In February 2010, Kulka joined two-dozen leading Israeli scholars in issuing an open letter in Hebrew and in (slightly imperfect and old-fashioned) German. “We the undersigned . . . are appalled by the way Israeli academia is portrayed in the German press, as if we have neither interest in nor the historical or linguistic aptitude to research the Brod archive. Brod is part and parcel of the history of the state of Israel, a writer and philosopher who authored numerous articles on Zionism, and who after his flight from Prague and the Nazis settled in Israel (then Palestine) and lived here for over thirty years until his death.”
Nurit Pagi, who wrote her dissertation on Brod at the University of Haifa, was the driving force behind the open letter. “One reason Brod’s wide-ranging works have not received the recognition they deserve is because his archive—which is 20,000 pages in size—has been inaccessible to scholars since his death in 1968, despite his request that it be given to the National Library,” Pagi told Haaretz. “Now there is a one-time opportunity to correct the injustice done to him for many years and to allow Israeli researchers and others to shed new light on his work and his heritage,” she added.
Pagi told me that her mother and Eva Hoffe had studied together at the Ben Shemen Youth Village, an agricultural boarding school founded in 1927. Pagi first chanced across Brod’s novels in the 1960s at a public library in Haifa and in time became fascinated by how Brod’s turn to Zionism moved him toward a realist style and vocabulary in his writing. She also took Brod as an instance of a wider truth: “Zionism was written in German,” she told me. She was referring to the Zionist movement’s deep roots in German-speaking culture, beginning with the writings of Viennese journalist Theodor Herzl, the early Zionist Congresses in Basel, and Zionist newspapers like Robert Weltsch’s Jüdische Rundschau.
Several years ago, Pagi learned that the son of one of Israel’s foremost poets said he was concerned about leaving his mother’s literary archive in Israel, because, he said, “we have no future here.” “The struggle to keep the Brod archive in Israel,” Pagi wrote in 2011, “could demonstrate the contrary . . . It could demonstrate that we believe in our existence and our future here; that we believe that the Zionist project is far from realized, and that the legacy of Central European Jewry plays an important role in its realization. In fact, the struggle to keep Brod’s archive in Israel is one of the most important of the struggles over our continued existence here.”
Andreas Kilcher, a prominent Zürich-based scholar of Kafka and German-Jewish literature, cited Pagi’s remarks on “the struggle” as an example of the Israeli “bellicose rhetoric” around the trial, and as a “gesture of culture-war” (“kulturkämpferischen Gestus”).
The semantics of scholars on both sides—“resentments,” “outrageous claims,” “culture-war”—revealed the rivalry between Germans and Israelis over a shared literary heritage.
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At the next hearing in the Tel Aviv Family Court, shortly after Cohen’s cross-examination, it was Eva’s turn to plead her case. After the “ambush” at the first hearing, she and her sister Ruth had first turned to Arnan Gabrieli, one of the leading intellectual property litigators in Israel. Gabrieli had represented their mother, Esther, and had negotiated the controversial sale of the archives of the Jerusalem poet Yehuda Amichai to Yale University. According to Eva, Ruth badgered Gabrieli to such a degree—including repeated calls to his home—that Gabrieli declined to take the case. Eva instead hired the lawyers Uri Zfat and Yeshayahu Etgar. (As a twenty-four-year-old law student at Bar-Ilan University, Zfat had clerked for Judge Shilo in 1975.)
From the outset, the two lawyers portrayed the National Library’s position as an attempt, in effect, to nationalize private property. They argued that Judge Shilo’s 1974 ruling against the state’s attempt to appropriate the Kafka manuscripts should stand, and reminded Judge Kopelman Pardo that in contrast to the present proceedings, Shilo had the advantage of hearing Esther Hoffe’s testimony directly. “The library’s claims have already been raised as part of a judicial process . . . and were decided in a manner that leaves no room for raising them again.”
Uri Zfat noted that Kafka’s papers ought not be deemed part of Brod’s estate at all. The fact that Brod made no separate mention in his will of the Kafka papers, Zfat said, demonstrates that he was well aware that they were no longer part of his estate; he had already given them as gifts to Esther Hoffe. Finally, Zfat said, during the years the National Library conducted negotiations with Esther Hoffe for the Kafka trove, it never acted as if it regarded itself as the rightful heir.
