In 2010, I got a call from the New York Times magazine, asking me to go to Israel to report on the legal case surrounding Max Brod’s papers. (...)
Just to quickly sum up: in 1921, Kafka writes a letter naming Brod as his literary executor, instructing him to burn everything. When Kafka tells him about the letter, Brod replies that he won’t comply with the instructions. Kafka doesn’t name a new executor.
In 1924, Kafka dies. Brod starts editing and publishing the works, starting with The Trial in 1925.
In 1939, Brod flees the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. He ends up in Tel Aviv, where he meets Esther Hoffe, his soon-to-be secretary. After Brod’s wife dies, Brod becomes very close with Esther and her husband, Otto. He goes on vacations with them in Switzerland. Esther has an office in Brod’s apartment.
Brod dies in 1958, leaving the papers to Esther Hoffe. Esther eventually auctions off the manuscript of The Trial for nearly $2 million. It ends up in Germany, at the Marbach archive.
When Esther dies in 2007, she leaves the rest of Brod’s papers to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. The National Library of Israel challenges the legality of the bequest. In 2010, the Supreme Court of Israel rules that an inventory must be taken of all the papers, some of which are still at Eva Hoffe’s home, on Spinoza Street in Tel Aviv.
Eva Hoffe at this point has a lot of cats. This is where I get involved. Basically what I’m told by by the Times in 2010 is: “So the daughter lives in an apartment with 100 cats, and she doesn’t talk to anyone. But we’re hoping she’ll talk to you.”
I was just getting started as a writer, so I took the assignment, even though I don’t speak Hebrew or German (so even if Eva Hoffe wanted to talk to me, how was it supposed to happen?). The travel budget was tiny—I don’t remember exactly, something like $2000, almost all of it went to the plane ticket from San Francisco. I didn’t have enough for a hotel. I stayed at a friend’s friend’s aunt’s (?) apartment. [I was lucky to have such a brilliant and helpful friend.]
I spent several days running around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, feeling continually guilty about my lack of qualifications. I was talking to scholars, archivists, and especially lawyers. An incredible number of lawyers. Eva Hoffe had a lawyer, the National Library had a lawyer, the Kafka estate had a lawyer, even the Marbach archive had a lawyer.
In the downtime from talking to lawyers, I lurked around Spinoza Street, hoping to somehow communicate with Eva Hoffe. I brought toys for the cats. Some of the cats came out, they were ready to go on the record, but Eva never answered the door.
Then I went back to SF and spent the whole summer writing the story. Meanwhile, the Times sent an Israel-based photographer (Natan Dvir) to Spinoza Street, and he had a really different experience from me: Eva invited him inside for tea and he was able to take a beautiful photo of her, and she even shared some old personal photographs. The story, “Kafka’s Last Trial,” made it to the cover:
That was in September, 2010. The trial, as you know, lasted for many more years. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library of Israel. Then there was another trial in Switzerland, but we’ll just fast-forward past that one. Since 2019, everything is at the NLI. And that’s it for the court case! Now we can talk about the actual human relationships!
Everyone who loves Kafka, has to be grateful to Brod. Literally everything we know of Kafka, all of his writing, comes to us via Brod.
But is gratitude always a pleasant feeling?
In 2010, when I was doing all the interviews, I kept encountering ambient waves of animosity towards Brod. Some of the animosity was relatively overt and pragmatic, and was related to how this whole legal mess had been caused by Brod—why hadn’t he put the papers in an archive, instead of leaving them to his secretary?
But there was also a less clearly stated, more emotional, and more diffuse annoyance at Brod—for getting in the way of “our” relationship with Kafka. And that’s one of the questions I want to ask today: What does it mean to try to get past Brod—to get to the authentic, unmediated Kafka?
In some cases, there is a clear literal answer. We heard yesterday from Ross Benjamin, the heroic translator who, at great personal cost, did Anglophone Kafka fans the huge service of translating the diary Kafka actually wrote, instead of the version redacted by Brod. In situations like this, it’s not just possible, but also very meaningful, to get past Brod. But I think such cases are more limited than we think.
