Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  “He found quite a comfortable, though not very influential, role as intermediary between local and foreign writers and the theater,” writes Freddie Rokem, a professor in Tel Aviv University’s Department of Theatre Arts. “My decision to work at Habima was absolutely right,” Brod records in his memoir. “Even in times of acute crises at the leading Hebrew theater, I never entertained any doubts about that decision. I always remained faithful with Habima and she with me.”

  Whether the theater reciprocated his loyalty is another question. In Eva Hoffe’s view, Habima took advantage of Brod’s international connections but never accorded him the recognition he deserved. He was never granted voting rights, for example, in the collective that decided which plays to stage, and his recommendations were sometimes overruled. “He was so disappointed in this country,” Eva said. “He had tremendous expectations when he arrived here, and what a slap in the face he got.” Another sign of neglect may be read in the fate of Brod’s Habima archives. When plays were submitted to Habima, Brod wrote readers reports on note cards in which he registered his opinion (in German) on whether the theater should produce them. During renovations after Brod’s death, Habima apparently threw out Brod’s archive of nearly four hundred of these boxed notecards (what the Germans call Zettelkasten). Long believed lost, they were rediscovered in late 2016 by Professor Tom Lewy of Tel Aviv University. Lewy told me that Shimon Lev-Ari, a Romanian-born actor, historian of Hebrew theater, and the founder of the Israeli Center for the Documentation of the Performing Arts at Tel Aviv University, stopped the truck carting the archive to the dump and salvaged Brod’s cards. They had all along lay dormant in unlabeled boxes at Tel Aviv University.

  At a dinner party I joined one evening in Jerusalem, a German graduate student at Hebrew University suggested that the Marbach archivists would take better care of the Brod estate than the National Library. I asked him why. In 2013, he said, he chanced across a remarkable volume on the discarded books rack of the Hebrew University library on Mt. Scopus: Max Brod’s own copy (Handexemplar, as the Germans call it) of his Heinrich Heine biography (1934). Inside, the astonished student found more than a hundred comments, corrections, and emendations in Brod’s own hand. The librarian could not tell him why the book had been discarded. Another guest added that in 2014 he had spotted first editions of several of Brod’s novels on the equivalent rack of decommissioned volumes at the National Library.

  _____

  Ever faithful to his promise of promoting the memory of Kafka in the new country, Brod worked two days a week at the theater, and the rest on editing, transcribing, and publishing Kafka’s manuscripts. So much so that Brod’s name came in these years to be invariably invoked in the same breath as Kafka’s. “In the eyes of the world,” the New York literary critic Irving Howe wrote in 1947, “he has become a mere figure in the Kafka myth; he has lost independent existence.”

  In a letter to Salman Schocken, dated February 22, 1951, Brod writes: “My most urgent wish is to see the German biography I wrote about Kafka distributed in Germany.” Once in Tel Aviv, Brod added to his biography of Kafka three studies on Kafka, each written in German. The Czech writer Milan Kundera called the trilogy, which Brod fired off in rapid succession, “a veritable artillery attack.”

  The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld remembers an evening in which Brod arrived from Tel Aviv to address a study group in the Rehavia neighborhood of Jerusalem. Brod, Appelfeld says,

  argued that Kafka was a Jewish writer not only because his parents and his close friends were Jewish; and not only because he had deep yearnings toward Jewish creativity, a feeling for Yiddish, for poetry and theater in Yiddish, for the Hebrew language and for Jewish thinking, but beyond all this—he should be regarded as a Jewish writer because of the very essence of his work. After all, who was that person in The Trial, the person who stood accused, but had committed no crime—the person in the grip of anxiety, shunted back and forth between different courtrooms—who was this person, if not the persecuted Jew?

