Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  Much of Brod’s overwrought fiction similarly hinges on eros. His short novel A Czech Servant Girl (Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen, 1909), features a Vienna-born German named William Schurhaft—the Prague-born linguist Pavel Eisner calls him “a symbolic figure of the Jewish intellectual from the Prague bourgeoisie.” William falls in love with a married Czech country girl who works as a maid in his hotel. He receives from the maid “the sweet sense of true existence.” The literary critic Leo Hermann, then chairman of Prague’s Bar Kochba Association, quipped that “the young author apparently believes that national problems can be solved in bed.” (When he read Hermann’s remark, Brod reported, “I jumped up in fury.”) In 1913, Viennese writer Leopold Lieger accused Brod of composing his love poems in bed.

  Brod’s novel Three Loves (Die Frau Nach der Man Sich Sehnt, literally The Woman One Longs For, 1927), can be read as an allusion to the tragic relationship between Kafka and Milena Jesenská, his married Czech translator and lover. Milena became preoccupied both with her fidelity to Kafka’s prose, and with her husband’s infidelity to her. Brod’s narrator finds pure love in Stasha, “a sacred ecstasy engendered by woman,” and “a call from the eternal celestial home of our hearts.” Stasha, like Milena, cannot and will not leave her husband, despite his affairs. (Brod had known Milena’s husband, Ernst Pollak, from the Prague literary scene. Brod may have taken his character’s name from one of Milena’s closest friends, the translator Staša Jílovská.) In 1929, Brod’s novel would be made into a silent film starring Marlene Dietrich as Stasha.

  Kafka, by contrast, asked himself in his diary in 1922: “What have you done with your gift of sex? It was a failure, in the end that is all that they will say.” Kafka also noted that several of the literary forebears he admired most—Kleist, Kierkegaard, Flaubert—were lifelong bachelors. “You avoid women,” Brod told Kafka, “you try to live without them. And that doesn’t work.” (He would level the same criticism at some of Kafka’s fictional creations. Brod charged Joseph K. in The Trial, for instance, with Lieblosigkeit, the inability to love.)

  Still, Brod often sought Kafka’s advice about the vagaries of young love. In 1913, Brod became engaged to Elsa Taussig, who would become a translator from Russian and Czech into German. Kafka noted, “I strongly encouraged Max and may even have helped to make up his mind.” And yet after the engagement party Kafka said: “When all is said and done, he is actually being separated from me.”

  This was no mere friendship, then, but a literary entanglement between two very different types—between a writer of genius and a writer of taste who recognized genius but could not partake of it. The entanglement raised a number of questions: How did Kafka inhabit Brod’s fiction? Was Brod an accidental companion to Kafka’s writing, or was he somehow internal to its motions?

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  In more than one sense, Brod considered himself a “Zwischenmensch,” a between-man, precariously perched between German, Czech, and Jewish cultures, and therefore attuned to each. “Where three cultures came together,” he would say, “a precocious awareness arises.” At a time when Prague, in Anthony Grafton’s phrase, was “Europe’s capital of cosmopolitan dreams,” Brod carved out a place as a litterateur in the enclave of cultural ferment known as the Prague Circle. (“For every ten Germans [in Prague],” Prague-born culture critic Emil Faktor quipped, “there are twelve literary talents.”) Already a published Wunderkind while in his teens, Brod’s early reputation as a versatile poet, novelist, and critic—not to mention enterprising networker—launched a career that would gain him recognition as the most successful Prague writer of his generation. Reiner Stach notes that by age twenty-five, Brod was corresponding with Hermann Hesse, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and other leading literary lights. In 1912, a twenty-seven-year-old literary journalist from Prague named Egon Erwin Kisch visited a café in London’s East End frequented by Yiddish speakers:

  A nineteen-year-old lad has run away from the Lodz yeshiva [Talmudic academy]; he doesn’t want to be a “bocher” [religious student] and doesn’t want to become a rabbi. Instead, he wants to create, to conquer the world, to write books, to “become a second Max Brod.”

