Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  _____

  Some have conferred on Kafka almost divinatory powers of prescience, if not of prophecy. Milena Jesenská said of Kafka: “He heard signals of impending peril where others, deaf to the truth, felt safe and secure.” More than he pursued the truth, she believed, the truth pursued him. Kafka’s name has become a byword for the dehumanizing effects of faceless bureaucracies that pervade public and private spheres alike. He is said to have distilled the irrational state power that renders individuals insignificant, transforms a man from subject to object, and makes terror a routine banality. “The crucial moment towards which everything in Kafka is directed,” the German-Jewish social critic Theodor W. Adorno remarked, “is that in which men become aware that they are not themselves—that they themselves are things.”

  In this view, Kafka foresaw, or foreshadowed, the corrosion of individual freedom under totalitarianism, with its grotesquerie of arbitrary arrests, show trials, self-denunciations, inscrutable tribunals, tortures in the name of edification, and punishments that precede crimes—in other words, judicial violence.

  Some of his earliest readers understood Kafka’s writing, so full of dread, as envisioning the machinery of fascism. In his memoir The Prague Circle, Brod writes: “Where angst speaks from the letters and diaries of Franz, it is justified angst. It is the angst before the approaching horrors of Hitlerism which he foresaw in a kind of spiritual clairvoyance and even described before they happened.” Did he have premonitions of what was to come? German playwright Bertolt Brecht answered in the emphatic affirmative:

  Kafka described with wonderful imaginative power the future concentration camps, the future instability of the law, the future absolutism of the state apparat, the paralyzed, inadequately motivated, floundering lives of many individual people; everything appeared as in a nightmare and with the confusion and inadequacy of nightmare.

  In June 1938, less than a year from Brod’s flight from Prague, Walter Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem that Kafka’s world was “the exact complement of his era which is preparing to do away with the inhabitants of this planet on a considerable scale. The experience which corresponds to that of Kafka, the private individual, will probably not become accessible to the masses until such time as they are being done away with.”

  The texts that in the eyes of some anticipated the totalitarian upheavals of the twentieth century now themselves became threatened by those same upheavals. Brod would not allow the Nazis to fulfill Kafka’s will by sending them up in flames in one of their funeral pyres of Jewish books.

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  The Brods’ train departed Wilson Station at 11 p.m., scraping through countryside just occupied by the Wehrmacht, and pulling into Ostrava on the Czech-Polish border at 4 a.m., March 15. When the train came to a halt, Brod looked out the window of his compartment and stared at a motionless German soldier guarding the platform. He looked “like the statute of a Roman legionnaire,” Brod said. “Truth be told, he was rather beautiful.” Brod noticed that his legionnaire was not alone; the tracks were lined with fully armed Wehrmacht soldiers. “It’s hard to say why this sight caused me no fear,” Max Brod recalled. “I think it was because I was so tired, so sleepless, and had thought I was still dreaming. And because the young soldier standing closest to me was such a beautiful specimen. This was always my weakness: beauty, in any form, always aroused my wonderment, and has more than once in my life brought me to the very edge of total disaster.”

  Felix Weltsch and his wife Irma shared the Brods’ train compartment. Felix, who had known Max since grade school, watched his friend cast glances at the bulky suitcase. “I didn’t take my eyes off it,” Brod later said. Brod might have been thinking of the young Karl Rossman in Kafka’s first novel Amerika, who during the voyage to the New World watched his suitcase “so carefully for the whole crossing that his watchfulness had almost cost him his sleep” only to lose it the moment he arrives at the New York harbor. Perhaps Brod already attached a talismanic importance to the contents of the suitcase, hoping that they would protect him from the unluckier fate of those he left behind.*

  It was to be the last train to cross the Czech-Polish border before the Nazis closed it. Later in the day, when the train pulled into Krakow, Poland, Brod saw the disheartening newspaper headlines: Czechoslovakia was no more. The country so dear to his heart, where he came to know joy and grief, had passed into oblivion and left him in the lurch.

