Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  For Karina

  Contents

  1 The Last Appeal

  2 “Fanatical Veneration”: The First to Fall under Kafka’s Spell

  3 The First Trial

  4 Flirting with the Promised Land

  5 First and Second Judgments

  6 Last Son of the Diaspora: Kafka’s Jewish Afterlife

  7 The Last Ingathering: Kafka in Israel

  8 Kafka’s Last Wish, Brod’s First Betrayal

  9 Kafka’s Creator

  10 The Last Train: From Prague to Palestine

  11 The Last Tightrope Dancer: Kafka in Germany

  12 Laurel & Hardy

  13 Brod’s Last Love

  14 The Last Heiress: Selling Kafka

  15 The Last Judgment

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  1

  The Last Appeal

  Supreme Court of Israel, Shaarei Mishpat Street 1, Jerusalem

  June 27, 2016

  The word sein means two things in German: being and belonging-to-him.

  —Franz Kafka, Meditation, aphorism 46

  One summer morning in Jerusalem, Eva Hoffe, eighty-two, sat with her hands clasped on a polished curved wood bench in an alcove of the Israeli Supreme Court’s high-ceilinged lobby. To pass the time before her hearing, a friend who had come to lend support leafed through a copy of the daily newspaper Maariv. On the whole, Eva avoided the press; she resented the farrago of lies generated by journalists bent on portraying her as an eccentric cat-lady, an opportunist looking to make a fast buck on cultural treasures too important to remain in private hands. A headline inked in large red letters on the front page caught Eva’s eye. “They’re even putting David Bowie’s lock of hair up for auction,” she said with a hint of indignation. “Yes, as if it were a religious relic,” the friend replied.

  The fate of another kind of relic would be decided on this day. Three months earlier, on March 30, 2016, Eva had learned that the Supreme Court had agreed to hear her case, “given its public significance.” Oddly, Eva’s case did not appear on the court’s public agenda alongside the others listed for the day. A digital screen in the Supreme Court entrance hall announced her hearing only as Anonymous v. Anonymous.

  Eva had arrived almost an hour early; perhaps she had missed the screen on her way in. Today, in any case, anonymity would elude her, no matter how devoutly she wished for its comforts. An eight-year custody battle of sorts was reaching its climax. Earlier stages of the trial—dense with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—had been covered in the Israeli and international press as the hearings wound their way through the Tel Aviv Family Court (September 2007 to October 2012) and the Tel Aviv District Court (November 2012 to June 2015). From the outset, the contest had pitted private property rights against the public interests of two countries: Does the estate of the German-speaking Prague writer Max Brod (1884–1968) belong to Eva Hoffe or the National Library of Israel, or would it be best housed at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany? At stake was more than the estate of Max Brod, a once acclaimed figure in Central European cultural life. Brod was the friend, editor, and literary executor of another Prague writer, whose name stands for modern literature per se: Franz Kafka.

  Brod’s estate included not only his own manuscripts, but also sheafs of Kafka’s papers, as brittle as autumnal leaves. Ninety-two years after Kafka’s death, 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—the rare writer whose name became an adjective. The unlikely story of how Kafka’s manuscripts came into the hands of the Hoffe family involved a then-unrecognized writer, endowed with genius, whose last wish was betrayed by his closest friend; a wrenching escape from Nazi invaders as the gates of Europe closed; a love affair between exiles stranded in Tel Aviv; and two countries whose obsessions with overcoming the traumas of the past came to a head in the Supreme Court on this day. Above all, the trial opened up another, highly charged question: Who owns Kafka?

  Eva, who now found herself in the eye of the storm, was born in Prague on April 30, 1934, a decade after Kafka was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery. She was five years old when she fled the Nazi-occupied city together with her parents, Esther (Ilse) and Otto Hoffe, and her older sister Ruth. She showed me photos of her mother Esther as a young beauty in Prague with her pet dog, a Great Dane named Tasso, after the sixteenth-century Italian poet best known for his poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581). “I named one of my cats Tasso too,” Eva said.