  Brod would prove as prolific (to the point of graphomania) as Kafka was not. His published work would run to almost ninety titles—twenty novels, poetry collections, religious treatises, polemical broadsides (not pugnacious by nature, he called himself a “reluctant polemicist”), plays (including on the biblical heroes Queen Esther and King Saul), essays, translations, librettos, compositions for the piano, and biographies. Read together, they amount to a surpassingly rich literary curriculum vitae. (Of these many works, only seven have been published in English translation.)

  Brod, a man inclined to search out greatness in others, was the first to fall under the spell of Kafka’s idiosyncratic fiction, the first witness to the range and richness of his friend’s imagination. On hearing Kafka read aloud from his early stories “Description of a Struggle” and “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” Brod writes: “I got the impression immediately that here was no ordinary talent speaking, but a genius.” (With great reverence, Brod read a draft of “Wedding Preparations” to his future wife, Elsa.) After Kafka read him two draft chapters of his novel-in-progress The Trial in 1915, Brod effused in his diary: “He is the greatest writer of our time.” On reading Kafka’s drafts, Brod did not feel that he was encountering a type of writing for the first time, but that he had somehow always known it. He did not imitate Kafka’s writing, but he was changed by it. From now on, Brod treated Kafka with what he conceded was a “fanatical veneration.” “He stood by my side like a savior,” Brod writes in his memoir.

  Kafka also served as Brod’s first audience, and often looked to Brod’s writing for solace. In 1908, he read Brod’s first large-scale work, the avant-garde novel Nornepygge Castle: Novel of the Indifferent Man. “Only your book,” Kafka wrote, “which I am at last reading straight through, does me good.” A couple of years later, Brod submitted to Kafka’s scrutiny a draft of his poems, collected under the title Diary in Verse (Tagebuch in Versen, 1910). Kafka recommended discarding about sixty poems.

  Kafka’s admiration for Brod’s energy and initiative grew in inverse proportion to his distrust of himself. Take, for instance, Kafka’s diary entry for January 17, 1911, when he was twenty-seven years old.

  Max read me the first act of Abschied von der Jugend [Farewell to Youth: A Romantic Comedy in Three Acts, one of Brod’s early works]. How can I, as I am today, come up to it? I should have to look for a year before I found a true emotion in me.

  That fall, Kafka and Brod began a joint novel, to be called Richard and Samuel. They published a first chapter in the Prague magazine Herder-Blätter, edited by their friend Willy Haas, before aborting the project. “Max and I must be fundamentally different,” Kafka noted in his diary. “Much as I admire his work . . . still every sentence he writes for Richard and Samuel involves reluctant concessions on my part which I feel in the very depths of my being.” Three years later, Kafka wrote: “Max does not understand me, and when he thinks he does, he is wrong.”

  Did Brod ever read one of Kafka’s drafts and wish that he had been its author? Brod suspected that for all his prolific production, he may have been bestowed with the gifts of taste and discernment but not the ability to create a truly original work of art. As a spectator of Kafka’s genius, he had to depend on something other than himself.

  Perhaps nonartists try to possess materially the art they cannot possess genuinely. Brod, as we’ll see, obsessively collected anything that Kafka put his hand to. Kafka, in contrast, felt the impulse to shed everything. “He was impervious to the joys of collecting things,” writes Reiner Stach.

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  Before long, Brod began to fictionalize his friendship with Kafka. The main character of his 1912 novel Arnold Beer is a dilettante who cajoles his friends to write in the same tonalities as Brod used with Kafka. “
Arnold simply demanded that work should go on all around him; as though dimly aware that for his part he was too fragmented to leave behind anything worth mentioning, he sought to make his energy operate through the medium of other people’s brains.” After reading the novel, Kafka told Brod: “Your book has given me such pleasure. . . . I give you a hearty kiss.”

