Kafka left written instructions to destroy his unpublished work. Max Brod had told him, years earlier, that he would not obey them.
The Instructions Themselves
There were two documents, both addressed to Max Brod. The first is undated but generally placed around 1921; the second was written shortly before Kafka's death in June 1924. Together they constitute one of the most discussed — and most complicated — acts of literary self-cancellation on record.
The first note, kept by Brod and later published, asked that everything Kafka left behind — diaries, manuscripts, letters, sketches — be burned unread. The second, also left among his papers and likewise addressed to Brod, repeated and sharpened the request. Brod was named executor. The instruction was explicit: destroy it all.
What makes the situation irreducibly strange is that Brod had already told Kafka he would do no such thing. According to Brod's own published account — in his biography of Kafka, first published in 1937 — Kafka knew this. When Brod said he would not carry out a destruction order, Kafka, the argument goes, could simply have found another executor. He did not. Whether this amounts to a tacit permission or merely to a resigned acceptance of a friend's stubbornness remains genuinely unresolved, and no reading of the documents settles it cleanly.
What Brod Did
Kafka died on 3 June 1924, aged forty. Within months, Brod was preparing manuscripts for publication. Das Schloss (The Castle) appeared in 1926, Der Proceß (The Trial) in 1925, Der Verschollene — the novel later published as Amerika — in 1927. The short prose Kafka had arranged and seen through the press himself, including In der Strafkolonie and the collection Ein Landarzt, was already in print before his death. What Brod published were the novels Kafka had set aside, the diaries, the letters, and the accumulated notebooks — precisely the material the instructions covered.
Brod did not pretend otherwise. He was open, even emphatic, about what he had done and why. His reasoning was essentially that the work was too important to suppress, and that a friend's knowledge of a writer's actual wishes — as opposed to the letter of a written note — gave him the standing to override the instruction. He also drew on the theological framing he brought to Kafka throughout his life, reading the work as spiritually urgent in ways that made its suppression unthinkable.
That reasoning has been contested ever since. The objection is not sentimental: it is that Brod substituted his judgment for Kafka's own, and that the authority of an explicit written instruction is not dissolved by a friend's conviction that he knows better. Against this, defenders of Brod point to the outcome — a century of extraordinary literary engagement — and suggest that the alternative, a Kafka known only through the few texts published in his lifetime, would have been an impoverishment no one could seriously prefer.
The Longer Aftermath
The manuscripts Brod salvaged did not stay in one place. He took them with him when he left Prague in March 1939, on the last train out before the German occupation made departure impossible, and they traveled with him to Tel Aviv. After Brod's death in 1968, the papers passed to his secretary and companion Esther Hoffe, and after her death to her daughters. What followed was a prolonged legal dispute — between the Hoffe estate, the National Library of Israel, and the German Literature Archive in Marbach — over where the manuscripts belonged and who had authority over them. The Israeli courts ultimately ruled that the papers should go to the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, a process that concluded only in the 2010s. The physical history of those papers after Kafka's death is its own long story.
The instructions themselves, meanwhile, have become a kind of interpretive problem that attaches to everything. To read The Trial knowing Kafka wanted it burned is not the same as reading it without that knowledge. It does not diminish the novel — nothing about its power depends on authorial approval — but it places the reader in an odd position: the beneficiary of a refusal, reading a book that its author, by his own account, wanted not to exist. Brod understood this, and he made no attempt to conceal it. The question he declined to answer is whether understanding a situation and having the right to override it are the same thing.
They are not, of course. But the novels exist, and they are what they are. That is the situation Brod created, and the one every reader inherits.
End of article · Afterlives