Like the man from the country in Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” Eva Hoffe remained stranded and confounded outside the door of the law. There would be no redemptive revelation for her. She did not understand the law or the intricacies of legal reasoning, but she did understand the sentence. Her inheritance was the trial itself. Paradoxically, she had inherited her disinheritance, inherited the impossibility of carrying out her mother’s will. She possessed only her dispossession.
Normally, a will establishes the heir’s identity by acknowledging continuity and legally recognizing what she can consider her own. A will allows the heir to understand her place in the generational order of things. Eva insisted that the disputed manuscripts connected her as much with Brod as to her mother. “You must understand that Max was a member of our family,” she told me.
She told me after the verdict that she felt “worse than despairing . . . as though I’ve been raped.” She said that in her humiliation, she felt too ashamed even to meet her friends at their usual Thursday coffee klatch. Instead, she tended to her cats and went to matinee movies “to pass the time.” She told me that because most of her teeth had fallen out and she couldn’t afford dental work, she ate soup or bread with tahini or jam. When we met at a café on Dubnow Street, she poked at her potato purée.
A form of masochism or sublimated self-fury seemed to have awakened within her. She had instructed her hairdresser to shave her head. In a convulsion of mourning? In a debt to the dead? In the wish to appear the martyr? “If I went on hunger strike,” she said, “they would just force feed me.”
The next time we met, her hair had grown out somewhat, but a thin film of melancholy seemed to coat her blue eyes. Speaking as though she regarded herself as the sum of her legal misfortunes, she compared the endless deferrals and delays of her case to those encountered by Joseph K. in The Trial. In both cases, she felt, an arbitrary system had insinuated itself into places both public and private. “Well,” the painter tells Joseph K., “everything belongs to the court.” “I felt from the beginning of the trial like an animal being led to slaughter,” she said.
The Supreme Court ruling, Eva insisted, represented “the will to appropriate, not the will to adjudicate.” Still, she felt that Brod’s gift to her mother, and her mother’s to her, was unrevoked and unrelinquished. She held out the slim hope that the court would reverse itself and recognize that it had failed both to fulfill Brod’s will and to respect her privacy. Because the ruling made no distinction between Brod’s estate and Esther Hoffe’s personal correspondence, Eva did not wish to ship off everything indiscriminately to the National Library.
During that conversation, I thought of the successive violations of intimacy that accompanied each chapter of the story: Joseph K. arrested in his bedroom in the opening scene of The Trial; Brod’s decision to publish Kafka’s diaries and letters (including the letter to his father); Esther selling off Kafka’s manuscripts at public auction; and now a trial that had thrust Eva into the public eye.
I relayed Eva’s concerns to Aviad Stollman, head of collections at the National Library. “For reasons both legal and moral,” he replied, the library “has no desire to publish personal material” and remained “committed to return to Hoffe any material of a personal nature in the estate.” The National Library has experience with such sensitivities in its treatment of the estates of living Israeli writers like A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman, Stollman said. He added that the library has forged partnerships with the German publisher Suhrkamp to publish material from the Gershom Scholem estate, for example, and with YIVO (a research organization established in 1925 as the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) regarding the estate of Vilnius-born Yiddish writer Chaim Grade (1910–1982).*
Such assurances were cold comfort to Eva Hoffe, whose dejection deepened by the day. She feared the authorities would break into her apartment to seize the papers by force. If they did, she told me, she would kill herself.
Several days after the ruling, Eva passed the Green Brothers bookshop on Frishman Street not far from her home. In the display window was a copy of J’Accuse, the open letter Emile Zola published in January 1898 in the newspaper L’Aurore accusing the French government of anti-Semitism in its prosecution of alleged traitor Alfred Dreyfus. Eva bought it. “Zola didn’t address the court,” she told me. “He addressed the president of the Republic. Maybe I should do the same.” She, too, hoped for exoneration, however belated.