Shmulik Cassouto, court-appointed lawyer for the Esther Hoffe estate, and author of the book Signature in Promissory Notes (1997), added that the state’s attempt to seize the manuscripts amounted to “open paternalism,” and as such “does not befit a democratic state, as Israel likes to present itself.” “It is not for us to determine whether Brod left his estate to the most ‘suitable’ person,” Cassouto said. “Nor is it our place to cast doubt on the inner desires of his heart. Perhaps the state is right to claim that Brod would have done better had he not been so soulfully connected to Mrs. Hoffe, or that he would have done better to leave his ‘treasure’ to a more fitting heir—and there is no more fitting heir than the state of Israel itself. But Brod was connected to Mrs. Hoffe. He saw in her his only remaining family, and wished to give to her all that he had. This will must be respected.”
Since Brod gave Esther the Kafka manuscripts as a gift during his lifetime, Cassouto claimed, both de facto and de jure, those manuscripts are not part of Brod’s estate, and thus not subject to the interpretation of his will. As for Brod’s own estate, Cassouto said, his will clearly left to Esther Hoffe the right to determine where it should go, and under which conditions. Furthermore, if it wished to conduct itself honorably, he said, the National Library would negotiate with Eva Hoffe for the acquisition of the manuscripts rather than to attempt to strong-arm her. The notion that the National Library should get the manuscripts without compensating Eva Hoffe he dismissed as “absurd.”
Beyond the legal intricacies, however, the hearings in the Tel Aviv Family Court were suffused with broader considerations of where the legacies of Kafka and Brod properly belong. “Like many other Jews who contributed to Western civilization,” Meir Heller said of Kafka, “we think he, his legacy . . . [and] his manuscripts should be placed here in the Jewish state.” Ehud Sol (of Israel’s prestigious law firm, Herzog, Fox and Neeman), court-appointed executor of the Brod estate, likewise argued that in deciding between Marbach and the National Library, the court must factor in Kafka’s and Brod’s attitudes “toward the Jewish world and the Land of Israel,” as well as Brod’s views on Germany after the Shoah. The significance of the Jewish people and its political aspirations to both Kafka and Brod would prove central to the trial—and to the judges’ verdicts.
4
Flirting with the Promised Land
Ballroom of the Hotel Central, Prague
January 20, 1909
If I haven’t emigrated to Palestine, I would at any rate have traced the way there on the map.
—Franz Kafka to Max Brod, March 1918
The theologian Martin Buber, apostle of a new spiritually dynamic Judaism, was speaking in Prague’s Hotel Central. He had been invited by the Bar Kochba Association, the Zionist group led by Hugo Bergmann, Kafka’s classmate from first to twelfth grade, together with Felix Weltsch and Hans Kohn. Buber, the author of popular anthologies of traditional eighteenth-century Hasidic tales, was giving his first of three lectures (in January 1909, and April and December 1910) on the regeneration of Judaism.* It wasn’t his first encounter with the Prague Zionists—Buber had visited in 1903, to celebrate Bar Kochba’s tenth anniversary—but it would be his most momentous.
Max Brod, twenty-five, seated in the packed hotel ballroom, had enjoyed the warm-up act: in an alluring voice, sixteen-year-old actress Lia Rosen gave a recitation of poems by Hugo Hofmannsthal (to whom Rai
ner Maria Rilke had introduced her in Vienna in November 1907). She also sang Richard Beer-Hofmann’s “Lullaby for Miriam” (Schlaflied für Mirjam), with the lines:
Buried with me will be that which I won.
None to be heir to us, we heirs to none.*
When Buber took the stage, his eyes seemed to Brod to blaze with a fierce intelligence. Brod thrilled to the sage’s rhetoric of Jewish self-determination, the fevered eloquence of spiritual renewal. What does it mean to call ourselves Jews? Buber asked. And what demands does Jewishness make on our inner lives?
