Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  For the previous eleven years, instead of obeying Kafka’s last message, Brod had dedicated himself with singular passion to saving the manuscripts and rescuing Kafka from oblivion—transforming himself in the process into the greatest posthumous editor of the twentieth century. In effect, Brod claimed a monopoly; by means of literary beatification, he canonized Kafka (giving him a stature far beyond what Kafka enjoyed in his own lifetime), and made him into a saintly icon—an object of what Germans call Dichterverehrung, or poet-worship. “The category of sacredness (and not really that of literature),” Brod wrote in his 1937 biography of his friend, “is the only right category under which Kafka’s life and work can be viewed.”

  Later readers of Kafka took issue with Brod on just this point. In his lecture on “The Metamorphosis,” Vladimir Nabokov writes that “such poets as Rilke or such novelists as Thomas Mann are dwarfs and plaster saints in comparison to [Kafka].” But Nabokov rejects Brod’s sanctification of the writer: “I want to dismiss completely Max Brod’s opinion that the category of sainthood, not that of literature, is the only one that can be applied to the understanding of Kafka’s writings. Kafka was first of all an artist, and although it may be maintained that every artist is a manner of saint (I feel that very clearly myself), I do not think that any religious implications can be read into Kafka’s genius.” In the footsteps of Nabokov, many have since accused Brod’s posthumous editing either of serving as an accessory to a shallow grasp of Kafka’s works or of suffering from misapprehension, as though something in Kafka’s art remained alien to the man most selflessly devoted to it. (South African novelist J. M. Coetzee, for instance, has said that Kafka was an artist “whom Brod revered yet utterly failed to understand”).

  To the degree that Kafka’s reputation rests on texts he neither completed nor approved, the Kafka we know is a creation of Brod—in fact, his highest and most enduring creation. By betraying Kafka’s last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy—first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. Kafka’s posthumous fame—“the bitter reward of those who were ahead of their time,” in Hannah Arendt’s phrase—was Brod’s doing. Without Judas, it has been said, there would be no crucifixion. And without Brod, there would be no Kafka. We cannot help but hear Kafka’s voice through Brod; whether knowingly or not, we read Kafka Brodly.

  Does creation involve possession? Some charge Brod with making Kafka in the image of his own Jewishness. Kafka biographer Reiner Stach, for instance, speaks of “the gap between Kafka’s ethics of truthfulness and Brod’s identity politics,” and of the sense that “Brod kept deceiving himself about the extent to which he ‘knew’ Kafka.” Singling out Brod’s efforts “to simplify Kafka’s relationship to the Zionist movement,” Ritchie Robertson (professor of German literature in Oxford and codirector of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre) writes that “in interpreting Kafka’s works he [Brod] is too much inclined to ride his own hobby-horses.” The New York intellectual Irving Howe remarked that Brod’s biography of Kafka encompassed “too much Brod and not enough Kafka.” According to Klaus Wagenbach, Germany’s foremost authority on Kafka, “Brod increasingly made Kafka’s writings serve his own aim of revitalizing modern Judaism in association with Zionism.” William Phillips, coeditor of Partisan Review, likewise mocked Brod’s slipshod attempt “to squeeze a Jewish over-soul out of Kafka.”

  At the time of Kafka’s death in 1924, Brod was at the zenith of his literary powers. In 1925, Brod’s novel about a sixteenth-century false messiah, Reubeni: Prince of the Jews (1925, published by Knopf in the United States in 1928, and in the Hebrew translation of Yitzhak Lamdan the same year), won the Czech State Prize, an honor he treasured.* His influential biography of Heinrich Heine was widely acclaimed. Stefan Zweig praised the pointillist portraits of his early fictions, and hailed him as “one of the most exquisite miniature painters in the German language.”

  Yet were it not for his role as the custodian, editor, and publisher of Kafka’s writings—the curator of Kafka’s posthumous fame—Brod would have long since faded from public memory. With the exception of his 1937 biography of Kafka (published in English a decade later), Brod’s own books have on the whole fallen into oblivion. To date, no biography of him has appeared in English, nor has his autobiography appeared in English. In Israel, the small number of his books translated into Hebrew have long since gone out of print. “Even among serious readers,” the German-born writer Heinz Kuehn said, “only his role as Kafka’s alter ego had kept his name alive.”

