Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  In 1969, Amis sold one-and-a-half boxes worth of manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Texas.* Fifteen years later, he sold the remainder of his papers and rights to all future papers to the Huntington Library in San Marino, California (which also happens to house one of the world’s finest collections of early editions of another English writer: Shakespeare).

  Four days before the Supreme Court hearing in Jerusalem, Germany’s parliament in Berlin offered an example of how European countries were seeking to clamp down on such sales. On June 23, 2016, the Bundestag adopted a controversial cultural heritage protection law aimed at keeping works in Germany that are considered “national treasures” (defined as “national cultural property of outstanding significance for the nation” whose removal would cause a “significant loss”). “The cultural nation of Germany,” Culture Minister Monika Grütters said, “is obligated to collect and preserve its cultural property.” Grütters dismissed concerns that the law would be used to “nationalize” German art and artifacts owned by private citizens. “Protection is not, in my eyes, expropriation.”

  As the lawyers in the Israeli courtroom debated where protection ends and expropriation begins, it became clear that the Israeli effort to claim Kafka for the Jewish state depended not only on positive assertions about his Jewishness but also on defining him by what he is not—in other words, not a German national treasure.

  Meir Heller took his seat, and attorney Sa’ar Plinner addressed the court in a clipped cadence. His client, the German Literature Archive in Marbach, headed by Ulrich Raulff, wished to add the Kafka and Brod collections to its world-class holdings of literary estates of prominent writers. But as Plinner told me later, he was constrained by precise instructions from Raulff about what to say and not to say in supporting Hoffe’s right to sell the estate to the Germans. All along, the German Literature Archive had implied that in Germany, Kafka would be read universally (from an objective “view from nowhere,” if such a thing were possible), and in Israel, where some are tempted to reduce Kafka to being a Jewish author, he would be read in more parochial and idiosyncratic ways.

  Now, aware that they had made some tactless moves in earlier stages of the trial, the directors of the German Literature Archive wished at this crucial juncture to keep a lower profile, to tread more lightly. Accordingly, as he says he was instructed to do, Plinner merely stressed that because of the abundance of material, previous attempts to inventory Max Brod’s estate were incomplete. “At present, I don’t think anyone knows what’s there,” he said.

  Before an hour has elapsed, Justice Rubinstein brought the proceedings to a close. He and his two colleagues retired to their chambers. Eva and her friends milled about anxiously in the lobby. “When will the verdict come down?” one asked. One of Eli Zohar’s aides replied by citing the medieval biblical commentator Rashi on the verse, “And it shall be when your son asks you tomorrow . . .” (Exodus 13:14). “There’s a tomorrow that means tomorrow, Rashi explained, and there’s a tomorrow that means in the world to come.”

  Not one to be deferential, Eva remarked that Eli Zohar seemed to be suffering from a summer cold. “He was not at the top of his game,” she said. But she seemed to signal that she could withstand the pressure, that she was made of sterner stuff. As she left the lobby and headed toward the footbridge that connects the Supreme Court compound with a garish mall across the street, she said: “Still, I hope against hope. My name is Hoffe [German for ‘I hope’], after all.”

  As she walked away, I thought of Kafka’s subversion of that old Latin motto of obstinacy, dum spiro spero—“While I breathe, I hope.” In his biography of Kafka, Max Brod reports a conversation in which Kafka suggested that human beings may be nothing more than nihilistic thoughts in God’s mind. Then is there any hope? Brod asked. “There is plenty of hope,” Kafka replied, “an infinite amount of hope—only not for us.” And as Eva’s small figure receded, I wondered whether Kafka—with his “passion for making himself insignificant,” as the German-language Jewish writer Elias Canetti put it—would shudder from the possessiveness the trial laid bare. Would he remind us that we can be intoxicated by what we possess, but even more intoxicated by what we don’t?

  Eva Hoffe at Max Brod’s graveside, Tel Aviv, January 2017. (photo: Tomer Appelbaum)

  2

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

  Charles University, Prague

  October 23, 1902

  A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

  —Franz Kafka, 1904

  Where faith is lacking, everything seems bare and frigid.