  The young country’s academic establishment, meanwhile, frowned on Brod’s portrayal of Kafka as a modern saint. Prominent literary critic Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) of Bar-Ilan University censured Brod for “pseudo-religious readings of Kafka” that sought to turn the author “into a prophet of redemption and Zionism.” Against Brod, Kurzweil claimed that Kafka “is a Jew for whom Judaism is meaningless.” Gershom Scholem, then a formidable figure at Hebrew University, joined his friend Walter Benjamin in dismissing Brod’s 1937 biography of Kafka as vacuous and sentimental hagiography, its authority undermined by Brod’s dilettantish lack of detachment and smug middle-brow banality. Benjamin, a student of Kafka’s works since the mid-1920s, had felt close affinities to their author. “His [Kafka’s] friendship with Brod,” Benjamin wrote to Scholem, “is to me above all else a question mark which he chose to ink in the margin of his life.”But then he gropes toward an answer. “Concerning friendship with Brod,” Benjamin wrote to Scholem in 1939, “I think I am on the track of the truth when I say: Kafka as Laurel felt the onerous obligation to seek out his own Hardy.” Kafka’s fate, Benjamin added, “was to keep stumbling upon people who made humor their profession: clowns.”

  _____

  Despite his difficulties with his adopted country’s language, literary climate, and cultural establishment, Brod explained to his old friend Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909–1980), returning to Europe after the cataclysm was unthinkable. Schoeps was a German-Jewish historian of religion who had published several important essays during the 1930s on Kafka’s Jewish-theological significance. He had briefly collaborated with Brod on editing the first posthumous collection of Kafka’s short stories (Beim Bau der chinesischen Mauer, 1931). Although they agreed on reading Kafka’s work in light of Jewish theology, they had parted ways over the question of Zionism. In August 1932, Schoeps wrote to Brod:

  And when it comes to Zionism, it is utterly impossible for us to come to an agreement. The experiential substance that one must possess in order to become a Zionist has never been granted me, and everything that has to do with national rootedness [völkische Verwurzelung] is foreign to me. . . . I have great reason to doubt that Zionism represents an objective return to Judaism. In fact, I see it as nothing else but a late-blooming of West-European imperialism, a product of the Occident’s secularized realm of thought. Zionism is not a religious movement. Its conception of the Jewish people secularizes all that is religious, and turns the people of God into a worldly people, thereby distorting the Jewish reality.

  Brod’s reply was swift:

  I greatly regret that our differences are so great that they make it impossible for me to preserve the good feelings I had for you at the beginning. As far as Kafka is concerned, I ask that you return the manuscripts that are still in your possession. I plan to publish all of Kafka’s works with Schocken Press. I can assure you that the new edition will acknowledge all of the editorial work you have undertaken up to this point.

  A Prussian patriot, Schoeps had survived the war years in Sweden. Though his mother was murdered in Auschwitz and his father in Theresienstadt, Schoeps returned to Germany in 1945 to teach theology at the University of Erlangen. In June 1946, Brod wrote to Schoeps:

  It is the greatest crime in human history that the German nation a) let this murderous gang come to power, and b) put millions of collaborators at their service. This crime can never be atoned; it reached metaphysical depths. So I do not comprehend how you could have a desire to live and teach among that accursed nation [verruchten Volk].

  A month earlier, on May 15, 1948, the armies of Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria invaded the state David Ben-Gurion had just declared. The outbreak of Israel’s War of Independence caught Brod in Genoa; he was on his way back from Switzerland, his first return to Europe since fleeing in 1939. Fearful of imminent invasion and “annihilation” by Arab forces, he sent a plea to the writer Hermann Hesse on May 22. Brod asked the Nobel laureate, almost seventy-one at the time, to
use his international reputation to “raise your voice in this tragic hour of Jewish history,” and “wake the conscience of mankind from its deep slumber.” Brod added that the war imperiled not just people, but also cultural treasures like Kafka’s manuscripts. Three days later, Hesse replied from Switzerland. He rebuffed Brod’s call for help, “beautiful and noble” though it may be.*

  In the months during and after Israel’s War of Independence, Brod channeled his anxieties into a novel called Unambo (published in German in 1949 and in English in 1952). In the novel, a strange-looking “fat man” offers the amiable protagonist Helfin (or helper) a Faustian bargain: by means of a “doubling machine,” he can live two lives at the same time, “equally present” in each: as a pioneer and soldier in Palestine, and as a film producer in Europe. (Brod took the novel’s title, and the name of the contraption, from the words uno—one, and ambo—both.) Helfin is spared the either-or choice that his author had to make.†

  Brod chose Tel Aviv. In July 1948, Brod wrote to Walter Berendsohn (1884–1984), a German-Jewish literary critic living in exile in Stockholm, and an old friend: “It is a good thing that we have to stand now on our feet and need no longer hanker after the judgment of others about Jewish character, Jewish peculiarities.”

