By Zachary Rothbart
The National Library of Israel’s Franz Kafka Collection is now online for the first time, following an intensive years-long process of conservation and restoration, cataloging and digitization.
An image of Franz Kafka over postcards he sent to Max Brod. (The Literary Estate of Max Brod/NLI)
The collection, one of the largest of its kind, contains dozens of manuscripts, notebooks, personal letters, drawings and more.
Some newly digitized items include three different draft versions of Kafka’s story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” a notebook in which he practiced Hebrew, hundreds of personal letters, sketches and drawings, travel journals and private thoughts he wrote to himself.
The collection came online exactly 97 years after the preeminent author’s death from tuberculosis on June 3, 1924.
About two years have passed since the conclusion of a decades-long international legal saga over the Max Brod Archive, including the Franz Kafka Papers, which came to the National Library of Israel (NLI) in Jerusalem after courts in Israel, Germany and Switzerland determined that the materials should be safeguarded at the NLI, where, in accordance with Brod’s wishes, it would be properly preserved and made available to the public.
Before his passing, Kafka asked Max Brod, a close friend, to destroy all of his letters and writings. Brod did not do this, later explaining that Kafka changed his mind several times regarding his wishes and Brod felt that not destroying the papers was what Kafka would truly have wanted.
Brod was responsible for publishing Kafka’s three major novels — The Trial, The Castle and Amerika — as well as short stories and letters. Brod also wrote the first biography of Kafka.
In March, 1939, after the rise of the Nazis and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Brod immigrated to British Mandatory Palestine, bringing with him all of Kafka’s writings.
Over the next 30 years, until his death in 1968, Brod worked tirelessly to publish his friend’s manuscripts, to translate them and to promote research related to them.
In the will he wrote in 1961, Brod charged his secretary, Esther Hoffe, with preserving his own archive, including the Kafka writings, and transferring it in an orderly manner to a public institution, naming the National Library in Jerusalem as the preferred destination.
Hoffe, however, did not fulfill these wishes, and even began to undertake extensive commercial activities, selling a number of Kafka manuscripts and letters. The culmination of these activities came in 1988 when the manuscript of The Trial was sold for $2 million.
When Hoffe passed away in 2007, her daughters tried to carry on her activities, but at this point NLI appealed the implementation of Hoffe’s will, requesting that Brod’s archive be transferred to the library, as Brod himself had wanted.
From 2008 through 2016, legal proceedings were held in three Israeli courts, including the Supreme Court, all of which determined that the archive should be handed over in its entirety to NLI.
From 2016-2019, the library worked to collect all of the archive’s materials from various vaults in Israel; an apartment in Tel Aviv; the German police who had confiscated materials that had been stolen; and finally, a Swiss bank vault where most of the Kafka papers were located.
During the last eight years of his life, Kafka moved a number of times between Prague, various sanatoriums in Italy and Austria, and even a few months in Berlin with his girlfriend Dora Diamant. His writings were left behind in all of these places, as well as in his in parents’ home.
It is also known that Dora kept some additional writings in her home. Those papers were ultimately taken by the Gestapo and their whereabouts remain unknown.
The Kafka Papers are considered to be an integral part of the Max Brod Archive and the larger collection of materials relating to the Prague Circle, of which Brod and Kafka were members.
NLI holds hundreds of personal archives of leading Israeli and Jewish writers, intellectuals and public figures, including most of the other members of the “Circle,” whose writings indicate the hope that their papers would ultimately be preserved there.
“The National Library of Israel has a key role in making the treasures of Israel and the Jewish people accessible in Israel and around the world,” said Oren Weinberg, NLI director. “The Franz Kafka papers will now join millions of other items we have brought online in recent years as part of our efforts to preserve and pass down cultural assets to future generations.
“After many years in which these papers were inaccessible to the public, we are proud to offer free open access to them for scholars and millions of Kafka fans in Israel and across the globe.”
The collection can be accessed at National Library of Israel.
