Lost, Stolen or Shredded

by Rick Gekoski

  When I had finished the available short stories, novels, collections of letters and biographies, I felt bereft and oddly resentful to have been left with a craving for more. Yes, I acknowledged, it was astonishing that this young, rather sickly lawyer, with a full-time job in the insurance industry, could have produced so much in so little available spare time. I was hooked on Kafka, and unreasonably resentful that he had let me down by not producing more. Like Oliver Twist, forever hungry: ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’ I tried reading Camus, but compared to Kafka it felt thin, and a bit formulaic.

  Prior to his death in 1924, at the age of forty, Franz Kafka had published few of those great works for which he is remembered, and his passing was hardly noted. There were a number of short stories, including a slim volume containing A Hunger Artist, and The Metamorphosis, but the great novels for which he is revered had not been published for the simple reason that he did not wish them to be. He left explicit instructions to his dear friend (also a lawyer) Max Brod about what to do with the material: ‘Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread.’ Indeed, towards the end of his life Kafka himself burned some of the work, and we can only speculate why he left the bulk of it for Brod to dispose of, when he could have done so himself.

  It was an unambiguous final request, and Brod, to his great credit, and perhaps intuiting Kafka’s ambivalence about the matter, ignored it. Over the next ten years he prepared the manuscripts for publication, as The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927) – probably the works for which the author is best known, and from which the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ is appropriately derived – appeared in German editions (the language in which they were written).

  This story is so well known – as worn by usage as are the many accounts of, say, the assassination of John F. Kennedy – that it is almost impossible to relate the bare facts with any vivacity. Most popular accounts of Kafka sound like Wikipedia entries (as diligent and prosaic as my previous two paragraphs), while most academic writing about him strives so desperately for something original by way of interpretation or textual analysis that it is hardly of interest even to other practitioners of the Kafka trade, much less to Kafka’s multitude of admiring readers. While his stories continue to provoke and to enthral, Kafka’s own story, once the simple facts have been laid down, seems to have lost much of its power to surprise or to move us. Nothing much more to be said, is there?

  But he has a curious haunting resonance, Franz Kafka. If he is not still with us, he has an insistent quality that makes us wish ardently that he were. His works have been made into songs, novels, films, biopics, operas, as if he were endlessly demanding to be re-understood, reanimated and reassessed. He is alive to us as few authors are, and it is no surprise that he has insinuated himself into the imagination of so many creative writers. Philip Roth wrote a marvellous piece on Kafka, which falls into two distinct parts: the first, a magisterial revisiting of the author, invoking his physical presence and imagining what might have been had he not died so young, and the second, as if imaginatively required, a fantasy in which a middle-aged refugee, Dr Kafka, shows up in Newark to teach Hebrew to the nine-year-old Roth (who cruelly refers to him as Dr Kishka) and a few of his friends at the local schul.

  The lonely bachelor is soon invited to the Roths’ table, and hesitantly begins to court Aunt Rhoda, an unprepossessing frump whom the exiled writer miraculously begins to invigorate. Next thing you know, she is about to star in the local play. It is touching, funny, with a surprising plausibility, and it ends – as it must – in tears. Though attracted, Kafka cannot commit. It is the story of his life, and it is necessary in this poignantly comic counter-life as well. He forswears Rhoda, dies once again, alone, with his piles of unpublished manuscripts unknown to his few acquaintances. We are left to assume, and to imagine, that they are thrown out with his few possessions after he dies. Even reincarnated imaginatively, he teases, disappoints and leaves us with nothing more than we had before.

  Roth’s effort is representative, and symbolic. But even his imaginative powers, and sympathy for both the man Kafka and for his works, cannot create what cannot be made. It is not up to Philip Roth to write more Kafkas, as, say, Kingsley Amis, John Gardner and Sebastian Faulks made more James Bonds following Ian Fleming’s death. James Bond is only James Bond, thin and predictable – almost anyone could do a recognisable version of him – but you can’t do more Kafka. You can parody him, or do a pastiche of the Kafka-esque, but the best of his works are so precisely individuated, so entirely his own, that it would be a ludicrous presumption to attempt more of them.

