Nearly a century after his death, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), author of “The Metamorphosis” and The Trial, was at the center of a legal battle. The case that played out in Israeli courts concerned the papers and unpublished manuscripts he left behind. Kafka instructed his executor, fellow writer Max Brod, to destroy everything. Brod disobeyed and his posthumous Kafka publications elevated his late friend to worldwide status as the articulator of modern despair. Brod’s will left the papers to the care of his secretary, who in turn willed them to her daughter, Eva Hoffe. And then the problems began.
Kafka’s Last Trial unpacks the conundrums raised by the case. No one except Hoffe felt the Kafka papers were best served by being kept in piles in her Tel Aviv apartment. But the validity of her mother’s bequest was challenged by rival claimants, a literary archive in Germany and the National Library of Israel. Both institutions sought Kafka as their own and each had a point while missing the larger questions. For the record, Kafka was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which no longer exists, and died in Czechoslovakia, also defunct as a political entity. He lived in neither Germany nor the land that became the State of Israel. Kafka wrote in German and had a fraught but evolving attitude toward his Jewish heritage. He evaded narrow categorization. Who owns his legacy?
Benjamin Balint writes lucidly, going beyond the courtroom drama into literary history and a meditation on identity. Kafka embodied existential alienation, yet in his last years appeared to embrace those aspects of Jewishness not associated with his stolid, largely assimilated father. Does that make him a proto-Israeli or was he singing the death knell of German-Jewish culture? Both or neither?
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Aware of the paradoxes, Balint hears out all sides. A portion of his sympathy goes to Hoffe, a depressed and penurious old woman who saw herself (with some reason) as a character in Kafka’s fiction, lost in a bewilderingly arbitrary labyrinth of legalism. But ultimately, he wonders about the instinct of possessiveness. “Long before the trials in Israel, legion are those who have sought to claim Kafka,” Balint concludes. The scope of Kafka’s anxiety was enormous enough to contain the entire world.