  On arriving in Palestine, Eva attended school in Gan Shmuel, a kibbutz near the northern town of Hadera, and then studied until age fifteen at the agricultural boarding school at the Ben Shemen Youth Village in central Israel. Her favorite teacher there, the artist Naomi Smilansky (1916–2016), took Eva under her wing. But Eva’s time at Ben Shemen was occluded by loneliness. “I suffered from terrible homesickness there and cried almost every night,” she said. At the outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence in 1948, with Ben Shemen besieged by forces of the Arab Legion, Eva and the others were evacuated in armored buses.

  After the war, Eva served in a Nahal unit of the Israel Defense Forces (such units, under the command of the Education and Youth Corps, combine social volunteerism, community organizing, agriculture, and military service). On completing her service, she opted to study musicology in Zürich. Before completing her studies, however, she returned to Israel in 1966, in part to soothe her father Otto’s anxieties of imminent hostilities between Israel and its neighboring Arab states. “He suffered from a terrible fear of war,” she said. “He feared they would slaughter us.”

  The Six-Day War broke out in the summer of 1967. Every day for six days, Eva walked to Cafe Kassit on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street, where she sipped espresso at one of the tiny tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, beneath the six panels of marionette-like harlequins and musicians Yosl Bergner had painted for the café wall facing the street. The café served as a gathering place and gossip mill for long-haired bohemians, down-at-heel intellectuals, hucksters, and the army’s top brass, including Moshe Dayan. (Major Ariel Sharon, later prime minister, once chastised a noncommissioned officer: “You spend your time at Kassit and you chat away, talking about our operations to Haolam Hazeh [a weekly magazine published by Uri Avnery] journalists.”) Anyone who was anyone, said Uri Avnery, one of the café’s habitués, “rubbed shoulders with one another, and in friction itself there is inspiration.” And every day, Eva brought home snatches of overheard conversations, updates on the progress of the war. Her father greeted her reports of Israeli victories with disbelief.

  After the Six-Day War, Eva taught music and rhythm to first-and second-grade children, delighting in their improvisations. The next year, however, Eva suffered a double loss: her father and the writer Max Brod, a Prague émigré and a father figure to her, died in the space of five months. She found she could no longer take pleasure in either playing or teaching music.

  As Eva grieved, the Israeli poet and songwriter Haim Hefer, another denizen of Cafe Kassit, recommended her for a job at El Al, the Israeli airline. She served as a member of the ground staff for the next three decades. “I didn’t want to be an air-stewardess,” she said, “because I wanted to be close to my mother.” Instead, she took an almost childlike glee in listening to the roar of a plane’s engines, in watching the ground mashallers, with their reflecting safety vests and acoustic earmuffs, wave their illuminated wands and guide an arriving plane to its
gate. She retired in 1999, at age sixty-five.

  In all her years at El Al, Eva never felt like flying to Germany. “I couldn’t forgive,” she said. Nor in all those years did she marry. “When I heard how scathingly Felix Weltsch [a friend of Kafka who fled from Prague to Palestine with Max Brod] talked about his wife Irma, I knew I didn’t want to get married.” Reconciling herself to childlessness, she preferred to live in a kind of symbiosis with her mother Esther—and their cats—in their cramped apartment on Tel Aviv’s Spinoza Street.

  _____

  Eva Hoffe moved in Tel Aviv’s intellectual circles—counting the Berlin-born Hebrew poet Natan Zach and the artist Menashe Kadishman among her friends—but she did not pretend to be an intellectual herself. She conceded to me that she had not read many of Brod’s books. Eva had no children; she took her nourishment from a circle of devoted friends who doted on her. Three of them huddled with her now in a nook of the Supreme Court lobby, waiting for the hearing to begin. “Whatever happens,” the one carrying the newspaper cautioned her, “don’t utter a word; no outbursts.” She nodded and put her frustration in someone else’s words. “If Max Brod were still alive,” she said in ventriloquy, “he would come to court and say, jetzt Schluss damit (enough already)!”