  On the afternoon of March 17, the Brods arrived in the Romanian port of Constanța on the Black Sea together with 160 other refugee families from Czechoslovakia. The train took them straight to the docks, where they had booked cabin 228 on an old Romanian liner called the Bessarabia. The ship took them to Tel Aviv with stopovers in Istanbul, Athens, Crete, and Alexandria.

  Brod had first set eyes on Palestine eleven years earlier. During a six-week visit in 1928, he had visited Kibbutz Beit Alfa and the adjacent Kibbutz Heftziba (both founded in 1922 by immigrants from Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Poland).* Some of his writing had been published in Palestine before the war. Tycho Brahe had appeared in Hebrew in 1935 (in the translation of the Polish-born poet Mordechai Temkin).

  Brod did not in those years entertain thoughts of aliya (immigration to Palestine). “The Diaspora will remain anyhow,” he wrote in 1920, “since Palestine can at best become the home for one-eighth of Jewry.” In 1922, Brod published an article in which he remarked on his “heart-felt reservations against Palestine, that is, against the exclusivity of Palestine as the salvation for the Jew.” (Brod, ever the redactor, deleted this passage when he republished the piece in 1966.) Brod had been determined, Mark Gelber writes, “to live his life indefinitely in the diaspora as a Jewish nationalist.” (Decades later, in 1957, Brod remarked to his friend Fritz Bondy, a Prague-born translator who wrote under the pseudonym NO Scarpi: “The state of Israel cannot exist without the Jews in the Diaspora, neither can the Diaspora survive without the state of Israel.”)

  Even now, on the eve of the Second World War, Palestine was not Brod’s first choice. Friends in Palestine, he writes in his memoir, “warned me against aliya. Men of intellectual professions, especially those above a certain age, are not in particular demand here. What is required there are sturdy young men, pioneers, men of action, engineers, chicken-coopers, farmers, shepherds.” In early 1939, Brod wrote in a tone of desperation to an old acquaintance, German novelist and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann. Sensing impending catastrophe, Brod declared he was determined to emigrate to America while there was still time. He mentioned an attack on him published in the Völkische Beobachter, the Nazi Party daily, which sought to discredit Brod on the basis of “some erotic passages from works of my youth, written decades ago.”

  Brod was familiar with the extraordinary roster of European Jewish émigrés who had the foresight to escape to the United States, despite the stiff quotas: Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, not to mention the musicians, painters, and sculptors who together would make an incalculable contribution to postwar American culture. Brod now begged Mann to arrange an invitation to an American university. (Mann had secured himself an offer to teach at Princeton.) Brod listed what he could offer to an American university: courses in Czech politics, Zionism, and music—and a treasure of unique value. “I would bring with me the whole still-unpublished literary estate [Nachlass] of Franz Kafka,” he wrote to Mann, “and would edit it there and set up a Kafka archive.”

  When he received Brod’s plea, Thomas Mann was just putting the finishing touches on his novel Lotte in Weimar. There he has Goethe warn that the German people “submit to any mad scoundrel who appeals to their lowest instincts, who confirms them in their vices and teaches them to conceive nationalism as isolation and brutality.” All too aware of the new Nazi brutality, Mann tried to bring Brod to the New York Public Library. In a letter dated February 27, 1939, Mann turned to H. M. Lydenberg, director of the library, and asked for help in bringing Br
od to the U.S. as a “non-quota alien”:

  I have known and admired Dr. Brod for many years. He is now fifty-four. For the past twenty years and more, he has worked for his country, not simply as a writer, but as a civil servant and also as editor of the Prager Tagblatt. He is a gifted and cultured man, but now, because he is a Jew, he is no longer permitted to write what he thinks and believes, and is being ridiculed and vilified in the German press.

  Mann also relayed to Lydenberg that Brod

  is willing to give his collection of the books and manuscripts of Franz Kafka to any institution of repute which would accept it and in return offer him a position to act as assistant or curator of the collection, and so make possible his entry into this country. . . . Perhaps you will agree with me that the possibility of acquiring the manuscripts and books of so well known a writer as Franz Kafka is an opportunity deserving of consideration quite apart from the human tragedy of the individual for whom the collection represents the one real chance of escape from an intolerable situation.