I want to point out that Western literary culture has a model of authorship that’s very individual-oriented.
We still have the German Romantic idea of the artist as a lone individual. And it’s not that this idea is wrong, exactly: a big part of writing really is you alone in a room with your awful self. But it’s not the whole picture.
I want to read you what I think is a very insightful observation from Brod. “Two opposite tendencies fought for supremacy in Kafka: the longing for loneliness, and the will to be sociable.”
This is a central tension, not just in Kafka, but in the act of writing. We find it stated very clearly in Proust. (One thing I love about Brod’s Kafka biography is the weight he gives to biographical and psychological similarities to Proust.)
At the end of In Search of Lost Time, we learn that literary “work” is a product of solitude and darkness—AND that the work is co-authored by others, by people outside of ourselves. Every novel is a collaboration with real people—with real life.
This is the main question of my talk: what happens when we look at the Kafka-Brod relationship as a collaboration? Just to clarify, I mean this in a very moderate sense—I’m not saying it’s an equal collaboration. Or only a collaboration. But what do we learn when we look at the relationship as, among other things, a collaboration?
One place where the monologic idea of authorship is very evident in our culture, is when it comes to Famous Quotes. We tend to visualize them as pure emanations from the brain of the solitary author.
This is a paraphrase of a quote we all know. Speaking for myself, I think it’s represented in my brain much like it is visualized here—floating in black space next to a photo.
In fact, that quotation comes, not from anything Kafka wrote alone in a room, but from a conversation with Brod. It’s in Brod’s biography. Kafka tells Brod that he thinks humans are “nihilistic thoughts that came into God's head.” Brod, trying to be helpful, quotes a Gnostic doctrine about how the human world is a sin committed by God. Kafka replies, basically: let’s not exaggerate, “we are not such a radical relapse of God's, only one of his bad moods. He had a bad day.” Brod is encouraged: “So there’s hope, then, outside of our world”—and that’s when Kafka says it: there’s infinite hope, but not for us. (...)
One of the main arguments between Brod and Kafka, as we know, is about Zionism—and, relatedly, the religious interpretation of Kafka’s work. Brod embraces Zionism in 1912—the same year he helps Kafka publish his first book. From the beginning, Brod is determined to see Kafka as a religious, moral (and eventually Zionist) thinker—not primarily as an artist. This becomes very controversial for Kafka’s readers.
In his review of Kafka’s first book, Brod writes: “How much absoluteness and sweet energy emanates from these few short prose pieces… It is the love of the divine, of the absolute that comes through in every line… not a single word is squandered in this fundamental morality.”
This isn’t what we would call a consensus interpretation of Kafka. It’s pretty niche. It’s gushing, it’s lacking in nuance—it’s not tasteful. Kafka found it embarrassing. (We know this from a letter to Felice Bauer.) (...)
So, unsurprisingly, Brod’s critics say: “This isn’t biography, it’s hagiography.” Brod is seen as gauche, tendentious, vulgar. He’s accused of turning Kafka’s works, which are SO multivalent—if there’s one defining feature, it’s plurality of meaning—into a mouthpiece for his own political agenda. (...)
In 1938, Walter Benjamin famously writes: Kafka’s “friendship with Brod is to me above all else a question mark which he chose to ink in the margin of his life.” Of all the mysteries about Kafka—how could he choose this guy as his best friend. This is a from a letter to Gershom Scholem in 1938. Benjamin has just read Brod’s biography, and his take is: “Brod has been denied any authentic vision into Kafka’s life.” (...)
Brod and Kafka meet in 1902 at the German students’ union at Charles University. They’re both law students. Brod has just given a bombastic speech about Schopenhauer, in which he calls Nietzsche a “swindler.” And Kafka comes up to him afterwards. It’s interesting that Kafka approaches Brod first. And Kafka, who is so self-effacing—“deeply unobtrusive,” as Brod puts it, in his dress and demeanor—nonetheless remonstrates with Brod for “the extreme uncouthness of [his] way of putting things.”