  That’s a fact. We have our favourite artists, composers, writers. They do their work, and they leave us. What they have not done remains undone, and if our internal and external landscapes are haunted by the unaccomplished possibilities – the lost buildings of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, the further poems of Keats or symphonies of Mozart – we simply have to do without them. Anyway, we were lucky with Kafka: had it not been for Max Brod’s unwillingness to destroy the unpublished material, all we would have had was an obscure writer who published a few short stories during his lifetime.

  When reading Kafka in my orange chair at Penn, I assumed – as most readers did – that Brod had chosen both discriminatingly and exhaustively when he edited Kafka’s manuscripts and prepared them for publication. Either there was nothing more, or there was nothing more that was fit to print. It was a reasonable presumption, and for some seventy years there was no reason to challenge it. And when such a reason began to emerge, the details were so remarkable, so unlikely, and so fraught, that they could only have been invented by the master himself. Kafka was back.

  Or was he? To understand the manifold complexities and ironies of this question, we have to return to 1939, when Max Brod, as the Nazis marched into Prague, departed in haste for Palestine, taking with him everything that he most valued. On arrival he was to continue his prolific career as a writer, involve himself in the theatre and settle into an apparently secure and uncontentious life. As far as one can ascertain, no one outside his immediate circle knew that he had taken with him from Prague two suitcases full of further Franz Kafka material.

  What was in the suitcases? Why had he chosen not to reveal their contents? How important were the documents? Brod left no answers to these questions. What he did leave, though, was the contents of the suitcases themselves, which passed after his death in 1968 (his wife having predeceased him) to Esther Hoffe, a long-time friend, secretary and (it was widely presumed) lover. It has still not been established exactly what Brod’s wishes in the matter were: whether Hoffe was to hold the papers in trust, before passing them on to an appropriate library (though why Brod would choose such an unwieldy process is unclear), or whether she simply took over ownership of the material under the terms of the will. There are numerous and contradictory accounts of what has followed since that time, mostly released through newspapers and the wire services, and which differ in crucial details.

  The following timeline and narrative seem the most likely account. Esther Hoffe, in the years after acquiring the Kafka material, behaved as if she unambiguously owned it and had the sole right to determine if, how and when it should be sold. In 1974 a series of letters and postcards from Kafka to Brod were privately sold to a buyer or buyers in Germany. The fact was not unnoticed in Israel, and Hoffe was regarded as the most likely source of the material. Somebody was clearly keeping an eye on her, because when, the very next year, she attempted to board a flight from Israel to Germany, she was stopped at customs, searched and found to have a cache (no one has revealed quite what was in it) of Kafka material for which, she was told, she needed to have deposited photocopies at the National Library as a condition of export. This did not stop her – nor is it entirely clear why it should have – from selling the handwritten manuscript of Kafka’s The Trial at Sotheby’s
in London, in 1988, for a price of just under $2 million, which was then the highest price ever fetched for a twentieth-century literary manuscript. It was purchased by the German Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, which has the largest collection of Kafka manuscript material, and which has continued to claim that Max Brod wished all of his material to end up there.

  Presumably that manuscript did not need a formal export licence (it may have been kept abroad), but it seemed to the Israelis that it needed at the very least a moral one. According to a spokesman for the Israeli National Library, Brod’s will had apparently stipulated that the material left in Hoffe’s possession was destined to be deposited there upon her death. But Hoffe’s lawyers cited a 1974 judgement of an Israeli district court which ruled that Brod had gifted the collection to her, and that she had the right to give or sell it to any institution of her choice, whether in Israel or abroad.