  In his autobiography, Brod gives the story a somewhat different spin: “When the danger of Hitlerism rose later on and remaining in Prague meant torture and death, Thomas Mann took me under his wing without my having to ask. Through Mann’s intervention, everything was so deftly handled that a professorship was waiting for me at an American university. I chose to follow the genius of my life and go to Palestine.” In fact, although Mann did succeed in getting Brod an offer from Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the letter of appointment failed to reach him by the time he fled Prague. According to Gaëlle Vassogne of the Université Stendhal in Grenoble, France, even after he arrived in Tel Aviv, Brod still tried to find a position in an American university.

  Brod’s attempt to tempt America with the Kafka manuscripts came to naught. Clutching his suitcase, he and Elsa headed to Tel Aviv instead. On at last arriving in Palestine, Brod said he had “only one plan: to act for the memory of my friend Franz Kafka in this country that he missed.”

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  What would Brod do with the relics of the sainted Kafka once he had brought them to the Promised Land?

  On May 5, 1940, with Germany poised for the invasion of Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Brod wrote from Tel Aviv to the Rector of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem:

  The turbulent times we live in cause me to turn to you with an urgent request. Would it be possible for you to keep a suitcase of mine containing very important manuscripts? In this suitcase is the estate of Franz Kafka, my musical compositions and my unpublished diaries. You understand that this suitcase, most precious to me, in these times cannot be secure in a private place. I would like it to be secured with you, if it is possible for anything today to be secure.

  The protracted negotiations between Brod and the Hebrew University were interrupted: on September 9, 1940, the Italian air force bombed residential areas of Tel Aviv, killing 137 people, including 53 children. Brod decided to deposit his treasures neither at an American university nor at Hebrew University but in a fireproof safe at the Schocken Library on Balfour Street in Jerusalem. In a document dated December 6, 1940, Salman Schocken affirmed that Kafka’s manuscripts were deposited in a safe at the Schocken Library, and that only Brod would have a key to that safe.

  It proved to be a false promise. It seems Schocken had the key duplicated and had the Kafka material hastily photographed without Brod’s permission. In a letter dated February 22, 1951, Brod protested to Schocken that he had made a copy of the key to the safe. When Brod requested the manuscripts to be returned, Schocken dragged his feet. “He hoped that if he wore Max down for long enough, Max would eventually throw up his hands,” Eva Hoffe told me.

  On April 26, 1951, Brod wrote to Kafka’s niece Marianna Steiner to say that Schocken had broken his promise and had a spare key to the safe. Steiner (née Pollak) had fled to London with her husband and son in April 1939. On April 2, 1952, Brod again wrote to Marianna Steiner to say that he had opened the safe in the presence of one of Schocken’s clerks “and found everything in best order.” According to Brod’s inventory, the manuscripts included:

  1. Kafka’s manuscripts of his three unfinished novels: The Trial , The Castle, and Amerika

  2. Kafka’s drafts of several short stories, including “Description of a Struggle,” “The Burrow,” “The Hunger Artist,” “A Little Woman,” “Blumfeld,” and “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk”

  3. Kafka’s diaries (thirteen quarto notebooks) and travel journals

  4. Kafka’s blue octavo notebooks (eight notebooks filled with Kafka’s aphorisms and stories)

  5. The original typescript of Kafka’s letter to his father

  6. Kafka’s Hebrew exercises

  7. Kafka’s letters to Brod

  Brod noted that Kafka’s letter to his father, and the manuscripts of The Trial and “Description of a Struggle,” “are my property.” Kafka’s letters to Brod “do not belong to the Kafka estate, but I myself deposited them there temporarily.” “Everything else,” Brod added, “belongs to the heirs of Kafka. ”

