Kafka before the law

In the autumn of 1994, I was 24 years old and staying in Prague for the first time. I was looking for Kafka, but the author, who avoided all visibility while alive, was just as invisible 70 years after his death. No Czechs had heard of him. In the end, I managed to buy his "collected stories" in English, a book that was not even his collected stories. Where did Kafka really belong? I wondered. Obviously not in Czechoslovakia. The Czech Republic's many Americans in 1994 did not seem to care, even though Kafka wrote an entire novel with the title America. Yes, Kafka, where do you belong? Hardly in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, where you never set foot. My answer was: You belong in modern literature, in fiction.

Rights Tangle

But after reading this book, I realize that the matter is more complicated than that. For who should have the rights of Kafka's survivors?
scripts? The process began on the day Franz Kafka died. He wanted Max Brod to burn the manuscripts, something his friend did not do. In 1968, Brod died and his secretary Esther Hoffe took over the rights, on condition that she collaborated with the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Switzerland and with the National Library in Jerusalem.

In 1974, the State of Israel Esther Hoffe sued in court. What position did it have with Kafka, a Czech who wrote in German, who did not speak Yiddish and who never visited a synagogue? Who was hardly religious in a dogmatic sense, who died long before the establishment of the State of Israel, and who reportedly had nothing in common with himself? It was not so nice; Esther Hoffe did not follow the will of the testator. Still, she won the lawsuit in 1974, and in 1988, two decades after Max Brod's death, she submitted the 316-page original manuscript of the novel The Process to auction at Sotheby's, the manuscript that Franz Kafka had written in ten different notebooks shortly after the break with her fiancé, Felice Bauer. In September 1914 he had read the first chapters for Brod. He decided the short story was in error, tore the pages from the notebook and put them in his desk. In 1920 he gave them to Brod, who passed them on to Esther.

In 1974, the State of Israel Esther Hoffe sued in court. What position did it have with Kafka, a Czech who wrote in German, who did not speak Yiddish and who never visited a synagogue?

As long as Brod was alive, she opposed selling Kafka's manuscripts. But in 1974 she sold 22 letters and 10 postcards for 90 German marks, and she offered the story "Marriage Preparations in the Country" to the German Literary Archive in Marbach for the neat sum of 000 German marks. The Marcbach archive rejected the offer. A sale of Kafka's manuscript was a dangerous step to take, as it could easily have ended up in the hands of a rich banker, and would never have been available to researchers.

The National Library contacted

When Esther Hoffe died, her daughters took over the manuscripts. Ruth filled out the necessary forms, but left the rest to Sister Eva. Shortly before his death in 1968, Max Brod had visited the National Library in Jerusalem and had decided to give Kafka's manuscripts there. But Brod was persuaded by Esther Hoffe to let her take over.

Not long after Brod's death, the National Library contacted Esther Hoffe to collaborate with her on Kafka's manuscripts, but she remained reluctant. As a final attempt, they sent the head of the manuscript department in Jerusalem, Mordechai Nadav, and his assistant, Margot Cohen, out to meet Esther Hoffe in her apartment in Spinoza Street, but this time too she refused to cooperate.

The German Literary Archive in Marbach did not want full ownership of Kafka's manuscripts, but wanted to share the rights with the National Library in Jerusalem. The heads of the archive evidently believed that Brod had declared that those who worked in the archive should have the right to manage Kafka's manuscripts in collaboration with Esther Hoffe, and accused her of withholding them. The battle for Kafka's manuscripts did not have to be a zero-sum game, but at the same time strong national interests were the main reason for the tug-of-war. The Israeli state thought it had the rights because of Kafka's Judaism, but he wrote in German, and one should distinguish between the manuscripts that Kafka had given Brod while he was alive, and those Brod took from Kafka after his death, and which Brod should actually have burned?

Since Brod, in the judge's opinion, robbed the manuscripts, the court questioned whether the manuscripts could rightly be said to belong to Esther, Ruth and Eva Hoffe. The further question was what kind of nation Kafka belonged to: Was he a Jew, who had been commissioned by God to write? And did he thus belong to the state of Israel? Should the fact that he was a Jew outweigh the fact that he wrote in German? That he wrote in German, the language of the Nazis, was too many Jews for them to distance themselves from him.

Brod: Judas or Samaritan?

Bread has been compared to Judas. Then Kafka must have been Jesus, which he was not. To me, Kafka appears as a "relentless Samaritan," one who, in a relentless way, gave the world one of its richest literary treasures of the 20th century.

Kafka's works are a gift given without mercy, but they would never have been given to the world without Brod. As the book says: "We are reading Kafka Brodly."

It is not so easy to determine Franz Kafka's identity. His principled identitylessness can just as easily be said to be characterized by the existence of an exiled Jew in the 20th century as by existential homelessness. It is also not so easy to determine whether he was religious or not; Kafka avoids most simple categorizations. At the same time, it can not be established that the Jewish part of his non-identity, to put it this way, not has an impact on the understanding of the work.

This book makes Kafka's invisibility visible. Understand the paradox, the one who can.