Kafka’s last trial: the Israeli-German court battle over his work
When an admirer of Franz Kafka once gave him a specially designed volume of three of his stories, his reaction was fierce: “My hornet’s bones… are nothing more than my own realization of horror,” he replied. “They shouldn’t even be printed. They should be burned.”
At the same time, Kafka believed that he had no other purpose in life than writing: “I am made of literature and can be nothing else.”
It is clear that Kafka’s difficulty with his work was an expression of deep uncertainty about himself. Did he have the right to impose his terrifying, imaginative visions on the world;
Ironically, the despair in Kafka’s work was precisely what secured him a place at the heart of 20th-century literature. Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to discover he has been transformed into an insect, and Josef K., who is tried by an informal court for a crime no one can explain, have become archetypal modern figures.
During the trial, German academics argued that Kafka’s manuscripts should have gone to Germany, where they would have been thoroughly studied, instead of being neglected in Jerusalem. An obvious counterargument was that it would be immoral for Kafka’s relics to end up in the country that exterminated his family.
Whistan Hugh Oden believed that Kafka was to the 20th century of absurdity and alienation what Dante and Shakespeare were to their time: the writer who captured the spirit of the age.
If only Kafka could read Benjamin Balint’s Kafka’s Last Trial , the illuminating new book on the fate of his work, he would surely have been surprised to learn that his horny scripts became particularly valuable – not only from a literary, but also from an economic and even a geopolitical point of view.
At the heart of Balint’s book is the trial that lasted for years within the Israeli justice system over the ownership of certain surviving Kafka manuscripts that had ended up in the hands of a private citizen in Tel Aviv. Because of the widespread coverage of the case at the time, it is known that in 2016 control of the manuscripts left the hands of Eva Hoffe, the elderly lady who owned them, and was transferred to the National Library of Israel.
For Balint, however, the case is about much more than the details of wills and laws. It raises very important questions about ethnicity, religion, literature, and even the Holocaust – in which Kafka’s three sisters died and he only escaped it because he died young of tuberculosis.
Hoffe inherited the manuscripts from her mother, Esther, to whom they were given by Max Brod, Kafka’s best friend and trustee of his literary oeuvre. She planned to sell them to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, where they would be collected along with the works of other great writers of German literature.
This would have been a cultural triumph for Germany, since it would have reinforced the idea that Kafka was properly considered a German writer, even though he was a Jew born and living in Prague. The National Library of Israel argued that Kafka’s writings are part of the cultural history of the Jewish people, and thus his manuscripts belong to the Jewish state.
At the time of his death in 1924, at the age of 40, Kafka hardly looked like someone who would later receive worldwide fame. He had a small fame in German literary circles but had never been a professional writer.
He spent his days working as a lawyer for an insurance company, a job he hated even though he was good at it. He published a few stories in magazines and small volumes, but though these included works such as “The Transformation,” “In the Penitentiary Colony” and “The Hunger Artist,” they received little recognition.
Kafka’s great novels, “The Trial” and “The Tower,” remained in manuscript form, unfinished and unknown to the world.
As is well known, he had tried to keep them that way. Before he died, Kafka wrote a letter to Brod, who found it when he went to clean out Kafka’s office. In this “last will and testament,” Kafka instructed Brontë to burn all his manuscripts, along with his letters and diaries.
But Brontë, who admired Kafka to the point of idolatry, refused to carry out his friend’s wishes. Instead he devoted the rest of his life to editing, publishing and promoting his work – he even wrote a novel about it, in which Kafka hides behind the character Richard Garta.
In doing so, Brod not only ensured Kafka’s immortality, but his own. Although Brod himself was a successful and prolific writer, today he is known almost exclusively for his role in Kafka’s story.
The question of whether Brod acted morally when he overlooked Kafka’s last wishes is one of the greatest debates in literary history and is at the heart of Balint’s book. As he notes, “Brod was neither the first nor the last to be faced with such a dilemma.”
Virgilio wanted the Aineaia to be burned after his death, a wish that was also not granted. Preserving an author’s work against his will implies that art belongs more to its audience than to its creator. And in purely utilitarian terms, Brontë made the right choice. The publication of Kafka’s work has brought pleasure and enlightenment to countless readers (and work to hundreds of Kafka scholars); its destruction would only benefit a dead man.
But did Kafka, the man who was made for literature, really want his writings to disappear? The truth is that if you read his will carefully, it is as ambiguous, as open to multiple interpretations, as anything else he wrote.
Still, the will distinguished his unpublished work from some of his published stories, which he described as “authoritative.” “I don’t mean that I want them republished,” he added, “but I don’t prevent anyone from keeping them if they want to.”