  —Max Brod, 1920

  Burning to impress, Max Brod, eighteen, a first-year law student at Charles University in Prague, had just wrapped up a talk on the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in the second-floor club room of the German Students’ Union on Ferdinandstrasse. On a sideboard next to the heavy drapes, thickly buttered slices of bread rested on trays next to newspapers from throughout Europe. For two years, Brod had been obsessed with the works of Schopenhauer. He could recite entire passages from memory. “When I was finished with volume six [of his complete works],” Brod recalled, “I immediately turned again to volume one.”

  From behind the lectern, Brod’s disproportionately large head was visible atop a stocky torso. Although you wouldn’t have guessed it now, a deformation of the spine (or kyphosis), diagnosed when he was four years old, had forced him to wear an iron corset and neck brace for part of his childhood.

  Max Brod was born in 1884, the eldest of three children of a Jewish middle-class family that traced its presence in Prague back to the seventeenth century. As an infant, he had suffered measles, scarlet fever, and a near-fatal bout of diphtheria. Max’s father Adolf, deputy director of the United Bohemian Bank, was temperate, easy-going, and urbane; his mother Fanny (née Rosenfeld), was a volcano of unbridled emotions. In his digressive autobiography, A Contentious Life (Streitbares Leben), Brod writes: “In my brother [Otto] as in my sister [Sophia], my mother’s energy was joined with my father’s nobility and kindness to form a well-rounded character, whereas in me much remained unstable and I always had to struggle to maintain a semblance of inner balance.”

  Brod’s gregariousness seemed at variance with his small stature, and in conversation one quickly forgot about the geometry of his figure. His friend the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig described Brod as a student: “I still remember him as I beheld him for the first time, a twenty-year-old youth, small, slim, and of boundless modesty. . . . Thus was he then, this young poet entirely devoted to everything which seemed great to him, to the strange, to the sublime, to the wonderful in every shape and form.”

  As the audience dispersed, a lanky, six-foot-tall, fastidiously dressed student one year his senior approached the lectern with a loping gait. His tie was perfectly knotted; his ears pointed. Brod had never seen him before. Franz Kafka introduced himself and offered to walk Brod home. “Even his elegant, usually dark-blue, suits were inconspicuous and reserved like him,” Brod recalled. “At that time, however, something seems to have attracted him to me; he was more open than usual, filling the endless walk home by disagreeing strongly with my all too rough formulations.” When they arrived at Schallengasse 1, where Brod lived with his parents, the conversation was still in full swing. With Brod struggling to keep pace, they walked to Zeltnergasse, where Franz Kafka lived with his parents and sisters, and then back again. Along the way, the two students spoke about Nietzsche’s attacks on Schopenhauer, about Schopenhauer’s ideal of renouncing the self, and about his definition of genius: “Genius,” the philosopher wrote, “is the ability to leave entirely out of sight our own interest, our willing, and our aims, and consequently to discard entirely our own personality for a time, in order to remain pure knowing subject, the clear eye of the world.” Brod noticed the color of Kafka’s eyes, “a keen, sparkling gray,” as he put it. As Kafka showed neither aptitude nor appetite for
abstract philosophizing, the conversation soon took a literary turn. With disarming simplicity, Kafka preferred to talk about the Austrian writer, ten years their senior, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. (One of the first gifts Kafka gave to Brod was a special edition, with embossed binding, of Hofmannsthal’s Das Kleine Welttheater, The Small World-Theater [1897].)

  The pair began to meet daily, sometimes twice a day. Brod became attracted to Kafka’s gentle serenity, to the “sweet aura of certainty,” as he put it, and the “unusual aura of power” he radiated. He seemed to Brod both wise and childlike. In his memoirs, Brod would describe the “collision of souls” as they read together Plato’s Protagoras in Greek, and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) in French. (Among many other gifts, Kafka would give Brod a book about Flaubert by René Dumesnil.) “We completed each other,” Brod writes, “and had so much to give one another.” More mundanely, Kafka depended on Brod to help him pass one of the oral examinations for his law degree. “Only your notes saved me,” he told Brod.