Dan Miron, a leading authority on Hebrew literature, took to the pages of Haaretz to paint the Supreme Court verdict as the misguided choice of “nationalist sentiment and local interests over the universal and objective interests of literary culture.” He noted that in the half century since Brod’s death, no Israeli institution had bothered to publish his collected works. To do so would require a team of experts in German literature and resources that the National Library lacks. It was not realistic to expect, Miron wrote, “that the National Library of Israel, which made no effort at the time to raise the relatively modest funds necessary to prevent Yehuda Amichai’s literary estate from being transferred from Jerusalem to the Beinicke Library at Yale, to now invest its resources in translating Brod’s works into Hebrew. . . . or to take care of the materials in his estate.” In Miron’s view, the National Library feigned interest in Brod in order to get at the real prize: the Kafka manuscripts that it claimed were legally inseparable from the Brod estate. The Supreme Court, in his view, had bought into the pretense.
“What do I want from Kafka?” Eva had told me. “Years ago, I asked Michael Steiner [the son of Kafka’s niece] to get involved. If anyone, he, and not the National Library, should have what remains of Kafka’s papers. He wasn’t interested. So Kafka for me has been a disaster. They mixed Kafka into Brod’s estate in order to take it all away from me.” Eva told me she was “absolutely convinced” that as soon as the publicity died down, the National Library in Jerusalem would cut a secret deal to sell Kafka’s manuscripts from the Brod estate to Marbach.
Reiner Stach took to the pages of the German weekly Die Zeit to argue that journalists had used Kafka as a kind of flammable lighter fluid to ignite controversy. “Ofer Aderet spun the tale in the liberal daily Haaretz of a considerable amount of unpublished Kafka works hidden by Eva Hoffe.” For this, and for obscuring the fact that many of Kafka’s manuscripts are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Stach charged Aderet with journalistic sensationalism and “disinformation.”
Still, Stach expressed relief at the verdict handed down in Jerusalem. The Hoffes, he said, “had for half a century literally no idea how to do justice to their cultural responsibility.” Stach, among others, contended that Marbach, given its exemplary work with literary estates of other German-Jewish writers, would have made a more fitting home. But they could now be comforted that the question of the physical location of the Kafka and Brod estates had been rendered redundant by the National Library’s pledge to digitize the material and put it all online.
“The presence of the original,” Walter Benjamin said, “is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.” What, if anything, can the trial in Israel tell us about the meaning of ownership in a digital age? Has the “aura of the original” become obsolete? Or do original manuscripts become more prized—and more fetishized—if they can be infinitely reproduced? Does modern technology destroy the aura of authenticity even as it creates an appetite for it?
“I would have preferred to have the papers preserved—with fair access to scholars—at the German Literature Archive at Marbach,” Stanley Corngold, professor emeritus at Princeton and dean of American Kafkaists, told me. “But that is a practical impossibility.”
Of course, they have the manuscript of Der Process [The Trial]. It would be good to have all of Kafka’s manuscripts together—in principle. For the rest, how could one disagree with what you quote Stach as saying? One is passionately glad that they are out of the hands of Ms. Hoffe and glad of the National Library’s promise to digiti
ze—and make them available—soon. In this case the practical outcome outweighs in importance the immense international brain-spill over the niceties of Kafka’s philosophy of non-arrival. . . . Meanwhile, if it were not for the intrusions of the Library, many of the documents—being mere paper—may not have survived at all in the dubious care of Ms. Hoffe—or otherwise never seen the light of day.
Karl Erich Grözinger told me that, research considerations aside, from a moral perspective, the trove of manuscripts properly belongs in Israel. “It was only thanks to the Zionist enterprise and to the yishuv [the Jewish community in Palestine before the declaration of the state in 1948] that Brod was able to rescue the manuscripts,” he said.
Others weren’t so sure that Kafka’s legacy—as elusive and enigmatic as ever, and nowhere at home—could be located on any earthly map. “From my perspective,” Tel Aviv poet Lali Michaeli told me, “Kafka’s manuscripts should be sent to the moon.”