  Brod’s best-known novel, The Redemption of Tycho Brahe (published in a printing of one hundred thousand copies by Kurt Wolff in 1916, and in English translation by Knopf in 1928), tells the story of the relationship between the great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601) and the intellectually superior German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). Kepler, devoted to discovering the laws of planetary motion, refuses to publish anything that falls short of perfection. The fictional Tycho describes Kepler as an enigmatic man in single-minded pursuit of “immaculate purity.” The more versatile Brahe, living in exile in Prague, does not know what to make of Kepler’s self-doubt, his disinclination to publish, or his declaration “I am not happy and have never been happy . . . and I don’t even want to be happy.” Kepler’s discoveries render Tycho’s obsolete. Yet Brahe self-effacingly overcomes his vanity and puts his own work second to Kepler’s. Brod dedicated the book to Kafka. “Do you know what such a dedication implies?” Kafka writes to Brod in February 1914. “That I am raised to the same level as Tycho, who is so much more vital than I. . . . How small I shall be, orbiting this story! But how glad I shall be to have a semblance of property rights in it. As always, Max, you are good to me beyond what I deserve.”*

  Acknowledging Kafka’s incapacity for self-promotion, the well-connected Brod came to serve as his friend’s advocate, herald, and literary agent. “I wanted to prove to him that his fears of literary barrenness were unfounded,” Brod wrote. He gave Kafka favorable mention in the Berlin weekly Die Gegenwart before Kafka had published a single line.

  Brod waged an uphill battle against Kafka’s sense of his own inadequacy. “The core of all my misery remains: I cannot write,” Kafka confessed to Brod in 1910. “I haven’t managed a single line I’d care to acknowledge; on the contrary, I threw out everything—it wasn’t much—that I had written since Paris. My whole body warns me of every word, and every word first looks around in all directions before it lets itself be written down by me. The sentences literally crumble in my hands; I see their insides and have to stop quickly.”

  In a letter to Brod, Kafka spoke of his “fear of attracting the gods’ attention.” Undeterred, and devoid of envy, Brod interceded on Kafka’s behalf with editors and publishers. Brod served as the liaison between Kafka and the journal Hyperion, edited by Franz Blei, where Kafka’s byline first appeared in print. Brod wrote to Martin Buber in 1916: “If you only knew his substantial, though unfortunately incomplete novels, which he sometimes reads to me at odd hours. What I wouldn’t do to make him more active!”

  In the summer of 1912, Brod brought Kafka to Leipzig, then the hub of the German book business, and introduced Kafka to the young publisher Kurt Wolff. “I promptly had the impression,” Wolff recalled, “which I could never afterwards efface, that the impresario was presenting the star he had discovered.” At the end of that year, Brod and Wolff arranged for Kafka’s first book to be published by Rowohlt Verlag in an edition of eight hundred copies. The ninety-nine-page volume, called Meditation (Betrachtung) was a collection of eighteen “prose poems.” The publisher’s advertisement remarked that the author’s “idiosyncratic need to polish works of literature again and again has so far held him back from publishing books.” Kafka dedicated the book to Brod, who in turn would publish a rave review in the Munich journal März:

  I could easily imagine someone getting hold of this book and finding his whole life altered from that moment on, and realizing he would become a new person. That is how much absoluteness and sweet energy emanates from these few short prose pieces. . . . It is the love of the divine, of the absolute that comes through in every line, with such a natural quality that not a single word is squandered in this fundamental morality.

  Kafka was mortified. “I could have used a hole to hide in.” When the review came out, he wrote to his fiancée Felice Bauer:

  Just because the friendship he feels for me in its most human element has its roots far deeper than those of literature and therefore comes into play before literature even has a chance, he overestimates me in a manner that embarrasses me and makes me vain and arrogant. . . . If I myself were working and were in the flow of work and carried along by it, I wouldn’t dwell on the review; in my mind I could kiss Max for his love, and the review itself would not affect me in the slightest! But as things stand . . .

  In 1913, Brod published Kafka’s breakthrough story “The Judgment” in his anthology, Arkadia.* (Kafka acknowledged that “The Judgment,” dedicated to “Felice B.,” drew on some motifs in Brod’s 1912 novel Arnold Beer.) In 1921, Brod talked up his friend in a long essay called “Franz Kafka the Writer” (published in Die neue Rundschau).

  “I wrested from Kafka nearly everything he published either by persuasion or by guile,” Brod recalled.

