The papers as objects, from a Prague drawer to a disputed archive
Kafka died in a sanatorium in Kierling, outside Vienna, in June 1924. He had no reason to believe his papers were secure. He had asked Max Brod more than once to destroy them — the letters, the diaries, the unfinished novels — and Brod had told him, just as clearly, that he would do no such thing. What this meant in practice was that the physical manuscripts passed immediately into Brod's possession and remained there, in a Prague apartment, for the next fifteen years, while the books Brod began editing and publishing turned their dead author into a European literary phenomenon.
The manuscripts were not yet an archive in any formal sense. They were objects in a private home: loose pages, exercise books, small octavo notebooks, some in Kafka's hand, some typed. Brod worked from them, transcribed them, made editorial decisions that are still disputed — about ordering, about which fragments belonged together, about what counted as a finished sentence. He held the physical papers while the published texts began their separate existence in print. The gap between those two things, the object and the edition, would widen for decades.
Through the war and into exile
When German troops entered Prague in March 1939, Brod left on the last train out of the city, on the night of March 14th. He took the manuscripts with him. This is the part of the story that acquires, in retrospect, the pressure of a narrow escape, though it is worth resisting the dramatic framing: Brod was a Zionist who had been planning to emigrate to Palestine for some time, and the manuscripts were among the possessions he had prepared to take. He settled in Tel Aviv, where he worked as a theater critic and continued his Kafka editing. The papers traveled with him into a different political context, a different language environment, a different continent.
In Tel Aviv the manuscripts stayed in Brod's possession throughout the decades of his later life. He kept them in his apartment on Spinoza Street. They were not publicly accessible in any systematic way. Scholars who wanted to consult them had to go through Brod, and many did — but this was access granted by a private individual, not archival access. The manuscripts' legal status was largely unexamined as long as Brod was alive.
Brod died in December 1968. He left the manuscripts not to a public institution but to his secretary and companion of many years, Esther Hoffe, and — with some ambiguity that would generate decades of legal dispute — to her heirs. Hoffe interpreted her inheritance as outright ownership. She sold the manuscript of Der Proceß (The Trial) to the German Literary Archive in Marbach in 1988, for a price reported to have been in the millions of deutschmarks. Other papers she kept in her apartment and in safe deposit boxes in Tel Aviv and Zurich.
The legal dispute and its resolution
Hoffe died in 2007. She left the papers to her two daughters, Eva and Ruth. This is when the case moved into the courtroom. The National Library of Israel brought a claim, arguing that Brod had always intended the papers to end up in an Israeli public institution and that his will, properly read, conveyed them to such an institution rather than to private heirs. The German Literary Archive in Marbach — the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, or DLA — entered its own position, having already acquired the Trial manuscript and holding an obvious institutional interest.
The Israeli courts took years to work through the question. The core dispute was interpretive: what had Brod actually intended when he made his bequests, and what obligations, if any, did his stated wishes about the papers' ultimate destination create in law? The Tel Aviv Family Court ruled in 2012 that the manuscripts should go to the National Library of Israel. An appeals process followed. Papers held in Swiss safe deposit boxes required separate Swiss legal proceedings. The process moved slowly, through bureaucratic stages that had their own opacity — though to call this merely Kafkaesque would be a lazy shortcut; the better observation is that Kafka had written, with great precision, about the experience of processes whose interior logic remains opaque to those they concern.
The National Library of Israel eventually took possession of the bulk of the papers in 2019, after the Israeli Supreme Court upheld the earlier ruling and after Swiss courts ordered the contents of the Zurich safe deposit boxes surrendered. Eva Hoffe, the last surviving daughter, died in 2018, and the legal proceedings concluded against the position her family had maintained.
What the archive now holds
The papers that arrived at the National Library of Israel were catalogued and, in significant part, digitized. The library made a large portion of the material available online, which meant that for the first time in a century scholars anywhere in the world could examine images of the physical manuscripts without traveling to an archive or appealing to a gatekeeper. This was a genuine change in the conditions of Kafka scholarship, not merely a symbolic one. Readings of the manuscripts that had relied on Brod's transcriptions could now be checked against the original hands.
The DLA in Marbach retains the Trial manuscript, purchased legitimately before the legal disputes crystallized and not subject to the later rulings. This means the physical manuscript of the most famous of the novels sits in Germany, while the rest of the papers are in Jerusalem — a division that reflects the accident of a 1988 sale more than any principle about where such materials belong.
What the archive holds is not only finished or near-finished work. There are drafts, false starts, letters Kafka received as well as wrote, and a number of papers whose relationship to any published text is uncertain. The physical objects carry information the editions do not: cancellations in the manuscripts, pagination in Kafka's hand (or its absence), the material sequence of pages that Brod sometimes reordered. Scholars working with manuscript images have proposed revisions to the standard texts, and the critical edition of the German-language Kafka, the Fischer Verlag Kritische Ausgabe begun in the 1980s and still in progress, has incorporated manuscript evidence that alters readings previously taken as settled.
Paper and inference
The history of these papers is, in one sense, a legal and institutional story about ownership and custody. In another it is a story about what happens to an author's intentions when the objects that might evidence those intentions pass through so many hands. Brod made decisions about the manuscripts before any institution existed to govern those decisions. Hoffe made different decisions. The courts made others. At every stage the physical papers were present but the question of what they meant — what Kafka had wanted, what his work should look like — was answered by people working from inference and interest.
The manuscripts are now in an archive with public access and digital surrogates available online. This is a better situation, by any reasonable measure, than papers in a private apartment or a bank vault. But it is worth holding onto the specific quality of the century that preceded it — the fragility of the survival, the degree to which the physical objects that underwrite Kafka's entire published afterlife depended, at crucial moments, on the decisions of private individuals acting without institutional oversight. A different last train, a different will, a different interpretation of an old man's intentions, and the archive might not exist at all.
End of article · Afterlives