  _____

  However little recognition Brod gained in the new country, in 1948, a decade after his arrival, he was awarded the annual Bialik Prize. Named for the poet H. N. Bialik, this was the first Hebrew literature prize and the country’s most prestigious literary accolade. To be precise, the award recognized not Brod but his eight-hundred-page historical novel, Galileo in Shackles. According to the jury, “The whole book is permeated with the original Jewish spirit and eternal ideals of the people of Israel.” The book was translated from the German into Hebrew by Dov Sadan (1902–1989), then a member of the editorial board at the Am Oved publishing house, later a Member of Knesset who himself would be awarded the Bialik Prize decades later (1980).

  The awards ceremony took place on January 11, 1949, in the ornate ground-floor reception room of Bialik’s former house in Tel Aviv. The room’s walls were painted in royal blue, and its columns were tiled with colorful cartouches depicting the twelve tribes of Israel. The German-born actress Orna Porat, at twenty-four already a rising star of the Cameri Theater, opened the evening with a reading of excerpts of Bialik’s essay “The Hebrew Book.” Then Brod spoke:

  I told a friend that today is a great holiday for me; I have the impression that thanks to the Bialik Prize I’ve now been accepted into the family of Hebrew writers—and there is nothing in the world I value more highly than this honor. Tonight I’m given the opportunity to apply to myself the biblical verse “I dwell among my own people” [2 Kings 4:13]. . . . I dedicate this book, a book on the freedom of thought, which I have written as one of the “sons who have returned to their homeland,” to my people, who are in these very days fighting for their full freedom.

  The family of Hebrew writers, it turns out, did not unanimously gratify Brod’s hopes of acceptance. Eight days after the awards ceremony, David Shimoni, head of the Hebrew Writers Association and chairman of the Academy of Hebrew Language (and Bialik Prize winner the next year) registered a protest: a work written in German should under no circumstances be eligible for a prize reserved for genuine Hebrew literature, he said. Shimoni and the members of his association treated Galileo more as a corpus delicti than as a worthy novel.

  Although Shimoni’s polemics avoided ad hominem attacks on Brod, a public controversy ensued. In February, a translator named Isaac Loeb Baruch (Brocowitz) (1874–1953) took to the pages of the right-wing daily Herut to explain why he was scandalized. Baruch dismissed Sadan’s translation of the novel from the German as “linguistic garbage.” He worried that if Brod’s award were allowed to stand, a slippery slope would lead to the appalling spectacle, before too long, of a Yiddish-speaking author claiming the prize.

  To be sure, some defended Brod’s award and took the episode as a study in the possibility of Jewish writing in a non-Jewish language. They argued for opening the Bialik Prize to all languages in order to infuse new blood into a Hebrew literature that some believed had curdled into provincial conformity.

  But the damage had been done. Brod never commented publicly on the controversy, and conspicuously failed to mention the prize in his memoir.

  _____

  For the next decade or so after the Bialik Prize episode, Brod and Esther Hoffe would take Dakota twin-engine planes from Tel Aviv to Germany, where Brod would speak to packed halls of German students. He would lecture either on Kafka (as he did in Berlin in 1954, on the thirtieth anniversary of Kafka’s death), or on the importance of distinguishing German culture and language from the crimes of the Third Reich. He related how, in the years when he had unquestioningly seen himself as part of German literature, he had been moved to gratitude for the poetry of Goethe and Hölderlin. Again and again, he asked the young people, who still remembered the war years, to understand the difference between Nazism and Germanness (Deutschtum), and to see that German culture ought not be held responsible for Nazi crimes.

  In 1964, during an interview for the newspaper Maariv on the occasion of Brod’s eightieth birthday, the journalist Refael Bashan raised the subject again.

  “Most of your books appear first in Germany, you go on lecture tours in Germany, you appear there on radio and television. Do you believe in a ‘different Germany’?”

