Franz Kafka: German or Jewish?
Gabriel Josipovici on the complicated battle over the author’s literary estate
The story is well known. Franz Kafka, dying of tubercular laryngitis, left instructions to his closest friend and fellow writer Max Brod after his death to burn all his papers unread. Brod, faithful to his friend’s genius rather than to his chronic self-doubt, ignored this instruction and saved everything he could find.
Kafka died in 1924, just short of his forty-first birthday. At this point he was known and admired for his mysterious and disturbing short stories by his own immediate circle of Prague writers and intellectuals and by a few discriminating writers in the German-speaking world, including Robert Musil and Rainer Maria Rilke. In the course of the next fifteen years, as Brod saw into print first the unfinished novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika (whose first chapter, “The Stoker”, Kafka had published in his lifetime and whose working title was The Man Who Disappeared), then a mass of hitherto unpublished stories as well as a fulsome biography, his fame spread throughout the Western world. By the start of the Second World War, translated into multiple languages, he was firmly established as one of the great writers of the twentieth century, to be spoken of in the same breath as T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Thomas Mann. In 1941 W. H. Auden, now exiled in America, could even assert: “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of”.
But here is where the complications begin. Brod’s biography of 1937 painted his friend as a saint and a mystic and his introductions to the novels presented them as religious quests, modern versions of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Even before the war astute critics such as Walter Benjamin not only took issue with this but accused Brod of using his privileged access to Kafka’s unpublished work to foist on the world a view of his friend that quite failed to do justice to his strangeness, his anguish and his originality. After the war, particularly in France, through the work of Maurice Blanchot and Marthe Robert (who edited the French translation of the Journals) and in Britain through the work of Erich Heller (a German-speaking Prague Jew exiled in Cambridge), a very different Kafka began to emerge. This was a modernist Kafka, ill at ease in both German and Jewish culture, condemned to write in the one and to struggle with the many different versions of the latter that came his way, from his father’s perfunctory synagogue attendance to the Zionism of some of his friends and the passionate engagement with Yiddish of the theatre group that came to perform in Prague in 1911. And it is this Kafka we are still coming to terms with, helped by the gradual publication of more or less everything he ever wrote, including his notebooks and diaries, letters to friends and family and to at least two of the women he was in love with, Felice Bauer, the Berlin-based relative of Max Brod to whom he was twice engaged, and the Czech writer Milena Jesenská. As well as this mass of new material, the past twenty years have seen the publication of the enormous three-volume biography by Reiner Stach, which manages what no other biography had previously done, so powerful are Kafka’s self-observations, to see him from the outside, as a German-speaking Prague Jew, riven by disease from early in his life and living through troubled and turbulent times.
Stach’s valuable and important work does not start with the early years and end with Kafka’s death. The first volume to appear, in 2002, was called Franz Kafka: The decisive years, and began in 1910 when Kafka was twenty-six. The reason for this, Stach explained in the introduction, was that papers connected to Kafka’s early years were not yet available to the researcher, as he hoped they would be in the near future. In the subsequent decade readers interested in Kafka were fed a little more information about the reasons for this unavailability in the form of newspaper articles about litigation, in the Israeli courts, between the daughter of the woman to whom Max Brod had left the Kafka papers in his possession at his death and the State of Israel over custody of these precious manuscripts, with the German Literature Archive in Marbach somehow also involved. But it was difficult, unless you took a great deal of trouble, to get to the bottom of what exactly was happening, almost a hundred years after Kafka’s death, to the papers of this most modest and withdrawn of men. Now Benjamin Balint has written a book, inevitably called Kafka’s Last Trial, in which the main outlines of this murky story are laid bare.
Unfortunately, where what was needed was a simple and clear exposition, Balint chooses to adopt a journalistic tone he imagines will make his book more exciting (“I watched as six boxes were wheeled under armed guard on a trolley into the library’s Holtzman conference room next to the cafeteria”), and he makes a confused story more confusing by cutting between the past (Brod’s early friendship with Kafka, his liaison with Esther Hoffe) and the present (the various court cases Hoffe and her daughter Eva were involved in between 1978 and 2016), so as to ramp up the tension. His text, moreover, is replete with sentences of dreadful banality (“these manuscripts held out the promise of shedding new light on the uncanny world of the writer who coined an inimitable, immediately recognizable style of surreal realism and etched the twentieth century’s most indelible fables of disorientation, absurdity, and faceless tyranny”), and strewn with minor errors which suggest a rather thin grasp of the twentieth-century cultural background (“the French anarchist writer André Breton”). And though he provides references for some of his quotations, these seem quite arbitrary, so that it is often impossible to check the sources of quotations just when one most needs to. Nevertheless, he provides enough information for a narrative of sorts to emerge concerning the later fortunes of those papers Brod salvaged from his friend’s study after his untimely death.