  Returning the manuscript of The Trial to Israel would ‘correct an ongoing historic injustice’, Israel National Library director Shmuel Har Noy told the newspaper Haaretz. The phrase is both opaque and provocative, and it was many years before the underlying assumptions and arguments were clarified and made public. It was already clear, looking at what is known of these transactions, that there was some problem with Frau Hoffe’s possession of the Kafka papers, only no one would say exactly what it was. Nor was it clear who this ‘no one’ consisted of. There was no statement regarding the matter from what one can only call The Authorities, who were palpably watching her closely and assuming some wrong-doing.

  It was as if The Trial were being re-enacted in Israel: mysterious, sinister and infuriating. In that novel, an investigating policeman makes this point to poor Joseph K. when he is first arrested: ‘Our authorities, as far as I know … don’t go out looking for guilt among the public; it’s the guilt that draws them out, like it says in the law, and they have to send us police officers out. That’s the law.’

  If The Metamorphosis resists analysis as metaphor, The Trial seems to demand it, and is often regarded as Kafka’s most approachable version of man’s fate. Joseph K., a thirty-year-old Chief Clerk at a bank in which he is held in high esteem, leading, so far as one can see, a blameless bachelor’s life, is suddenly told he is under investigation by the judiciary and police, for a crime or crimes which are never specified. This sinister procedure is not directed at him alone; it can and does happen frequently to others, who are similarly ignorant of the complaints levelled against them, and of the processes by which they will be tried, or through which they can defend themselves. A sprawling, tawdry and floppily implacable judiciary resides over this deathly shambles, and teams of lawyers and experts, of one sort or another, attempt to navigate these murky byways, and fail. Within a year Joseph K., having moved from initial bemuse-ment and spirited resistance to a weary if uncomprehending acceptance that he cannot defend himself – no one is found innocent – is taken off in the night-time by two burly functionaries and stabbed in the heart, dying ‘like a dog’ in an abandoned quarry. He accepts his fate but never understands it: a process that certainly seems to have some gener-alisable implication.

  In the meantime, Frau Hoffe continued in residence in her Jerusalem apartment with (according to most reports) some of the Kafka material – the rest apparently deposited in safe-deposit boxes in both Tel Aviv and Zurich – and her many cats. It was, by most accounts, a most insalubrious environment (unless you were a cat), and visitors, other than her daughters, were unwelcome. Scholars appealed desperately to be given access to the material and were unceremoniously dismissed. Whether The Authorities attempted to enter the premises is unrecorded, and (if they did) what the outcome was is unknown.

  Esther Hoffe died, aged 101, in 2007 and left the material, still under the firm impression that she was its rightful owner, to her daughters, who themselves had no doubt that they now owned it, or about what to do with the material. It would be sold, they announced through an attorney, as if it were a bag of oranges:

  If we get an agreement, the material will be offered for sale as a single entity, in one package. It will be sold by weight … They’ll say: ‘There’s a kilogram of papers here, the highest bidder will be able to approach and see what’s there.’ The National Library [of Israel] can get in line and make an offer, too.

  This bizarre and unprecedented procedure can itself indicate how little either the heirs or their lawyers understood about the importance of the material, or the proper ways of appraising its value. Indeed, even a buyer of oranges likes to inspect them before purchase. The value of such material correlates exactly to its importance: has it been published before? How significant is it biographically or in literary terms? In short: what can be learned from it? The manuscript of The Trial didn’t weigh much, but it is one of the iconic novels of the twentieth century, and would undoubtedly have fetched many times more than a cache of lesser material which weighed twice as much. It doesn’t add to one’s confidence in lawyers. Unless this one was kidding – good joke! – though Israeli lawyers with a sense of humour are an endangered species.