Brod later said he went into the lectures as a “guest and opponent” and came out a Zionist. Before then, he says he felt not a trace of Jewish self-hatred, but neither did he feel a particular Jewish pride. The encounter with Buber recalibrated Brod’s relationship to Jewish life, and in turn to Kafka and Kafka’s writing. Here began what Brod called his “struggle with—and for—Judaism.” Buber’s lectures spurred Brod to articulate something he and many other German-speaking Jews had only vaguely sensed: their attempt to identify with the “deutscher Geist” (the German spirit) had failed. On the heels of that failure, Brod became preoccupied with what Robert Weltsch would call die persoenliche Judenfrage (“the personal Jewish question”). Brod “moved from an almost exclusive and deliberate preoccupation with aesthetic aspects to complete identification with the Jewish people,” Weltsch reported.
The question arose from a sense of strangeness. “The German Jew in Czech Prague was, so to speak, an incarnation of strangeness and will-to-be-strange,” writes Pavel Eisner. “He was the people’s enemy without a people of his own.” Some Prague Jews escaped the strangeness of their condition by escaping to places where they hoped their liminality might dissolve: to Vienna (Franz Werfel), Berlin (Willy Haas), or America (like the parents of Louis D. Brandeis). Others embraced radical socialism (Egon Erwin Kisch, who declared “my homeland is the working class”) or baptism. Some of Prague’s Jews took up Zionism more as trendy fashion (Mode-Zionismus) than as serious commitment. Gershom Scholem derisively called them Hatschi-zionisten, endowed as they were with all the intensity of a sneeze. Others, like Max Brod, would take up Zionism with the utmost seriousness.
Prague’s notoriously tiny Zionist circles centered on the Bar Kochba Association, named for the leader of the last revolt of Jews against Rome.* If the ceiling of a certain café would collapse at a certain time, a common joke had it, the entire Zionist movement in Prague would be wiped out at a single stroke. Numerically small as it was, however, the movement managed to create an intoxicating blend of Zionism and socialism so successfully that, after 1918, Zionists would command two mandates in the city council of Prague. The leaders of the Zionist movement in Prague, Brod writes,
were young men of a singular purity of character and most intensive intellectuality, a group of shining exemplariness the kind of which I never met again in my subsequent life. The student organization Bar Kochba was its center of crystallization. . . . All of us were united in the conviction that our work had to be realized through personal sacrifices and deeds, not through front-page articles or inflammatory speeches but through quiet efforts in the midst of the people. Our first goal was the renewal and elevation of the ethics and morals of the humiliated, maligned Jewish community which, after all, had in many ways corroded in the diaspora. . . . The Jewish state we wanted to prepare “over there,” in Palestine, was to be founded on justice and selfless love between individuals and included, as a matter of course, offering friendship and help to our next-door neighbors, the Arabs.
During the decade 1900–1909, Brod had remained indifferent to the Zionist zeal Bar Kochba embodied. He said that in 1905, he had never even heard the name Theodor Herzl, the founding father of political Zionism. (Brod remembered the first time he saw a portrait of Herzl on the wall of Hugo Bergmann’s living room in the Podbaba district of Prague. “Who’s that?” Brod asked.)
But beginning in 1909, he began to seek after the meaning of Jewish identity, and the moral commitments it entailed. After the Austrian-Hungarian Empire dissolved and Czechoslovakia was created, Brod would be elected honorary member (alter herr) of Bar Kochba, would serve as vice-chairman of the Jewish National Council. He would also become one of the leading spokesmen of Czech Jews in the newly founded republic, instrumental in negotiating significant autonomy concessions that President Tomáš Masaryk granted Czechoslovakian Jewry. During his Zionist activity, Brod said, a line from Kafka’s story “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” inspired his selflessness:
Our folk, ever calm, without showing the slightest sign of disturbance, practically in the guise of the master—a mass that is at one with itself and essentially an entity that despite all appearances to the contrary is one that can only give gifts to others but is never able to receive any.
In that story, Kafka’s narrator reports that Josephine, the mouse singer, “is a small episode in the eternal history of our people.” The mouse people, the narrator adds, “has always, somehow or other, saved itself, though not without sacrifices which fill historical researchers with horror.”