Where Kafka was parsimonious with his writing and ruthless in what he allowed into print, Brod was one of those writers who seems to have no censoring superego at all. In the course of his long life he poured out novels, plays, poems, memoirs, autobiographies and philosophical and religious tracts as well as numerous books on Kafka. According to those who have read them, these are uniformly execrable, though at the time of Kafka’s death Brod was far better known than Kafka. Yet even if he was misguided, he was nevertheless a faithful friend. His admiration and love for Kafka are unquestionable. Having failed to make it to America as things grew dark for Jews in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s, Brod finally managed to get to Israel, along with his wife and a suitcase full of the material Kafka had given him in the course of his life as well as what he had rescued against Kafka’s expressed wishes at his death.
Brod was also as promiscuous as Kafka was chaste – and, while married, serially unfaithful. However, he was devastated by the triple blow of having to abandon his beloved Prague in 1939, followed by the deaths of both his mistress and his wife in quick succession. Besides, any thoughts of being greeted by the Tel Aviv intelligentsia as a major European writer were quickly dashed. Here he was, in a foreign country whose ways he failed to understand, unable to master the language and bereft of friends, in the middle of a world war which an avowed enemy of the Jews seemed at the time quite likely to win. It was at this low point that he met Otto and Esther Hoffe. Like him they were émigrés from Prague; and Brod had even known Esther’s mother, Hedwig Reich, in the old country. Soon a close friendship developed between the three, so much so that friends remarked that Brod had “at last found his familial nest”.
He soon roped in Esther to help him sort out the Kafka archive he had brought with him, and the two gradually grew inseparable. Balint is discreet on whether or not they became lovers and says nothing about the subsequent fate of poor Otto, but there can be no doubt that Brod had found the woman of the last years of his life. In 1952, according to Balint, Brod wrote a formal note to Esther which ran: “Dear Esther, In 1945 I gifted you all the Kafka manuscripts and letters in my possession”. This gift, intended to take effect immediately and not after his death, included Kafka’s letters to Brod and his late wife Elsa, the original manuscript of The Trial and of the early stories “Description of a Struggle” and “Preparations for a Village Wedding”, the typescript of his book-length letter to his father, three notebooks of his Paris diaries, a draft of the novel he and Brod had once started to write together, his 1911 address on the Yiddish language, aphorisms, photographs and first editions of his few publications.
Brod died in 1968, at the age of eighty-five in a Tel Aviv hospital, attended by Esther and her daughter Eva. He left more than one will. The first, dated March 24, 1948, named Esther Hoffe as his sole heir and executor and expressed the desire that she should arrange to give his literary estate “to a public Jewish library or archive in Palestine”. He did not mention Kafka’s manuscripts. His last will, dated June 7, 1961, appointed Esther Hoffe as sole executor of his estate and bequeathed to her all his possessions. He also gave instructions that after his death his literary estate should be placed “with the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Municipal Library in Tel Aviv, or another public archive in Israel or abroad . . . . Mrs Hoffe will determine which of these institutions will be chosen, and under which conditions”. Again, there is no mention of manuscripts.
Reiner Stach calls this will, giving Esther the right to do with the estate as she wished yet obliging her or her heirs to transfer the estate intact to a proper archive, “inadvisably vague”. That is an understatement. If ever anyone had been asked to devise a more Shandean scene of chaos and confusion around an inheritance that by then had acquired world-wide significance, they could not have come up with anything more likely to lead to protracted litigation. What was Esther to do with either the 1952 note or this? Keep what had been gifted to her? Sell parts of it in order to provide for herself and her family? And if what she was asked to do was simply pass it on to an official archive, what kind of a gift was it?
In April 1969 a Tel Aviv court granted probate to Brod’s last will and appointed Hoffe as executor of his estate. The material Brod had rescued from Kafka’s study at his death and then from the Nazis in 1939 was now lodged in the flat in Spinoza Street that Esther shared with her daughter Eva and in banks in Tel Aviv and Zurich. In 1973 the State of Israel, concerned that Esther might sell the Kafka manuscripts abroad, sued for their possession – and lost. Judge Shilo ruled that Brod’s last will “allows Mrs Hoffe to do with his estate as she pleases during her lifetime”. Nevertheless, since under an Israeli law the state archivist can prevent the removal from Israel of privately owned records which are of “national” value, the authorities kept a watchful eye on Esther Hoffe and did indeed once detain her at Tel Aviv airport.