  The two young men would spend the occasional evening together at the cinema or the cabaret Chat Noir. Although they conversed exclusively in German, they would chuckle at certain Czech figures of speech, like člobrdo (“poor little chap”). They enjoyed conversations about the new stereoscopic slide shows called Kaiserpanorama. They often hiked together on Sundays, and took day trips to Karlštejn Castle, a Gothic keep southwest of Prague that had held the Czech crown jewels, sacred relics, and the most valuable documents of the state archive. They discussed the differences between novels and theater as they strolled among promenading couples along the tree-hemmed paths of the Baumgarten, the park known as “the Prater of Prague.” Kafka would amuse Brod by imitating the way in which other saunterers handled their walking sticks. They went swimming in the Moldau River, and loafed under chestnut trees after a dip in Prague’s open-air bath. “Kafka and I held the strange belief that one has not taken possession of a landscape until a swim in its streaming bodies of water establishes a physical connection,” Brod said.

  When Kafka and Brod visited Lake Maggiore, Kafka biographer Reiner Stach reports, they began with a swim and “embraced while standing in the water—which must have looked quite odd especially because of the difference in their heights.” The pair also vacationed together in Riva on Lake Garda, on the Austria–Italy border; visited Goethe’s house in Weimar; and stayed together at the Hotel Belvédère au Lac in Lugano, Switzerland.* In 1909, they attended the air show at the Montichiari airfield near Brescia, in northern Italy. They exchanged their travel diaries. They twice traveled to Paris together: in October 1910, and again at the end of an extended summer trip in 1911. During that trip, Kafka and Brod thought up a new kind of travel guide. “It would be called Billig (On the Cheap),” Brod said. “Franz was tireless and got a childlike pleasure out of elaborating all the principles down to the least detail for this new type of guide, which was supposed to make us millionaires.” Their motto for the series: Just Dare.

  As wifely and solicitous as he could be, Brod did sometimes tire of what he called “Kafka’s hopelessness.” “It is pretty clear to me,” Brod writes in his diary in 1911, “that . . . Kafka is suffering from an obsessional neurosis.” But such reservations did not long interfere with Brod’s growing admiration. “Never in my life,” Brod wrote, “have I been so serenely cheerful as during weeks of holiday spent with Kafka. All my cares, all my peevishness stayed behind in Prague. We turned into merry children, we came up with the most outlandish, cutest jokes—it was a great stroke of luck for me to live close to Kafka and enjoy first-hand hearing him spouting his animated ideas (even his hypochondria was inventive and entertaining).”

  Even when they were apart, Brod said, “I knew exactly what he would have said in this or that situation.” When Brod vacationed without Kafka, he often sent postcards. He once sent Kafka a postcard from Venice, for instance, featuring Bellini’s painting of Venus, goddess of love. “For a brief time,” writes Reiner Stach, Kafka “even contemplated starting a new private notebook devoted exclusively to his relationship with Brod.”

  _____

  And yet the contrasts between the two young men—one as exuberant and outgoing as the other was inward-looking—were evident for all to see. Brod, with his joie de vivre, alive with surplus energies, radiated a verve, vitality, and communion with human life lacking in Kafka. Brod, of a sunnier temperament, less divided against himself, seemed free of the kind of self-doubt that accompanied Kafka’s pitiless self-scrutiny. If Kafka could not bring himself to care much about worldly success, Brod (in the words of Arthur Schnitzler) was “consumed with his own ambition, jumping headlong into opportunities that come along like an enthusiast.”

  Kafka tended to husband his energies inward. His obsession with writing conferred on him a capacity for asceticism wholly lacking in Brod. “When it became clear in my organism that writing was the most productive direction for my being to take,” Kafka wrote in 1912, “everything rushed in that direction and left empty all those abilities which were directed toward the joys of sex, eating, drinking, philosophical reflection, and above all music.” In a diary entry from August 1916, he put it in another way: “My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying.” “I am made of literature,” Kafka wrote in 1913. “I am nothing else and cannot be anything else. . . . Everything that is not literature bores me.” “I hate everything that does not relate to literature,” he admitted the same year.

