While Kafka (1883-1924) passed away June 3, the exhibition opened six months later – delayed by the war in Gaza and Lebanon.
A poster from the Kafka exhibition at the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.(photo credit: GIL ZOHAR)ByGIL ZOHARThe best way to describe the temporary exhibition “Kafka: Metamorphosis of an Author” on display at the National Library of Israel (NLI) until June 30, 2025, is “Kafkaesque.”
The more than 80 original items from the NLI, which together with the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford and the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, Germany, holds the world’s major Kafka archives, mark a century since the Prague-born, Czech-Jewish writer died from pulmonary tuberculosis at the Kierling Sanatorium, near Vienna. The unprecedented exhibition – with leaning and crooked walls alluding to Kafka’s inner turmoil – includes his famous will, in which he asked to burn all his writings after his death, and the accusatory 100-page “Letter to His Father.” Also on display are the original manuscripts of his well-known books The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika, as well as his stories and novellas, including The Metamorphosis, first and rare editions, personal letters and postcards, his own drawings, photographs, and Hebrew vocabulary exercise books. The items were selected by co-curators Netta Assaf and Karine Shabtai, exhibition designer Hadas Ophrat, and Stefan Litt, curator of the Humanities Collection at the NLI.
As well, art was commissioned from eight of Israel’s leading illustrators – Sergey Isakov, Eitan Eloa, Nino Biniashvili, Anat Warshavsky, Addam Yekutieli, Merav Salomon, Roni Fahima, and Michel Kichka – who were challenged to address the themes of the works of Kafka and the figure of the novelist himself.
While Kafka (1883-1924) passed away June 3, the exhibition opened six months later – delayed by the war in Gaza and Lebanon. Indeed, the grand opening of the splendid new NLI, slated for just after October 7, 2023, is yet to take place. Kafka, the master of blind bureaucracy, alienation, and the often pointless reality and crushing despair of post-modern life, would have appreciated the nuance.
How the Bodleian Library came to hold much of his papers, given that the author had no connection with Oxford before his death, and the second-biggest collection ended up in Jerusalem – a city which he never visited – is detailed in Ritchie Robertson’s Kafka: Making of an Icon (2024), Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature (1985), and especially Benjamin Balint’s magisterial Kafka’s Last Trial: The Strange Case of a Literary Legacy (2017).
Merav Salomon’s illustration from the ‘Kafka: Metamorphosis of an Author’ exhibition at the National Library of Israel (credit: NLI)Diagnosed with TB in 1917, Kafka initially exploited the “consumption,” using it as a pretext to get out of a second engagement to his fiancée, Felice Bauer. Filing for an early pension from his dreary desk job at the post office and then as an insurance adjuster examining workmen’s accidents, he used his retirement to concentrate on his writing. As the then incurable and painful disease made his demise inevitable, Kafka entrusted his good friend Max Brod (1884-1968) to be his literary executor. The two had met at 1902 when they were students at the German-language Charles University in Prague.
Kafka instructed Brod to burn his unpublished manuscripts upon his death. Brod refused and had his friend’s works published posthumously instead. (The Trial came out in 1925, followed by The Castle the next year, and Amerika in 1927).
In March 1939, as the Nazis marched into Prague having seized Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region the year before, Brod and his wife, Elsa Taussig, caught the last train to Poland before the border closed. They made their way to the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanza. From there, Brod – still faithfully shlepping Kafka’s notes, diaries, and sketches in a suitcase – sailed to Tel Aviv.
He deposited the Kafka trove with Berlin-born publisher Salman Schocken at his private library in Jerusalem. But here, too, danger lurked. Mussolini’s Regia Aeronautica repeatedly bombed the country, including an attack on Tel Aviv on September 10, 1940, that killed 137 people. Similarly, Hitler’s Luftwaffe carried out reconnaissance flights over the Levant to identify strategic targets.
Schocken felt that Kafka’s literary legacy – if not the whole new country – was under existential threat.
In 1956, under the dark cloud of the Suez Crisis, he deposited the papers for safekeeping in a bank vault in Zurich. Five years later, Kafka’s heirs – the children of his three sisters – discussed the future of the archive with Malcolm Pasley, a Kafka scholar at Oxford. They agreed to house the papers at the Bodleian Library.
Pasley received the news while skiing in the Alps. Rushing to whisk the invaluable collection from the Swiss bankers, he drove it back to Britain in his mini Fiat. These materials were later edited and published in six volumes of collected works.
Not all Kafka’s papers were in that trove, however. Some were mixed in with Brod’s literary estate. Upon his death, this trove of materials was passed to his secretary and lover, Esther Hoffe, who maintained most of them until her death in 2007. (The original manuscript of The Trial was auctioned in 1988 for 3.5 million Deutsche marks at Sotheby’s – about $2 million.)
The result, described so well by Balint, was a prolonged lawsuit pitting the NLI against Esther’s daughters, who claimed that Brod had passed the papers to their mother as an inheritance which should be theirs. The sisters had announced their intention to sell the materials to Marburg. But in 2016, the Supreme Court of Israel ruled in the NLI’s favor.
How, then, is one to view Kafka’s enormous literary legacy?
He belonged to the German-speaking world of Central Europe. And he was a hero of Czechoslovakia, a doomed country that split apart in 1992. But Kafka was also a proud Jew and Zionist who studied Hebrew in anticipation of settling in Palestine.
He no doubt was familiar with the admonition of 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote in his 1820–1821 play Almansor: “Das war ein Vorspiel nur. Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen” (That was but a prelude. Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people).
The books of Heine, Kafka, and Brod were consigned to the bonfires of May 10, 1933, when Germans were ordered: “Reiningt eure Büchereien” (Cleanse your libraries).
Other proscribed authors included Bertolt Brecht, Sigmund Freud, Irmgard Keun, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Heinrich Mann. Werfel’s 1933 novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, depicting Armenian resistance to the Ottoman genocide of 1915, metaphorically anticipated the Holocaust.
One can only speculate what fate would have awaited Kafka had he had lived longer. Berlin-born writer Walter Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou, Spain, in 1940 when he learned that the Franco regime was about to deport him to Nazi-allied Vichy, France.
Kafka was acutely aware of the pending Abrechnung mit den Juden (settling of accounts with the Jews). The term Das Drittes Reich (The Third Reich) was coined by Arthur Moeller van der Bruck in his eponymous book published in 1923.
And Kafka was familiar with “das System” – the derogatory Nazi term for the Weimar Republic. Dying in 1924 at the age of 40, Kafka was cursed “only” with frail health and a tortured personal life that inspired his dystopian and totalitarian novels. Had he lived longer without wrangling a life-saving immigration certificate for Palestine, he likely would have been deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and then Auschwitz as ein frecher Jude – “an impudent Jew.”■