This is exactly what Walter Benjamin finds so irritating about Brod: “his striking lack of tact,” his tendency towards “feuilletonistic clichés.” And yet it seems that this very “uncouthness”—which may relate to Brod’s famous “vitality”—is part of what attracts Kafka.
So Brod and Kafka are walking home together, talking about their favorite writers. Brod quotes a line he loves from Gustav Meyrink, comparing butterflies to “great opened-out books of magic.” Kafka responds by quoting a phrase from Hoffmannsthal: "the smell of damp flags in a hall.” He then falls into a deep silence, “as if this hidden, improbable thing must speak for itself.” And this is such an important moment for Brod that, thirty-five years later, he still remembers the street they were walking on, the house they were passing.
Brod starts collecting all of Kafka’s utterances. A lot of the most famous Kafka lines come to us from Brod’s biography. “My head made an appointment with my lungs behind my back.” A lot of hits. So the claim that Brod didn’t understand Kafka, or didn’t appreciate him, or wasn’t sensitive to him—it doesn’t quite hold up. Of course, in every relationship there are blind spots and misunderstandings. But “our” understanding of Kafka is largely an understanding that was communicated to us by Brod. Can we really say it was totally unavailable to Brod himself?
Brod DOES come across as pushy and tendentious—even, or especially, in the biography. We see Brod subjecting Kafka to Gustav Meyrink quotes, hounding him to visit publishers. We see that sometimes this is too much for Kafka. The biography actually reproduces many beautiful, tactful notes that Kafka writes, to get out of meeting Brod. My favorite:
My Max,
I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be necessary. From the fact that you won't try to answer this postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.
Your Franz
I remember reading that in Tel Aviv and having this realization that everything we know—even the picture of Brod as a bumbling oaf—comes from Brod himself. (...)
As we all know, there are many different Kafkas. One of them is Funny Kafka. And funny Kafka is very much in conversation with Brod. In the biography, Brod famously recounts how he and their friends laugh “quite immoderately” when Kafka reads them the first chapter of The Trial; Kafka himself “laughed so much that there were moments when he couldn't read any further.”
Let’s linger for a moment on that image: Kafka, reading his work aloud to Brod and their friends, laughing too hard to keep reading. (...)
It isn’t hard to see what Benjamin means when he says Kafka is “not a humorist,” or not primarily a humorist: Kafka’s works are wrenching and terrifying. And yet… it’s possible to be humorous about situations that are wrenching and terrifying. It’s possible to argue that such situations are the origin of humor.
by Elif Batuman, The Elif Life | Read more:
Images: Author/and via
[ed. See also: Kafka’s Last Trial (NYT):]
The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. (...)
The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?
***
During his lifetime, Franz Kafka burned an estimated 90 percent of his work. After his death at age 41, in 1924, a letter was discovered in his desk in Prague, addressed to his friend Max Brod. “Dearest Max,” it began. “My last request: Everything I leave behind me . . . in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches and so on, to be burned unread.” Less than two months later, Brod, disregarding Kafka’s request, signed an agreement to prepare a posthumous edition of Kafka’s unpublished novels. “The Trial” came out in 1925, followed by “The Castle” (1926) and “Amerika” (1927). In 1939, carrying a suitcase stuffed with Kafka’s papers, Brod set out for Palestine on the last train to leave Prague, five minutes before the Nazis closed the Czech border. Thanks largely to Brod’s efforts, Kafka’s slim, enigmatic corpus was gradually recognized as one of the great monuments of 20th-century literature.The contents of Brod’s suitcase, meanwhile, became subject to more than 50 years of legal wrangling. (...)
The situation has repeatedly been called Kafkaesque, reflecting, perhaps, the strangeness of the idea that Kafka can be anyone’s private property. Isn’t that what Brod demonstrated, when he disregarded Kafka’s last testament: that Kafka’s works weren’t even Kafka’s private property but, rather, belonged to humanity?