Kafka seems to have hoped that his work would find readers. And in choosing Brod as the executor of his “will”, he chose the person he was sure would not follow his instructions. It was as if Kafka wanted to pass on his writing to future generations but did not want to be responsible for it. “Even in self-declaration, Kafka was swayed by indecision,” Balint writes.
Bront, for his part, had no doubts about the greatness of his friend’s writing. He succeeded in getting publishers for The Trial and The Tower in the 1920s, but it was only in the 1930s that Kafka’s work slowly began to find a real audience.
The rise of Nazism convinced readers that they were indeed living in Kafka’s world of false laws and meaningless violence – even if Nazi anti-Semitism made it impossible for his books to be published in Germany.
Brod left Czechoslovakia the night the Nazis annexed the country, in March 1939, carrying Kafka’s manuscripts with him. A devoted Zionist for many years, he moved to Tel Aviv, where he lived until his death in 1968.
Balint describes that, like many immigrants from Germany, Brod found it difficult to rebuild his life in Palestine. To his dismay, he was underestimated by the local literary world, which was only interested in Jewish writing. Indeed Balint points out that Kafka’s work was never as popular in Israel as it was in Europe and America.
If you didn’t know Kafka was Jewish, you could read his books without ever finding out. The word Jew is never mentioned in his writings, and his characters have the universality of characters in a parable
During the trial, German academics argued that Kafka’s manuscripts should go to Germany, where they would be studied in depth, rather than being neglected in Jerusalem. An obvious counter-argument was that it would be immoral for Kafka’s relics to end up in the country that exterminated his family.
Balint quotes the words of an Israeli academic who made this scathing observation: “The Germans don’t have a good track record of looking after Kafka’s things. They didn’t pay attention to his sisters.”
But the case for Kafka’s stay in Israel went deeper and involved literary as well as legal criticism. Balint writes that by returning Kafka’s papers to the National Library of Israel, the judges “confirmed that Kafka was in fact a Jewish writer.” And the real question at the heart of Kafka’s Last Trial: Is he a Jewish writer? What do we gain and what do we lose by reading his work through a Jewish perspective?
Biographically, Kafka’s Jewishness is obvious. He was born into a Jewish family and lived in a Jewish community that was beset by severe and sometimes violent anti-Semitism. Although he grew up with little knowledge of Judaism, Kafka developed a keen interest in Jewish culture.
The Yiddish theatre and Hasidic folk myths were major influences on his work, and in the last years of his life he dreamed of moving to Palestine, even studying Hebrew to prepare himself. (Kafka’s Hebrew exercise book was among the items Eva Hoffe inherited.)
But if you didn’t know Kafka was Jewish, you could read his books without ever finding out. The word Jew is never mentioned in his writings and his characters have the universality of characters in a parable: Joseph K. could be anyone living in a bourgeois society. And yet many Jewish readers – among them critics like Walter Benjamin and Harold Blum – always approach Kafka’s work as coming from, and describing, the Central European Jewish experience.
Kafka belonged to a generation that was cut off from the lives of Yiddish-speaking people in eastern Europe, but at the same time was unable to fully assimilate into the German culture that treated Jews with contempt and hostility.
In a letter to Bront, Kafka memorably described how the German-Jewish writer was “clinging from his little hind feet to the faith of his ancestors and with his front feet trying to find, but never finding, new ground.”
Once you start looking for such figures in Kafka’s work, you find them everywhere. The captive ape in “Report on an Academy,” who has painfully learned how to enter the human world; the protagonist of “Josephine the Singer, or the People of the Mice,” whose art helps to aid her persecuted people; Josef K. in “The Trial,” who is tried by strange laws he does not understand-each a distinct commentary on the predicament in which Kafka the Jew found himself.
Above all, Kafka’s obsession with the idea of law and his bewilderment at legal systems whose functions seemed incomprehensible is essentially theological, a product of his sense that Jewish law was now irrevocably lost.
But Kafka’s genius was that he understood that these Jewish experiences-what Balint calls Kafka’s “stubborn lack of shelter and sense of belonging”were also archetypically modern experiences. In the 20th century, being cut off from tradition, manipulated by hostile institutions and subjected to sudden violence became almost universal.
For Bertolt Brecht, Kafka’s work was a kind of omen, describing “the future concentration camps, the future instability of law, the paralyzed, tortured lives of many people.”
A writer whose name would become an offensive designation (Kafkaesque) acts as a kind of prophet, giving a name to experiences that the future might hold for everyone.
So in the end, it doesn’t really matter if Kafka’s relics are in Germany or Israel. What matters is that we all live in Kafka’s world.
With information from The Atlantic / EDITOR: SOFIA STATHOPOULOU