  An Israeli novelist once told me she thought of Eva Hoffe as “the widow of Kafka’s ghost.” Eva, haunted by the prospect of disinheritance, had acquired something of the ghost’s despair at the opacity of justice. In Kafka’s unfinished novel The Trial, edited and posthumously published by Brod, Joseph K.’s uncle tells him: “A trial like this is always lost from the start.” Today Eva communicated that she was bowed under the weight of a similar despair. “If this were a tug-of-war contest, I’d have no chance,” she said. “I’m up against immensely powerful opponents, immensely.” She was referring to the State of Israel, which claimed that the manuscripts her mother had inherited from Kafka’s closest friend belonged not to her but to the National Library in Jerusalem.

  The clamor of the previous hearing was quieting down. It was time for Eva, her face sallow but alert, to enter the chamber. “As far as I’m concerned,” Eva said as she pressed through the heavy doors leading from the lobby into the courtroom, “the words justice and fairness have been erased from the lexicon.”

  In The Trial, legal chambers are dimly lit. The Jerusalem chamber, by contrast, resembles a high-ceilinged chapel, its unadorned white walls suffused with natural light. There is no glitz or gilding here. The angular building, commissioned by the London-based philanthropist Dorothy de Rothschild, is sheathed in Jerusalem stone. It is capped by a copper-clad pyramid inspired by the ancient tomb of the prophet Zechariah, the monument hewn out of the solid rock of the Kidron Valley on Jerusalem’s eastern flank.

  Nine lawyers in black robes sat at a semicircular table. They were there to give voice to the three not necessarily equal parties to this dispute: the National Library of Israel (which enjoyed the home-court advantage, so to speak, since the proceedings played out on Israeli turf); the German Literature Archive in Marbach (which had the advantage of financial resources of a magnitude not available to the other two parties); and Eva Hoffe (who, at least for the time being, had physical possession of the prize sought by the others). Each of the parties engaged in polemic by legal means, and each (and in turn, the judges) fluctuated between two rhetorical registers: the legal and the symbolic. The legal proceedings promised to throw light on questions of enduring significance for Israel, Germany, and the still fraught relationship between them. Both Marbach and the National Library brought to the courtroom a concern about their respective national pasts (albeit in very different ways); both sought to use Kafka as a trophy to honor those pasts, as though the writer was an instrument of national prestige.

  The lawyers, their backs to the rows of spectators, faced a panel of three justices on the raised dais: Yoram Danziger (formerly a leading commercial lawyer) to the left, Elyakim Rubinstein (a former attorney general) in the center, and Zvi Zylbertal (formerly of the Jerusalem District Court) to the right. These were the men tasked with measuring the legitimacy of each claim against the limits of that legitimacy.

  Eva seated herself alone in the front row. Months earlier, I had chanced to see her on Tel Aviv’s Ibn Gvirol Street, not far from her apartment; she seemed to be wandering, forlorn and companionless. Today, the expression on her face, mottled with melanin spots, was one of unmixed attention and lucidity. She took a seat just behind her lawyer, Eli Zohar, a well-connected hot-shot litigator who represented executives, high-ranking Israeli army officers, power-players in the Israel Military Industries and the Shabak (Israel’s internal security service), and, somewhat less successfully, Israel’s former prime minister, Ehud Olmert. (Olmert, convicted of breach of trust in 2012, and of bribery in 2014, began serving a nineteen-month prison sentence in February 2016.) Eva had switched lawyers several times in the last eight years: before settling on Zohar, she had been represented at various stages by Yeshayahu Etgar, Oded Cohen, and Uri Zfat. Eva told me she had given a lien on her apartment to Zohar to ensure he’d be paid in the event she died before the proceedings concluded.

