Nearly a century after the writer’s death an argument was still raging over who had the more valid claim to his literary legacy — Germany or the Jews, writes Guy Chazan
Nearly a century after the writer’s death an argument was still raging over who had the more valid claim to his literary legacy — Germany or the JewsIn October 1916, Franz Kafka asked his fiancée Felice Bauer to tell him who he really was. A recent article had said there was something “fundamentally German” about his writing. Another had said his stories were “typically Jewish”.
It is a typically self-deprecating, tragicomic line from a writer whose work so brilliantly reflects the neuroses of the modern mind. Yet it is also prophetic. Nearly 100 years after his death an argument was still raging over who had the more valid claim to his literary legacy — Germany or the Jews., a highly entertaining story of literary friendship, epic legal battles and cultural politics centred on one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century.
There’s an added irony in the fight to own Kafka: in his lifetime, he was singularly unpossessive. As his biographer Reiner Stach wrote: “There is not a single known episode in his life in which he displayed any joy in ownership. He did not necessarily have to own what he loved.” And yet the tussle over ownership of his papers dragged on for years.
Brod brought Kafka’s papers with him when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939. On his death in 1968 he left them to Esther Hoffe, his secretary, who later bequeathed them to her daughters, Eva and Ruth.
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