Despite this, Esther began, in the ensuing years, to sell off portions of the Kafka material. In 1974 twenty-two letters and ten postcards sent by Kafka to Brod, among other documents, were auctioned off for 90,000 Deutschmarks. In 1981 she offered an autographed copy of “Wedding Preparations in the Country” to the German Literature Archive in Marbach for 350,000 DM, but they declined it. Her behaviour grew more and more erratic. She signed a contract with Swiss publishers giving them the sole rights to Max Brod’s diaries for a five-digit sum, but never handed them over and kept the advance when the firm went bankrupt. She refused to talk to interested parties in her flat, preferring to harangue them on the stairs. Then in 1988 she put up the original manuscript of The Trial for auction at Sotheby’s, to the consternation of the international Kafka community and reputable state archives in Britain (where Malcolm Pasley had secured a large number of Kafka manuscripts for the Bodleian), Germany and Israel, who were fearful of its falling into private hands and disappearing for ever. In the end it went to Marbach.
Esther died in 2007 at the age of 101, bequeathing the remaining Kafka material to her two daughters. However, at this point the Israeli government stepped in. Its representative, the National Library, objected to the probate and filed to contest the will. The case dragged on for years, as more and more interested parties began to get involved. The principal one was the German Literary Archive in Marbach, aghast at the thought that Israel was asserting its right to house the literary archive of a German writer. For the Israelis, on the other hand, Kafka was a Jewish writer. For Eva and her sister Ruth, he was a dear friend of their mother’s greatest friend. Eventually, in August 2016, Justice Elyakim Rubinstein ruled that, while Eva and Ruth should go on receiving royalties from Brod’s literary estate, the estate itself, including all the Kafka material, should pass into the keeping of the National Library of Israel.
The world of Kafka scholarship breathed a sigh of relief. Although the Germans felt cheated, even they recognized that what was important was that Kafka’s remaining papers would now be housed in a highly reputable public institution, which promised to digitalize the material as soon as possible. But the protracted case and the whole convoluted history of this material had over the years raised fascinating ethical issues about who owns the rights to a dead author, and about the nature of Kafka’s work. Was he fundamentally a Jewish author, as the Israelis claimed, or a German author, as Marbach and German Kafka scholars would have it, or neither, but rather an extraordinary private individual?
We must also be clear that what was at stake was by and large an irrelevance to ordinary lovers of Kafka’s writings, for nothing in the Brod archive changes our view of the work, which has by now been thoroughly sifted by the scholars, with a German annotated edition in print. Despite newspaper stories, there have been no sensational finds of hitherto unknown work by Kafka. Balint talks at one point of three unpublished aphorisms, and at another of a large number of Kafka’s drawings to be found in the Hoffe apartment, but we can be sure that had anything been discovered that would count as a new story, novel, or notebook, the world would by now have learned of it.
No, the issues are fundamentally cultural and critical. The Germans argued that Israel had shown no interest in Kafka in the early years of the state, had in fact seen him as a representative of that desperate and unhappy world of European Jewry from which the State of Israel wished to dissociate itself totally. Was the sudden change of direction not driven solely by the fact that ownership of the Kafka archive was a way of boosting Israel’s cultural credibility as the world turned against it, owing to its seemingly permanent annexation of the West Bank? The Israelis, for their part, wondered why a people that had killed Kafka’s family and banned his books should be given access to his literary remains. Nor were the Hoffes above playing the Holocaust card themselves, though this time it was the State of Israel that was accused of “Gestapo tactics”. And Balint, an admirer of Kafka might feel, should have sensed that any attempt to use Kafka’s own complex meditations on the vagaries of the law to underpin his examination of the role the law played in the physical afterlife of Kafka’s writings was a dangerous gambit. The story he tells is interesting enough in itself not to need sentences like: “As Eva Hoffe awoke in Tel Aviv one morning in August 2016 from uneasy dreams, she found herself transformed into a disinherited woman”.
In the end the passages of Kafka that Balint quotes stand in vigorous reproof to all the legal arguments that surround the case and of the banal justifications for their actions provided by both individuals and institutions. Here is one, from the Letter to his Father, that is typical of Kafka in its inextricable mingling of humour and pathos. Kafka is trying to convey to his father what he experienced during the latter’s rare visits to the local synagogue accompanied by his son:
And so I yawned and dozed through the many hours (I don’t think I was ever again so bored, except later at dancing lessons) and did my best to enjoy the few little bits of variety there were, as for instance when the Ark of the Covenant was opened, which always reminded me of the shooting galleries where a cupboard door would open in the same way whenever one hit a bull’s eye; except that there something interesting always came out and here it was always just the same old dolls without heads.
Here his radical alienation from all traditions, which Kafka himself recognized in himself, can be seen as both utterly debilitating – for whether we know it or not, we all function by means of inherited traditions of one sort or another – and marvellously liberating. That is the wonder and the mystery of the world Kafka, and he alone, opened up for us a hundred years ago. Neither has faded in the intervening years.