  “Sir,” Brod replies, “I have a special reckoning with Germany. For my fiftieth birthday, the Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels presented me with a gift: an official manifesto calling for my books to be put on the pyre!*. . . . The Germans also murdered my beloved brother, Dr. Otto Brod. . . . So what can I tell you? That I don’t know the Germans? But I also found decent ones among them, and if a German is decent then he is very decent!”

  For the rest of his life, Brod used his writing to withdraw to familiar territory. He wrote forewords and afterwords to Hebrew editions of Heinrich von Kleist, Oskar Baum, and others, acting as a gatekeeper for reception of German-language authors in Israel. His adaptation of Kafka’s novel The Castle for stage (translated by A. D. Shaphir) was performed at the Cameri Theater in Tel Aviv in 1954 (directed by Leopold Lindtberg, and starring Orna Porat and Michael Shilo). (Eva Hoffe told me that Brod was hurt that his own Habima theater declined to produce the play, which was “an unforgettable success,” she said.)* Content to love at a distance, he revisited the carefree days of his youth in novels like Jugend im Nebel (Youth in the Fog, 1959), which Brod called “the story of my awakening,” and Die Rosenkoralle (The Red Coral, 1961), about his gymnasium years. He spent the early 1960s writing Der Prager Kreis (The Prague Circle), a semiautobiographical portrait of the writers (including Felix Weltsch, Hugo Bergmann, and Franz Werfel) who made the city on the Moldau a cultural mecca in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire. In the attempt to replicate such a circle in Tel Aviv, he continued to participate in a literary salon for German-speaking Jews hosted by his sister-in-law Nadja Taussig in her home on Mapu Street. (Some seventy letters Brod sent to Taussig were put up for sale by the Kedem Auction House in Jerusalem in March 2018.)

  All the while, Brod was pursued by a deep need to be understood in Israel. In that 1964 Maariv interview, Brod was asked about his plans. “Plans? What plans can a man of eighty entertain? I dream that my autobiography, which has already appeared throughout the world, will be translated into Hebrew as well. That is my great dream. I so wish that Israeli youth would get to know me a bit more!”†

  Max Brod (right) with actors at the Habima Theater, Tel Aviv. (Israel Government Press Office)

  Max Brod (seated far right) with actors at the Habima Theater, Tel Aviv, March 1942. (Zoltan Kruger, Israel Government Press Office)

  13

  Brod’s Last Love

  Max Brod’s apartment, HaYarden Street 16, Tel Aviv

  April 2, 1952

  Amalia smiled, and this smil
e, even though it was sad, illuminated her grimly drawn face, made her silence speak, made the foreignness familiar . . .

  —Kafka, The Castle

  In 1942, Max Brod was devastated by three losses. In late February, he learned of the suicide of his old friend Stefan Zweig in Brazil. The news brought home to Brod the magnitude of the cultural catastrophe being visited on Jewish exiles not fortunate enough to have made it to Palestine. In his book Prophets without Honor, Frederic V. Grunfeld, who fled from Germany to New York with his family in 1938, asks his readers to imagine

  that T. S. Eliot had died in exile in Peru; that the aged Bernard Shaw committed suicide on a ship to South America; that Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein, had been compelled to live out their last days in a small community in Guatemala . . . that William Faulkner had learned Spanish in order to teach in a school in Caracas. . . .

  That imaginative exercise gives us some idea of Brod’s devastation as he witnessed the land of Goethe and Schiller banishing his Jewish colleagues (no matter how vital their contributions to German culture) and scattering the last upholders of Central European humanism to the four corners of the earth.

  Nearly a decade earlier, in March 1933, another literary refugee, the Austrian-Jewish novelist Joseph Roth, had written to his patron Stefan Zweig: “We stem from the ‘Emancipation,’ from Humanity, from the humane rather than from Egypt. Our ancestors are Goethe, Lessing, Herder, no less than Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Roth died six years later in squalid exile in Paris, just after learning that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York. Brod, who had published Roth’s essays in the Prager Tagblatt and put him in contact with the Paul Zsolnay publishing house, was burdened by their fates, too.