  Kafka’s death only quickened Brod’s determination to promote and publish his friend’s writing and bring it into the public eye. Georg (Jiří) Langer, writing in 1941, remembered the savior’s devotion some fifteen years earlier:

  It goes without saying that he [Brod] was a trustworthy caretaker of these writings, he prized them and guarded them like the apple of his eye. And behold, one evening a well-known writer visited him, and Brod wanted to show him Kafka’s manuscripts, which he didn’t allow just anyone to see, with the exception of this man, because even looking at them could harm them. He was already in the process of removing the manuscripts from their folders to show to the guest. But just at that moment, the lights in the entire house and all the neighboring houses went out due to some mishap with the electricity, and the honorable guest returned home disappointed; he hadn’t seen a single letter.

  Readers wouldn’t have to wait long. In the three years after Kafka’s death, as Brod became a leading culture critic for the Prager Abendblatt and the Prager Tagblatt, he organized the papers he had salvaged from Kafka’s desk, cobbled together his late friend’s three unfinished novels, and published them in rapid succession. “Today,” Brod writes in his 1960 memoir, “every word of Kafka’s is snatched up. But how hard it was for me in the beginning (i.e. after Kafka’s death) to find a publisher for all his works.” In 1925, he coaxed an avant-garde Berlin publisher (Die Schmiede, founded four years earlier) to publish The Trial , which Brod prepared for publication from Kafka’s unfinished manuscript. In 1926, he persuaded the Munich publisher Kurt Wolff to publish The Castle , also left unfinished by Kafka. Wolff later complained that he had sold very few of the 1,500 copies of The Castle he printed. But the following year, Brod had Wolff bring out Kafka’s first novel. Kafka’s working title for the novel he began writing in 1912 was The Man Who Disappeared (Der Verschollene); Brod, insisting that Kafka often referred to the book in conversation as his “American novel,” renamed it Amerika. Brod expressed the hope that “precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.”

  Confident that he was equal to the task, Brod then edited and brought out two volumes of Kafka’s posthumous stories: Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer (translated by Willa and Edwin Muir as The Great Wall of China, 1933), and Beschreibung eines Kampfes (translated by Tania and James Stern as Description of a Struggle, 1958). Brod followed these with his selections from Kafka’s diaries, letters, and aphorisms.

  Can we say with any certainty where Kafka ends and Brod begins? Brod invented titles for what Kafka had left untitled, and sequences for what Kafka had left loose and unnumbered. (It was his idea, for example, to end The Trial with Joseph K.’s execution.) Never beset by the notion that Kafka’s texts were somehow unalterable or unrevisable, Brod aggregated and expurgated, in ways both subtle and significant. He rearranged sentences, tidied up Kafka’s loose punctuation and orthographic peculiarities, edited out what he called “linguistic errors” (Sprachunrichtigkeiten) and Prague colloquialisms, tinkered with paragraph breaks and notes to typesetters, and entered his own scribblings in red on the manuscripts. He bowdlerized sexual, prurient, or unflattering references from Kafka’s diaries and censored out references to people still living. (In his biography, Franz Kafka: The Poet of Shame and Guilt, Prague-born historian Saul Friedländer examines the discrepancies between Brod’s version of the diaries and the newer critical edition.) Sometimes, as with Kafka’s story “Description of a Struggle,” Brod mer
ged two manuscript versions into one. In one of his octavo notebooks, Kafka crossed out an entire draft of a short story. Brod gave it the title “Prometheus” and published it. “Savior though he was,” Cynthia Ozick comments, “Brod also manipulated whatever came into his hands.”*

  In his book Testaments Betrayed (1993), the Czech-born writer Milan Kundera insists that Brod betrayed Kafka not only by propagating the myth of the suffering modern-day saint, but also by indiscriminately publishing Kafka’s unfinished works and diaries, his undelivered letter to his father, and his love letters. With this indiscretion, Kundera writes, Brod created “the model for disobedience to dead friends; a judicial precedent for those who would circumvent an author’s last wish.”

  But had Brod obeyed the author’s last wish and consigned his manuscripts to the flames, most of Kafka’s writing would be lost. We—and Eva Hoffe—owe our Kafka to Brod’s disobedience.

