The room prepared by the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem remained small. It could not be for less. Not every day has the opportunity to display folders with hundreds of manuscripts, including unpublished, by writer Frank Kafka and his literary guardian angel, Max Brod.
Shortly after exposing letters (such as the one sent to his father he never received), travel diaries, brief texts in Hebrew and interesting sketches of the Jewish intellectual from Prague kept until two weeks ago in safes in Switzerland, the president of the Israeli academic center , David Blumberg, told EL MUNDO: "We can end the Kakfian story around the archive of Kafka and his great friend Brod."
"Kafkian history" is a popular term in the main Israeli library center located at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem to define twelve years of judicial and literary litigation around its precious legacy . 95 years after Kafka's death and 51 after Brod's death, his files are regrouped, with the new pearls, in Jerusalem to be exhibited in the coming months on the Internet.
After Kafka's death in 1924, Brod did a historical favor to literature by not fulfilling his last desire to burn all his writings and took them to Tel Aviv in his flight from Europe under Nazi harassment. The request of the author of The Metamorphosis , The Process and The Castle , among other works, can be explained by his famous ego deficit and literary self-esteem. Kafka did not consider his writings so transcendental as to share them with the world. Brod - who ended up being an important playwright of the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv - pointed out the possibility that he did want to publish his works. Otherwise, he himself would have burned them. "He only needed a match," he said .
Finally destiny - in this case, his friend - turned his relative anonymity into life into myth in absence. What Brod could not imagine is that his faithful secretary Esther Hoffe also failed to fulfill his last wish to leave all Kafka and his documents to a public institution, preferably to the National Library of Israel. Among other reasons, because he liked how the center of Jerusalem managed the archive of his admired Martin Buber.
After his death, however, Hoffe was left with the rich literary heritage. When he died in 2007, he went to his daughters Ruth and Hava. A year later, the National Library claimed him before the Justice recalling Brod's will while Hoffe's daughters alleged that they fulfilled the family will. Along the way, they sold one of Kafka's great creations, The Process , for almost two million dollars in London.
In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that all texts by Kafka and Brod should be in the archives of the National Library. A Swiss court seconded the decision and ordered the transfer to Jerusalem of material stored in a bank in Zurich.
As the curator of the collection in the Library recalls, Dr. Stefan Litt, the work was scattered in four places: "In Hoffe's residence in Tel Aviv in inhuman conditions and very deficient to preserve it, in two banks in Tel Aviv, in four Swiss safes and in the hands of the German Police who managed to locate the stolen material from Hoffe's house. "
At the end of last May, they traveled to Berlin to receive thousands of stolen documents from Brod. Among the flow of texts, a postcard from Kafka in 1910 addressed to Brod. The documents, recovered by the German Police, came from Hoffe's house in Tel Aviv where they lived badly with numerous cats.
60 folders of hidden manuscripts in Switzerland
In Jerusalem, they call it "the missing link in Brod's written heritage . " Analyzing the 60 folders, Litt is surprised by the effective learning of Hebrew in its last seven years of life. It was known that he studied Hebrew with a young teacher from Jerusalem but not that he could write it as shown in the notebook now displayed for the first time. According to him, "it shows that he could write short texts in Hebrew and his interest in Zionism and modern Hebrew language."
Litt also highlights the six autobiographical pages, always in German, with the original letter of Kafka in 2009 in which for example his sentence appears: "Among the students who studied with me I was dumb, but not the dumbest."
And the three draft versions of the "Wedding Preparations in the Country" of the groom Raban. And the newspapers written by Kafka and Brod about their meetings at the Savoy Café in Prague, including one with the actor of the Yiddish theater company, Isaac Levy.
"What has also surprised us is the notebook with ideas, scribbles, and drawings," Litt admits to this newspaper highlighting the incredible epistolary activity of Kafka. And, of course, the 47 pages of the letter to his father he always feared.
"It is important that all these documents are here not only because it was Brod's will but because his cultural legacy is concentrated and well cared for in one place and not scattered in the hands of all kinds of collectors around the world. The new generations in everyone can get to know all his work, "Blumberg adds. The manuscripts received, some in a sensitive state, could be exposed to the general public, after digital treatment, at the end of the year.
United before and after death
Born into a Jewish family in Prague, Kafka is the author of transcendental novels, collections of stories and letters like the one sent to his father Hermann that he never received.
Tormented and shy, Kafka managed to somehow get out of his isolation (a state he defined as "way of knowing ourselves") thanks to the meeting in 1902 with the extrovert Brod. Surely the person who knew him best, helped most in life and after his death by revealing his literary treasure. It helped him solve doubts by perhaps fulfilling one of Kafka's famous quotes: "There are problems that we would never have solved if they were really our problems."
The two Jewish writers forged a solid literary relationship that has survived time. While Brod was buried in the Trumpeldor cemetery in Tel Aviv, Kafka rests in the Jewish cemetery in Prague. Victim of tuberculosis, the writer was buried in 1924. The year in Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf . Kafka died without having to suffer the horror planned and executed by the Nazis unlike his three sisters killed in concentration camps.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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