_____
Eva Hoffe had one more chance: she had fifteen days from the date of the ruling to enter a request for another Supreme Court hearing. Despite the efforts of her lawyer, Eli Zohar, to contact her about next steps, she felt despondent and alone. In her desperation, she reengaged Yeshayahu Etgar (a friend of Supreme Court Justice Rubinstein), whom she had retained and then dropped much earlier in the litigation. On the fifteenth day, August 22, 2016, she and Etgar submitted the request for a new hearing. It noted that the National Library did not formally exist as such when Brod wrote his will (either in its original form in 1948 or last form in 1961). It was incorporated only in 2007. The request also reiterated that since Esther explicitly gave her daughters the Kafka manuscripts—as formalized in a letter of August 1970—they belong neither to Brod’s estate nor to Esther’s, and should therefore not be subject to the ruling. On December 13, 2016, Justice Salim Joubran, the first Arab to receive a permanent appointment to Israel’s Supreme Court, declined the request.
In a last-ditch effort, Etgar advised Eva to take offensive action and sue the Justice Ministry for negligence and misconduct in its handling of the case. To describe Eva’s careening emotions that week, one of her close friends invoked a line from Goethe’s Egmont, now a common German saying: “Himmelhoch jauchzend, zu Tode betrübt”—“heavenly joy, deadly despair.”
On December 15, as ordered by the court, the first of Hoffe’s red-brown safe deposit boxes was brought in a Brink’s armored truck from Bank Leumi in Tel Aviv to the National Library in Jerusalem. On December 20, the boxes were to be opened for the first time. I watched as six boxes were wheeled under armed guard on a trolley into the library’s Holtzman conference room next to the cafeteria.
I wondered whether the manuscripts they contained could be thought of as filaments, however frayed over the years. Though the words they carry remain unchanged, the meaning of the loose leaves and sheafs of paper in question had undergone its own metamorphosis. They had connected Kafka to Brod; Brod in exile in Tel Aviv to his prewar heyday in Prague; Brod to the intimate partner of the second half of his life, Esther Hoffe; Hoffe to her devoted daughters; and finally, Germany to Israel in a legal tug of war.
In the conference room, two archivists, Stefan Litt (a Berlin native who has made Israel his home since 1995 and has worked at the National Library since 2010) and Paul Maurer (a Riga-born specialist on German-Jewish material at the National Library who in 2002 conducted research in Marbach), sat on the right side of a long table. They were eager to begin the work of sifting through thousands of pages of material and checking it against Itta Shedletzky’s inventory. Supervising them from the facing side of the table were Matan Barzilai, head of the library’s archives department, and Yaniv Levi-Korem, head of its technical services department. None of them knew quite what to expect. Video cameras had been set up at the head of the table to record the occasion.
In the first few days, Litt and Mauer turned up private correspondence between Max Brod and Esther Hoffe that makes the intimacy of their relationship quite clear. They discovered letters between Kafka and members of his family, and three unknown aphorisms in Kafka’s handwriting, written during World War I and intended for a book never published. Subsequent finds included a file of twenty-five of Brod’s musical scores, thickly bundled handwritten drafts of his novels, and voluminous correspondence (“a who’s who of Central European literary life,” Maurer said.) Rusted paperclips had bled onto many of the papers. The files also confirmed Brod’s instinct to keep mementos of all kinds: signed tickets from 1905 or so for Vienna’s Casino de Paris nightclub, and illustrated postcards from the Wiener Werkstätte (the Vienna workshops of visual artists, established in 1903).
Part of their work involved separating papers belonging to Esther Hoffe’s estate (letters to her from Brod, for example) from those belonging to the Brod estate (Esther’s letters to him). The former would be returned to Eva Hoffe, they said. In the meantime, Eva Hoffe and Yeshayahu Etgar vowed to fight the “extradition” of the materials from Zürich.