Brod looked to cultural Zionism not only with an eye to reassessing his attachment to the Jewish people but also with a view to criticizing the tendency of new nation-states to erode the collective identities of minorities. “For me,” he wrote in the Zionist weekly Selbstwehr, “there can be no doubt that the ‘Jewish nationalist’ may not be a ‘nationalist’ in the sense of the word commonly in use today. It is the mission of the Jewish-national movement, of Zionism, to give the word ‘nation’ a new meaning.” The regeneration of Judaism—and the resurrection of the Hebrew language—could come about only if it were rooted in the Land of Israel. “Above all,” Brod wrote to the Prague-born writer Auguste Hauschner (1850–1924), “Jewish nationalism must not create just another chauvinistic nation. Its sole purpose is to bring back to health the reconciliatory, all-inclusive humane genius of the Jew which today has degenerated.”
As the Habsburg dynasty disintegrated, the upwelling nationalism gave Brod’s mission new urgency. “The Jew who takes the national problem seriously,” Brod wrote, “finds himself today in the midst of the following paradox: he must fight nationalism with the aim of establishing universal human fellowship . . . and he must simultaneously stand with the young Jewish national movement.”
During World War I, Brod taught classes on world literature—what today we might call a “great books” course—to young Jewish women, refugees from Eastern Europe fleeing the war. In the first issue of Der Jude, he called the experience his “only solace in this spiritless time.” “An enchanting freshness and naiveté emanates from the girls,” he writes. They are “spiritual through and through.” In an essay the following month, Brod contrasts his students with the more superficial “Western Jewesses.” “The Galician girls as a whole are so much fresher, more spiritually substantial, and healthier than our girls.”
Brod justified the increasingly central place Judaism occupied in his life with a six-hundred-page treatise called Paganism, Christianity, Judaism (1921, published in English in 1971). In this opus, magnum or not, he distinguishes three attitudes to worldliness: an affirmation of this world (paganism); a denial of this sinful world in favor of the “world to come” (the Christianity of “My kingdom is not of this world”); and an affirmation that this imperfect world can be redeemed (Judaism). This last attitude Brod calls the Diesseitswunder, or this-worldly miracle. Robert Weltsch said that for Brod, “paganism is the religion of the Diesseits, of human life in this world which ignores what is beyond sense experience. Christianity is the religion of the Jenseits, the world beyond. Judaism . . . is the religion which takes into account both worlds and believes in the coincidence of opposites, Grace and Freedom.”
Attracted to sensuality and spirituality both, Brod chose Judaism. And that choice entailed the choice of Zionism. “Zionism provides Jewish religiosity with a body, which it had lost,” Brod writes in the closing page
s of Paganism, Christianity, Judaism. By providing him refuge from the neo-Paganism threatening to engulf Europe with what he calls “the bestialization of politics,” Zionism would also save his life.
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On August 13, 1912, Kafka arrived an hour late at Max Brod’s apartment on Prague’s Skořepka Street. He wanted to discuss the final order of the pieces in what would be Kafka’s first published collection, Meditation. The moment he stepped into the apartment, Kafka noticed a twenty-four-year-old woman, a distant relation of Brod’s, sitting at the table. “Bare throat,” he records in his diary. “A blouse thrown on. Looked very domestic in her dress although, as it turned out, she by no means was. (I alienate myself from her a little by inspecting her so closely . . .) Almost broken nose. Blonde, somewhat straight, unattractive hair, strong chin. As I was taking my seat I looked at her closely for the first time, by the time I was seated I already had an unshakeable opinion.”
In the course of their first conversation, the young woman reported that she worked in the Berlin offices of Carl Lindström AG, marketing a new dictation device. She also remarked that she had studied Hebrew and mentioned her Zionist leanings; “and this suited me very well,” Kafka says. He took the liberty of suggesting a trip to Palestine together the following summer. She agreed, and they shook hands on it. In his jacket pocket that evening, Kafka carried the August 1912 issue of the journal Palästina, featuring a German translation of an essay by the cultural Zionist Ahad Ha’am about his recent visit to Palestine. Kafka jotted down her Berlin address on the title page before escorting her back to her hotel, Zum Blauen Stern (the very place where in 1866 Bismarck had signed the peace treaty between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire).
Kafka's Last Trial Page 5
