The Israel National Library on Wednesday unveiled a missing batch of Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka’s papers, ending more than a decade of legal wrangling over ownership in Israel and Europe.
As he battled with tuberculosis in an Austrian sanitorium, the author of “The Trial” and “The Metamorphosis” asked his close friend Max Brod to destroy all his letters and writings.
After the writer’s death in 1924, Prague-born Brod, also Jewish, felt he could not carry out his friend’s wishes and in 1939 he fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for Tel Aviv, carrying Kafka’s papers in a suitcase. Brod then published many of the works and played a key role in establishing Kafka’s success as one of the 20th century’s key literary figures.
Brod’s own death in 1968 ushered in what library spokeswoman Vered Lion-Yerushalmi called “the Kafkaesque story” of the Brod archive, with the hoard being split up and part of it stolen and offered for sale in Germany.