  _____

  Max Brod had been disappointed that the publications of Kafka’s three unfinished novels had not gained more notice. Beginning in 1931, he tried in vain to interest the Berlin publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer (1880–1949) in the rest of Kafka’s literary estate. The Nazi rise to power in 1933 scuttled the project. Meanwhile, an imperious autodidact and department store magnate named Salman Schocken (1877–1959) launched a publishing house on Berlin’s Jerusalemstrasse. (Brod had known Schocken at least since 1915, when Schocken cofounded the Zionist journal Der Jude with Martin Buber.) In 1934, Brod offered Schocken, whom he called “the patron of the Jewish book,” world rights to Kafka’s works.

  The offer met at first with rejection by Lambert Schneider, Schocken Verlag’s editor in chief. According to Arthur Samuelson, who would later serve as editorial director of Schocken Books in New York, Schneider only reluctantly changed his mind. “He was urged by one of his editors, Moritz Spitzer, to see in Kafka a quintessentially ‘Jewish’ voice that could give meaning to the new reality that had befallen German Jewry and would demonstrate the central role of Jews in German culture.”

  Spitzer, thirty-four, had years earlier met Kafka at a meeting in Prague’s Lucerna Palace of the Zionist-pacifist movement Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair. The founder of that movement, A. D. Gordon (1856–1922), visited Prague in the spring of 1920. Spitzer introduced the distinguished Zionist leader to Kafka. Spitzer recalled that Kafka “almost physically contracted” when he met new people. Ever since reading Kafka’s first two short stories, which had appeared in Der Jude, Spitzer had been eager to get his hands on anything Kafka published.

  On February 22, 1934, Kafka’s mother (widowed in 1931) signed a contract with Schocken Verlag, negotiated by Brod, in which she gave the publisher world rights to Kafka’s writings. Thanks to Schocken, Kafka gained some readership in Germany before the Second World War. In an advertisement for a Kafka anthology (Vor dem Gesetz) published in the Schocken Bücherei series in 1934, Hermann Hesse called Kafka a “younger brother of Nietzsche.”

  But as the Nazi noose tightened, “Aryan” publishers in Germany were forbidden from publishing Jewish authors, and Jewish publishers forbidden from publishing non-Jewish authors.* With the exception of Tycho Brahe, all of Brod’s books were blacklisted in Germany in 1933. Kafka’s works, by contrast, were not well enough known to be banned by the regime; but they were deemed “Jewish” enough to be off limits to “Aryan” publishers.

  This changed with the Gestapo’s instructions in July 1935. The change was likely prompted by a rave review published that month of the first of four volumes of the Schocken edition of Kafka’s works. Writing in the exile journal Die Sammlung, twenty-eight-year-old writer Klaus Mann (son of Thomas Mann) wrote: “The collected works of Kafka, offered by the Schocken Verlag in Berlin, are the most noble and most significant publications that have come out of Germany . . . the epoch’s purest and most singular works of literature.” Mann added that the publisher was among the last bastion of culture in Germany.

  In the fall of 1936, to get around German restrictions, Spitzer, with the help of a trusted lawyer named Josef Schlesinger, transferred the rights to Kafka’s works to a publisher in Prague, Heinrich Mercy Verlag (using Julius Kittl Nachfolger, Keller & Co. as its distributor). Under the agreement, Schocken would cover any losses, and the rights would revert to Schocken upon request. Mercy Verlag brought out volumes 5 and 6 of Kafka’s complete works. This arrangement lasted until the German occupation of Prague and the forced liquidation of Schocken Verlag in 1939. (Spitzer fled to Jerusalem in March of that year.)

  In 1935, Salman Schocken managed to smuggle his library from Berlin to Jerusalem. The collection included several hundred Hebrew manuscripts; more than 4,500 pages of the German poet Heinrich Heine’s manuscripts and letters; almost all manuscripts of Novalis’ philosophical writings; autographs and manuscripts by Schopenhauer, Beethoven, and Schubert; and more than sixty thousand rare books (first editions of works by Goethe, Hölderlin, Lessing, Kleist, Schiller, Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and others). Five years later, in 1940, Schocken wanted to bring the printings of Kafka’s works, and other stock, from the Czech warehouse to Palestine. Since Britain classified Czechoslovakia as an enemy state, British Mandatory Palestine refused to permit the shipment. Schocken didn’t know that the entire stock, including the Kafka print run, was likely destroyed when the Gestapo seized the Julius Kittl company in the summer of 1939. Schocken had lost the stock but retained the rights.*

  In a 1937 letter to Salman Schocken, sending greetings for the publisher’s sixtieth birthday, Gershom Scholem hailed the decision to publish Kafka’s works. Kafka had inscribed for us, Scholem wrote, “a secular statement of the Kabbalistic world-feeling in a modern spirit.”

