Kafka’s Last Trial
By Benjamin Balint
Picador, £14.99

It is easy to understand the collecting of paintings (though prices of “names” nowadays beggar belief); a picture on a wall can give pleasure continuously. Collection of rare books can be similar: a binding on a shelf may captivate the eye. Manuscripts of “names” on display in glass cases can have analogous attraction. But “doodles, scatterings of shorthand, false starts and reworkings” tucked away in a drawer?

Franz Kafka’s posthumous papers are a currency like gold. Despite his request that all should be burned, his literary confrère Max Brod gathered and preserved them. By Brod’s will, they passed to his secretary and soulmate Esther Hoffe, thence to her daughter, Eva. By then, a world had changed: Kafka’s sisters had perished in the Shoah, Brod had established himself in Israel and, via his efforts, Kafka had become the iconic writer of an epoch.

Kafka’s language was German. He learned Yiddish and Hebrew and was fascinated by idealistic Zionism but was buried as he lived, in Czech Prague.

To whom did his legacy belong? Germany, Israel, mankind at large? Who was best-placed to curate his papers post-Brod? Eva Hoffe? The German Literature Archive to whom she could sell? The National Library of Israel which, in a court’s view, might “open a door that will enable the public and history to judge Kafka’s words and to see them in all their great ethical and artistic worth — and not, as Kafka sometimes saw them in his lifetime, “failed works” that there was no point preserving?

Kafka’s words are now happily available in many languages — though, as Benjamin Balint shows in his multi-layered account, Hebrew came late in the process. Kafka achieved quick apotheosis in a renovated postwar German canon, but his harassed, confused, fearful personae did not suit the mood of manly struggle, fight and escape from spectres of the past in nascent Israel. Gershom Scholem might have claimed Kafka as a great, instinctive Kabbalist, but was this haunted product of modernist Europe truly the apogee of Jewish literature?

Salman Schocken published a Kafka anthology in Berlin in 1934 with an advertisement by Hermann Hesse tagging the author “a younger brother of Nietzsche”.

Schocken published an edition of Kafka’s works in 1936, which exiled Klaus Mann puffed as one of “the most noble and most significant publications to have come out of Germany”.

Decades later, trials raged in Israel to determine the last resting-place of remains Kafka wanted to destroy. The National Library appears to have won. Balint’s book offers forensic insight into this turbulent afterlife of a genius.

Stoddard Martin is a writer and critic