  There were other telling contrasts. An accomplished composer and pianist, Brod had a delicate discrimination and refined taste in matters of music. He set texts by Heine, Schiller, Flaubert, and Goethe to music. (He had studied musical composition with Adolf Schreiber, a student of Antonín Dvořák, and was proud of a distant relative, Henri Brod, a famous French oboist.) Stefan Zweig remembered how “his small, girlish hands strayed gently over the keys of a piano.” One evening in 1912, when Albert Einstein was teaching in Prague, Brod and the physicist played a violin sonata together. Leon Botstein, the American conductor and president of Bard College, speculates that for Brod, “music facilitated what seemed impossible in politics: the forging of communication between the Czech and the German.”

  Kafka, by contrast, admitted his “inability to enjoy music cohesively.” He never indulged in opera or classical concerts. He admitted to Brod that he wouldn’t be able to distinguish a piece by Franz Lehár, a composer of light operettas, from one by Richard Wagner, the composer who gave voice to the Dionysian passions of German myth. (Brod greatly admired Wagner’s music, and claimed never to have read the composer’s anti-Semitic screeds.)

  Certainly, music features in Kafka’s fiction. In Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” [Die Verwandlung], for example, Gregor Samsa, transformed into a repulsive insect, scuttles out of his room toward the vibrating sounds of his sister Grete’s violin. “Was he a beast, if music could move him so?” he asks himself. “It seemed to him to open a way toward that unknown nourishment he so longed for . . . No one here would appreciate her music as much as he.” In Kafka’s first novel, Amerika, Karl expresses an immigrant’s longing with his amateurish renditions of a soldier’s song from the old country. In the short story “Investigations of a Dog,” the canine narrator devotes his life to a scientific study of the riddle of seven dancing “musical dogs” (Musikerhunde) whose melodies overwhelm him and in the end restore him to the canine community.

  And yet Samsa’s creator pronounced himself “completely detached from music,” a detachment that overwhelmed him with “a quiet bittersweet mourning.” “Music is for me like the ocean,” Kafka said. “I am overpowered, and transported to a state of wonderment. I am enthusiastic but also anxious when faced with endlessness. I am, as is evident, a poor sailor. Max Brod is the exact opposite. He rushes headlong into the waves of sound. Now that’s a champion swimmer.”
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  Nor could Kafka match the erotic passions that Brod expressed in life and literature alike. Together they visited brothels in Prague, Milan, Leipzig, and Paris. Brod, a regular at Prague’s upscale brothels like Salon Goldschmied, “would go into raptures in his diary over the perky breasts of a young prostitute,” Reiner Stach writes. Not so Kafka, who on visiting one of Prague’s thirty-five brothels confessed to Brod that he felt “desperately in need of just a simple caress.” Brod, a self-confessed ladies’ man and worshiper of women, spoke with Kafka of “my natural disposition to women, my feeling of being utterly abandoned to them.” Brod would go to the Cafe Arco and pore over Aubrey Beardsley’s erotic illustrations or read, “with inflamed fervor,” Casanova’s memoirs, with their accounts of his adventures with women. (Kafka “found them boring,” Brod writes.) “For me,” Brod told Kafka, “the world takes on meaning only through the medium of a woman.” Kafka may have had Brod in mind when he wrote that “men seeking salvation always throw themselves at women.”

  Yet to Brod, sex—and the redemptive power of women—was serious business. “Of all God’s messengers,” Brod wrote, “Eros speaks to us most forcefully. It drags man most speedily before the glory of God.” In contrast with Christianity, which Brod says turns “a sour face” to the carnal, Judaism harnesses its power. “The prodigious achievement of Judaism,” Brod writes in his brambly 650-page philosophical treatise Paganism, Christianity, Judaism (1921), “radiating down the millennia, is to have recognized the earthly miracle, the purest form of this divine grace, ‘God’s flame,’ in love—not in any diluted spiritual form of love, but in the direct erotic rapture of man and woman.”*