  At times I stood over him like a rod, drove him and forced him . . . again and again by new means and new tricks. . . . There were times when he thanked me for doing so. But often I was a burden to him with my prodding and he wished it to the devil, as his diary informs one. I felt that, too, but it didn’t matter to me. What mattered to me was the thing itself, the helping of a friend even against the wish of the friend.

  Franz Kafka, Prague, 1917.

  3

  The First Trial

  Tel Aviv Family Court, Ben-Gurion Avenue 38, Ramat Gan

  September 2007

  What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped.

  —Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

  In September 2007, having filed a routine request for the probate of her mother’s will, Eva Hoffe’s grief was rudely interrupted.

  After Esther Hoffe’s death, Eva’s sister Ruth assembled the necessary forms and dropped them off herself at the Israeli Inheritance Registrar’s office on Tel Aviv’s Ha’Arbaa Street. Eva remained skeptical that the probate of the will would come off without a hitch. Their mother’s will, she told Ruth, “is like a fire in a thorn-field.” But she deferred to her older sister.

  According to Israel’s Succession Law of 1965, one may bring about the execution of a will only by obtaining a “probate order” from the Israeli Inheritance Registrar. The request for such an order includes an affidavit signed by the petitioner and verified by a notary, an original death certificate, the original will, and notifications to any other heirs or beneficiaries of the probate request. (Israel does not impose estate taxes on its residents.) In order to allow for objections to the will to be made, requests for a probate order are publicized, usually in the form of newspaper advertisements. The registrar furnishes a copy of the petition to the administrator general at the Ministry of Justice, who has the discretion to intervene if a matter of public interest is at stake. Once obtained, a probate order carries the same binding legal status as a court verdict.

  “My [law] partner happened to be walking through the library one day when this old guy came up and gave him this file full of papers,” Meir Heller, the National Library’s lawyer told the Sunday Times. “And there among them was Max Brod’s will. When I looked at it, I could see straight away that Brod intended Esther to have the papers in his lifetime. Then, when he was dead, they should go to a public archive. I checked on the internet and saw that a court hearing was taking place in two days to discuss probating Esther’s will.” Less than forty-eight hours later, Heller made his dramatic entrance. “I busted into the court and said, ‘Stop! There is another will—the will of Max Brod!’ ”

  The Family Court occupied a couple of floors in a drab office building on the main boulevard of Ramat Gan, a Tel Aviv suburb. The recessed ground-floor entrance was framed by red-tiled columns. To the right, lawye
rs and their clients sat on orange plastic chairs at a sandwich, falafel, and shakshuka kiosk. Eva and her sister Ruth had arrived at the court alone that morning in September 2007; Ruth had understood that there was no cause for worry and no need to bring along a lawyer. Heller’s appearance came as a shock, a sudden baring of the iron machinery of the state’s legal apparatus. “It was an ambush,” Eva said. “We were ensnared.”

  As a result of Heller’s intervention, the State of Israel—represented in the Tel Aviv Family Court by the state custodian (apotropos), the National Library, and a court-appointed executor of the Brod estate—objected to the probate and filed to contest Esther Hoffe’s will. For the next five years, until it concluded in October 2012, the case would be heard before Judge Talia Kopelman Pardo, a specialist in inheritance law, in a cramped room in the Family Court.

  Heller contended that Brod had left the Kafka papers to Esther Hoffe as an executor rather than as a beneficiary. The manuscripts were never hers to give, and thus she could not now pass them on to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. Esther Hoffe had betrayed Brod’s will, Heller claimed, much as Brod had betrayed Kafka’s.

  After Esther’s death, Heller maintained, Kafka’s manuscripts reverted to the Brod estate, which in accordance with his 1961 will should now be bequeathed, not sold, to the National Library of Israel—without a shekel of compensation to the Hoffes. In that will, Brod asked that his literary estate be placed, at Esther’s discretion, “with the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem [since renamed the National Library of Israel], the Municipal Library in Tel Aviv, or another public archive in Israel or abroad.” The National Library was eager to add the Kafka collection to a long list of the papers of German-Jewish writers it already preserved, including those from the “Prague Circle.”