  In August 2015, a month after the Tel Aviv District Court decision, Marianna’s son Michael Steiner, for many years a partner in a leading London law firm, wrote to the Israeli lawyers in the Hoffe case in his capacity as executor and trustee of the will of his mother and as representative of the Kafka estate. Referring to Brod’s claims in the 1952 letter, Steiner writes:

  My mother accepted these claims throughout her life and the Kafka Estate does not adopt any different position . . . At this point I should like to make it clear that the Kafka family has always been grateful to Max Brod for everything that he did for Kafka’s literary reputation, for his selfless behavior after Kafka’s death, and for the assistance he gave the family, in particular in its negotiations with Schocken, the publishers. . . . In 2010, I was approached by the National Library for information and it was mooted that the Kafka Estate might wish to be joined in the litigation that was in prospect. I was not able to understand how, after so many years, the construction of Brod’s will determined by Judge Shilo could be relitigated. I supplied what information I could to Meir Heller [the National Library’s lawyer], explained what the Estate’s objectives had been in the past, and asked to see a copy of the court-ordered inventory to enable me to compare it with Brod’s letter of April 1952. I also made it clear that the Estate regarded itself as the owner of all items which Brod had himself accepted did not belong to him, which might include manuscripts of Kafka not listed in the letter, but the existence of which had for some reason not been listed by Brod. The inventory has never been supplied to me. I think it now should be.

  In the same letter, Michael Steiner adds that in 1956, “Schocken transferred the manuscripts to a safe in Switzerland without informing either my mother or Max Brod. It appears that before that happened Brod had already taken away the manuscripts of which he claimed ownership in the letter of April 1952, with some other items which he may have wanted for his editorial work.” More than six decades later, the episode has hardly faded from Eva Hoffe’s memory. The Schocken family is “monstrous,” she told me.

  In April 1961, manuscripts which Brod conceded belonged to the Kafka estate and which were in the Swiss bank vault were collected by the scholar Sir Malcolm Pasley on behalf of the Kafka estate and deposited with the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Pasley brought the manuscripts from Switzerland to Oxford in his small private car.*

  Max Brod in Prague, February 1937.

  (Czechoslovak News Agency)

  11

  The Last Tightrope Dancer: Kafka in Germany

  Theodor Ackermann antiquarian booksellers, Ludwigstrasse 7, Munich

  November 1982

  In the organism of humanity, there are no two people which attract and repel each other more than the Germans and the Jews.

  —Moses Hess, 1862

  From early on they [the Jews] have forced upon Germany things that might have come to it slowly an
d in its own way, but which it was opposed to because they came from strangers.

  —Franz Kafka to Max Brod, 1920

  In November 1982, almost a century after Kafka’s birth, Werner Fritsch, managing director of the venerable Munich bookseller Theodor Ackermann (founded 1865), got the offer of a lifetime. A man he declines to identify told Fritsch that, unlike Kafka’s family, the writer’s personal library of some 279 books somehow survived the Nazi regime more or less intact. The collection promised to throw light on a previously obscure question: With whom did Kafka keep mental company? After showing the books to Professor Jürgen Born to verify their authenticity, Fritsch sold the library for an undisclosed sum to Born’s Institute for the Study of Prague’s German Literature at the University of Wuppertal.

  The accent of Kafka’s library lay heavily on German classics: the works of Goethe, Schiller, Schopenhauer (Kafka had nine volumes of his collected works), and Friedrich Hebbel, along with world classics in German translation: nine volumes of Shakespeare, and several novels of Dostoyevsky. The Jewish components of Kafka’s library proved rather meager. Among other works, it included Theodor Herzl’s diaries; some volumes of Jewish folklore collected by M. Y. Berdichevsky (described as “the first Hebrew writer living in Berlin to be revered in the world of German letters”); Richard Lichtheim’s The Zionist Agenda (Das Programm des Zionismus, a gift from Brod); Moses Rath’s Hebrew study book (1917); and an anthology published by the Bar Kochba Association. It also includes a 1921 edition of Brod’s book, Paganism, Christianity and Judaism, with the dedication: “For my Franz, for your recovery, Max.”