  No one outside the immediate circle of those arguing and advising on the proceedings had been informed about the contents of the boxes. If there was some problem with Hoffe’s ownership of the papers – was she merely their custodian? – it was also unclear whether she had the legal right to pass them on to her daughters. The lawyer acting for the Israeli National Library was as outraged as only a lawyer can be: ‘As long as Esther Hoffe was alive, she was responsible, she could say, “I am handling it” … The late Mrs. Hoffe did not do what the late Mr. Brod asked her to do and deposit the documents in the National Library … The will was not honoured, it was desecrated.’ The Trial, again, is a perfect guide to the absurdity of the process: ‘Needless to say, the documents would mean an almost endless amount of work. It was easy to come to the belief, not only for those of an anxious disposition, that it was impossible ever to finish it.’

  But there was a much more complex question at issue, which lay in the baffling claim that the Kafka papers are essential to the Jewish heritage, and hence are the natural property of the state. According to David Blumberg, chairman of the board of directors of the National Library, ‘The library does not intend to give up on cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people … Because it is not a commercial institution and the items kept there are accessible to all without cost, the library will continue its efforts to gain transfer of the manuscripts that have been found.’ The implications of this remarkable assertion, according to Judith Butler, who has written one of the most thoughtful pieces on the subject, are breath-taking:

  The implicit understanding is that all … Jewish cultural assets – whatever that might mean – outside Israel eventually and properly belong to Israel … if the National Library claims the legacy of Kafka for the Jewish state, it, and institutions like it in Israel, can lay claim to practically any pre-Holocaust synagogue, artwork, manuscript or valuable ritual object extant in Europe.

  It is hard to see how such an argument could convince anyone who has the slightest degree of sense, much less of justice.

  Nor would Kafka himself have acceded to this easy description of himself as somehow essentially Jewish, hence naturally assimilable to the state’s claim that his work was one of its cultural assets. Kafka was by temperament and inclination an outsider, his major commitment being to the inconsistent ways in which he engaged with the world. He was, he observed in a letter, ‘excluded from every soul-sustaining community on account of my non-Zionist (I admire Zionism and am nauseated by it), non-practising Judaism’.

  In 2009 the Tel Aviv Family Court required that the papers be examined before giving its ruling on the question of their ownership and eventual destination. This process was apparently envisaged as taking several weeks. But it took almost two years, in which the ten lawyers involved could hardly be crammed into the under-sized room in which the court met.

  The room they’ve been allocated, with
its narrow space and low ceiling, will be enough to show what contempt the court has for these people. The only light in the room comes through a little window that is so high up that, if you want to look out of it, you first have to get one of your colleagues to support you on his back.

  These proceedings were so complex and protracted, the procedures so opaque, that it is impossible, once again, not to invoke Kafka’s great novel.

  Advocates, civil servants, experts and witnesses milled about, uncertain what the procedures were, and where each of them fitted in. Indeed, according to Reuters, ‘lawyers twice asked what exactly the deliberation was all about’. The Trial again describes just such an absurd process:

  there are so many various opinions about the procedure that they form into a great big pile and nobody can make any sense of them. … Even for the junior officials, the proceedings in the courtrooms are usually kept secret, so they are hardly able to see how the cases they work with proceed, court affairs appear in their range of vision often without their knowing where they come from and they move on further without learning where they go.

  It was not until February 2011 that these obscure deliberations reached a point when a rough sense of the documents in the safe deposit boxes began to emerge. The wire services noted the presence of the manuscripts of ‘Wedding Preparations in the Country’ (previously published, but from incomplete fragments) and a few other short stories, some Kafka diaries and correspondence, and Brod’s unpublished diaries. The Oxford Professor of German, Richie Robertson, noted that ‘potentially the most interesting item is Max Brod’s own diaries … used for his own biography of Kafka, in which he quoted numerous passages about Kafka.’ It is hard to follow his reasoning without seeing the material, but it would seem likely that the discovery of a previously unknown version of a story by Kafka is a more exciting discovery than any amount of diaries by Kafka’s friend and amanuensis. Maybe it’s not a very good short story? But, the professor observes, ‘there may be more’, and until we know exactly what this might be, it is still hard to make a judgement. It will take some further time before we can assess fully the nature and importance of what is, at long last, revealed.