  Zohar, his thinning hair slewed to one side, his black robe perfectly perpendicular to the polished floor, cleared his throat and spoke with remote courtesy—straightforward, not showy. In a firm baritone, he opened by saying that the court need not render a decision. The judgment had, in effect, been handed down four decades earlier. When Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, a month short of his forty-first birthday, his close friend and champion Max Brod—a prolific and acclaimed author in his own right—balked at Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts, diaries, and letters unread. Instead, Brod rescued the manuscripts and devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient—and most disquieting—chronicler of the twentieth century. When Brod died in Tel Aviv in 1968, these manuscripts passed to his secretary and confidante Esther Hoffe, Eva’s mother.

  In 1973, five years after Brod’s death, Zohar continued, the State of Israel sued Esther Hoffe for possession of the Kafka manuscripts she had inherited. The case was brought before Judge Yitzhak Shilo of the Tel Aviv District Court. In January 1974, Judge Shilo ruled that Brod’s last will “allows Mrs. Hoffe to do with his estate as she pleases during her lifetime.”

  Invoking this precedent, Zohar argued before the justices that with all due respect the present proceedings were unnecessary; there was no need to relitigate a case that had given Esther the right to what she already had.

  The argument did not cut much ice with Justice Rubinstein. With a schoolmaster’s manner, and with an air of omnicompetence about him, the judge gave Zohar short shrift. “The gentleman will please take the bull by the horns. We cannot devote too much time to Judge Shilo’s ruling, which we have read. The gentleman will proceed.”

  Unrattled, Zohar tried another tack: why, he asked, should the Kafka and Brod estates be transferred to the National Library of Israel, an institution that manifestly lacks the experts capable of discernment in German literature?

  The issue, Justice Zylbertal interjected from the right side of the dais, is not so much whether the library can furnish experts, but whether it can house material and make it accessible to scholars who wish to consult it.

  Attorney Yossi Ashkenazi, court-appointed deputy executor of Max Brod’s estate, rose, younger and less smooth in his manner than Zohar, and less convoluted in style. Brod had granted Esther Hoffe the choice of how and to whom to give the manuscripts, he argued, but not the right to pass that choice on to her heirs. Brod “did not want her daughters to deal with the matter.”

  Eva lowered her blue eyes and shook her head, her long hair swaying slightly. But she suppressed any other signs of distemper.

  Polished to a high sheen, the bald cannonball head of attorney Meir Heller now came into view from the right corner. Heller, who represented the National Library of Israel throughout the eight-year legal battle, came
out swinging. He blamed Esther Hoffe for preventing researchers access to the manuscripts she kept locked away for decades, and counseled the court to put an end to that untenable situation. Hundreds of researchers come to the National Library annually to consult the thousand personal archives of Jewish writers it holds, he said, and he expressed the hope that Kafka’s papers, rescued by Brod, would soon find their rightful place among them. The undercurrent of his argument was unmistakable: Kafka, a writer of Jewish literature in a non-Jewish language, belongs in the Jewish state.

  “The attempt to portray Kafka as a Jewish writer is ridiculous,” Eva once told me. “He did not love his Jewishness. He wrote from his heart, inwardly. He didn’t have a dialogue with God.” But even those who do consider him a Jewish writer, she said, cannot justifiably deduce from that anything about “the proper home” of his literary legacy. “Natan Alterman’s archives are in London, Yehuda Amichai’s are in New Haven,” she said, referring to two of Israel’s most beloved poets. “By what law must a Jewish writer’s archives stay in Israel?” As she spoke, I noticed the shift of registers between “love” and “law.”*

  Of course, Amichai had the luxury of deciding in his lifetime where his papers should go; Brod can no longer tell us about his own preferences. The posthumous handling of literary estates (Nachlässe in German) is not the same as the acquisition of papers from living authors (Vorlässe). But Hoffe’s point did have parallels elsewhere. The British novelist Kingsley Amis (1922–95), for instance, once remarked that he had little patience for the view that manuscripts by British authors should stay in Britain. Nor did he entertain qualms about his own papers leaving England:

  I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or the other about such bidder’s country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University should have a collection of [the English poet and novelist] Robert Graves manuscripts (say).