  The transmission of that statement to Kafka’s readers, however, had its flaws. In June 1937, Moritz Spitzer complained to Scholem that Brod’s editing of Kafka was “sloppy, of course,” and that “just between us, a real Kafka edition will have to wait until the day Brod is no longer sitting on the manuscripts.”

  10

  The Last Train: From Prague to Palestine

  Ostrava, Czech-Polish border

  March 15, 1939

  He over whom Kafka’s wheels have passed has lost forever both any peace with the world and any chance of consoling himself with the judgment that the way of the world is bad.

  —Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” 1962

  At 9 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, 1939, fifteen years after Kafka’s death, Max Brod, fifty-four, and his wife, Elsa, stood at platform 2 of Prague’s Wilson Station. The station, known to the Czechs as Wilsonovo nádraží’, was named after former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, whose statue faced the station from a high pedestal across the street. Max and Elsa carried British immigration visas to Palestine in their coat pockets. It had been an eventful day. That morning, they had watched columns of Nazi youth marching four abreast down Prague’s main avenues chanting “Sieg Heil!” That evening, Hitler had summoned the President of Czechoslovakia, Emil Hácha, to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. The Brods boarded the train not knowing whether they would be permitted to cross the Czech-Polish frontier. They were seen off by three men who had helped arrange the last-minute escape of Czech Jews: Jacob Edelstein (head of the Palestine Office in Prague), Fritz Ullmann (a Zionist leader and representative of the Jewish Agency), and Robert J. Stopford (British Treasury liaison officer in Prague for financial and refugee questions).*

  Max Brod’s experience of the First World War twenty-five years before had awakened him not only to the tenuous position of Prague’s Jews but also to the realization that politics cannot be wishfully ignored. Brod, then thirty years old, felt that the high-minded intellectuals and “men of spirit” (Geistigen) had held themselves and their beautiful thoughts dangerously aloof from political realities. “We were an over-indulged generation. . . .” Brod recalled in his memoir. “Debates about Richard Wagner’s music, the foundations of Judaism and Christianity, impressionist painting, etc. seemed far more important. And now this peace had sudd
enly come to an end, overnight. Never has a generation been so brutally trampled by the facts.” Until then, Brod said, the word “war” carried an atavistic medieval ring; it seemed to belong to an earlier age. “We writers had done too little,” he writes of the decisive year 1914 in Paganism, Christianity, Judaism. “We had not been concerned enough about the forces of reality. . . . The demons had caught us unawares.”

  This time, he would not be caught unawares by a society coming apart at the seams. Five years before he boarded the last train out of Prague, he had authored a pamphlet called Rassentheorie und Judentum (Race Theory and Judaism, 1934), in which he assailed the new German racial theory. But the anti-Semitism and racist group-think only swelled. At the end of September 1938, immediately after the Munich Agreement allowed Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia, Brod resolved to leave. “He felt rejected by the culture that he loved—the German culture,” writes Gaëlle Vassogne, author of Max Brod in Prague: Identity and Mediation.

  An exile, as the saying goes, is a refugee with a library. Standing on the platform, Brod was a refugee with a bulky, cracked-leather suitcase stuffed with loose bundles and leaves of Kafka’s manuscripts: journals, travel diaries, rough drafts, fair copies, sketches, hundreds of letters, and thin black notebooks in which Kafka earnestly practiced his Hebrew. (Brod left his own manuscripts in a trunk to be shipped later.) Brod had carefully collected even the smallest scraps of Kafka’s furtive fragments. According to the English playwright and poet Ben Jonson, Shakespeare “never blotted a line.” Not so Kafka. The pages in the suitcase showed all the marks of Kafka’s hand: passages crossed out with bold diagonal strokes, doodles, scatterings of shorthand, false starts, and reworkings.