More than one of Eva’s closest friends worried that she might succumb to despair and do something rash. In one of our conversations, Eva told me, apropos of nothing, about Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian writer who in 1973 ignited a blaze in her bedroom, apparently from a lit cigarette. Bachmann died in the hospital three weeks later. I could not help imagining a nightmarish scene: after her final defeat, Eva defiantly burns what remains of the manuscripts on Spinoza Street: at once a fulfillment of Kafka’s last wish, a sacrifice of her most precious possession—like Abraham willing to sacrifice Isaac, like the offerings on the altar of the Temple in Jerusalem—and a belated acknowledgment that Kafka belongs to no one.
“Art is never owned, neither by its patrons nor even by the artists themselves,” the poet Joseph Brodsky wrote. The trial laid bare a possessiveness over the artistic legacy of the least possessive of men. Reiner Stach writes of Kafka: “There is not a single known episode in his life in which he displayed possessiveness.” Not so Kafka’s would-be heirs in Israel and Germany who forgot that Kafka is not theirs; if anything, they are his.
The trial also disclosed how unsettled these heirs seemed by what they sought to possess. Aware of the latent power of Kafka’s imagination, they wanted not just to possess but to contain and classify. Artistic affirmation and national affirmation, after all, are quite different things. In his 1987 Nobel lecture, Brodsky said: “The revulsion, irony, or indifference often expressed by literature towards the state is essentially a reaction of the permanent—better yet, the infinite—against the temporary, against the finite.” The latter is the preserve of archivists. But which is more ethereal—words or states?
If the trial represents the apprehensive counterreaction of the finite (state interests) against the infinite (literature), it seems apt that the German word for trial, Prozess, suggests something in open-ended progress. “Only our concept of time,” Kafka once wrote, “makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name; in reality, it is a summary court in perpetual session.” The judges in Jerusalem may have reached their verdict, but the symbolic trial over Kafka’s legacy has yet to adjourn.
Esther Hoffe’s bank deposit box, opened for the first time at the National Library, Jerusalem, December 2016. (Hanan Cohen, National Library of Israel)
Epilogue
And the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine.
—Isaiah 34
Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear when it is once more covered with leaves.
—Kafka, Aphorism 15
Viewed from a certain elevation, Kafka’s writing appears to take its boundaries from the notion that messages are more often than not lost, misunderstood, perpetually postponed, or (which may come down to the same thing) garbled in transmission. They arrive too late, if at all. Kafka’s novel The Trial—itself an unfinished message—tells the story of an increasingly baffled man who is tried b
y laws that remain shrouded in incomprehensibility. The accused is in the end executed without having been able to discover what it is all about.
In the parable “Before the Law,” part of The Trial, Kafka’s supplicant from the countryside receives the crucial message—that the door to the law before which he has waited for years is meant only for him—just before he dies, when it is too late to matter. He is never granted access to the radiant revelation behind the door.
In The Castle, the village mayor explains to K. that ten years earlier the village had sent a representative to the castle to request a land surveyor. When this was judged unnecessary, a second message canceled the first. But the second message was inexplicably lost, only to resurface just when K. arrived. (Kafka seems to leave open the question of whether the surveyor had been summoned at all.)
In Kafka’s story “The Stoker,” which Brod made the first chapter of Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika, our young hero is about to disembark from the ship that has taken him across the ocean when he meets the stoker. This man who fuels the ship has an urgent story to tell, and we are on the brink of hearing it, but in the end do not. Perhaps it is incommunicable.
Kafka’s most unsettling story, “In the Penal Colony,” features an “apparatus” of needles that inscribes a sentence into the prisoner’s flesh in a kind of slow execution by exegesis. The observer cannot decipher the labyrinth of lines the cruel contraption carves; he finds it “incomprehensible” (unbegreiflich). Its macabre message—Kafka calls it a Gebot, or commandment—is intelligible only to the condemned man, if at all, and only at the point of death.
In Kafka’s parable “An Imperial Message,” the emperor—an image of paternal authority—whispers a message from his deathbed to a messenger who has no hope of emerging from the impenetrable chambers and thronged inner and outer courts to deliver and divulge it. He bears a message—as undeliverable as it is urgent—“from a dead man.”
Kafka's Last Trial Page 20
