematurely, Kafka would have suffered the same fate as his circle of family, lovers, and friends. If Max Brod had not caught the last train out of Prague, clutching the suitcase stuffed with Kafka's manuscripts and letters, the world would not have known about the great writer. Brod would have have been murdered and the the papers burned.
In August 2016, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that Kafka's manuscripts, letters and papers were to be turned over to the National Library of Israel, where they would be digitized and made available to the world to read and study.
An interesting side note: while still in Prague, Max Brod asked Thomas Mann - then teaching at Princeton University - for his assistance in finding a position at a college or university in the United States. Mann did succeed in securing for Brod an offer from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. But the letter of appointment failed to reach Brod before he fled Prague. Who knows, if the mail had been more efficient, perhaps Kafka's writings would be at the National Archive in Washington DC, or at University of Texas Archives together with the works of that other great 20th century modernist James Joyce. Franz Kafka may have been pleased. After all, he never wrote a story or book about Palestine or Jerusalem. But he did write the novella Amerika.
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