After years of fractious legal disputes, the papers of the Czech Jewish novelist Franz Kafka and his close friend, Max Brod, have finally been returned to Israel from the Zurich bank vaults where they were held.
The National Library of Israel (NLI) is celebrating the arrival of hundreds of letters, manuscripts, journals and notebooks, hand-written by both Kafka and Brod, finally carrying out Brod’s wishes that the papers should go to Jerusalem.
Kafka died in 1924. Though he famously told Brod, who was also a writer, to burn all his unpublished manuscripts, Brod just as famously refused, and as executor of his literary estate, proceeded to publish Kafka’s work and burnish his reputation as one of the 20th century’s greatest writers.
As well as writing the first biography of Kafka, Brod published Kafka’s three major novels (The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika), as well as short stories and letters.
Brod arrived in Mandate Palestine in March 1939, after the Nazis had occupied his native Czechoslovakia. He brought all of Kafka’s papers with him and when he died in 1968, made it a condition of his will that his secretary, Esther Hoffe, should bequeath all the material to the NLI.
Not only did Hoffe ignore Max Brod’s wishes, but she in fact sold a number of Kafka papers, including, in 1988, the manuscript of The Trial for $2 million.
Esther Hoffe died in 2007 and her two daughters sought to carry on her activities. But the NLI decided to take legal action to try to fulfil Max Brod’s original intention.
Court cases in Israel, Germany and Switzerland ensued over the next 12 years — until this year when it was finally ruled that all the remaining material should be returned to Jerusalem.
David Blumberg, chairman of the board of the National Library, said: “After seeing materials, including Kafka’s Hebrew notebook and letters about Zionism and Judaism, it is now clearer than ever that the National Library in Jerusalem is the rightful home for the Brod and Kafka papers”.
The papers will be digitised by the NLI and made available online.
