Kafka's Last Trial

by Benjamin Balint

  A second loss of 1942: in August of that year, Brod’s wife, Elsa, died in Tel Aviv a day short of her fifty-ninth birthday. Elsa and Max had been married twenty-nine years. Even in Prague, the marriage had been beset by Brod’s womanizing. Kafka biographer Ernst Pawel writes that Brod was “formally married and informally promiscuous.” Brod had often confessed his extramarital adventures to Kafka—with a married woman in Brno, and with a Catholic chambermaid named Emmy Salveter in Berlin. Kafka took up the role of a tactful marriage counselor when the affairs threatened Brod’s marriage.

  Later that year, Brod suffered “the most tragic” of his disappointments, as he wrote to his close friend Shin Shalom: an aspiring, Czech-born Habima actress, Ella Berglass (Shalom described her as “stunningly beautiful”), had ended their affair without warning.* Brod feared she had used him to advance her career, and called her “egoistic and calculating.” So strong was his hatred for her that Brod made Shalom promise never again to see her, even after Brod’s death.

  Brod was thrown into a turmoil of the spirit.

  A long-lasting and deep-churning revolution went on in me, particularly since the death of my wife. The great question, “Is the soul immortal?” . . . screamed for an answer. After the end of the war, when I received the news that my brother and his family had been killed in Auschwitz, another equally old question emerged with the same urgency: “How is the suffering of the world compatible with belief in an all-powerful, all-good God?”

  Brod would find some measure of consolation from an unlikely direction. Kafka’s uncanny presence, and his manuscripts, would bring him together with a woman twenty-two years his junior. She would serve as his secretary and intimate friend for twenty-six years.

  _____

  Ilse Hoffe was born in 1906 to Josef (b. 1874) and Hedwig Reich (b. 1876) in Opava (Troppau, in German). Opava was the capital of Czech Silesia, but also a center of a brand of “greater Germany” anti-Semitism led by the far-right politician Georg Ritter von Schönerer. Soon after the birth of their two daughters, Ilse and Marion, the Reichs moved to Havlíčkovo Square in Prague’s hilly working-class Žižkov district, a twenty-five-minute walk from the cemetery where Kafka would be buried in 1924. It was here that Ilse met her husband-to-be, Otto Hoffe.

  Otto, twenty-one years older than Ilse, was born in Myslkovice (Miskowitz, in German), a village 170 miles west of Opava and today an hour-and-a-half drive south of Prague. Orphaned at age fourteen, Otto was taken in by the family of the Czech-Jewish industrialist Jindřich Waldes. After the marriage in 1930, Otto found work as a manager at the Koh-i-noor Company factory in the Vršovice district of Prague, founded by Waldes. In the early 1930s, he and Ilse had two children—Ruth and Eva. (After the war, members of the Waldes family who had escaped to America ensured that Otto received a pension.)

  In early 1940, at Ilse’s strenuous urging, the Hoffe family obtained permission from the German occupation authorities to take a two-week holiday to Germany. On the eve of departure, Gestapo men searched the apartment to verify that the Hoffes had packed only for a holiday. On the night train to Germany, Ilse and Otto did not tell their daughters that they would never be coming back to Prague. Eva says she remembers humming songs to herself to the gentle rhythms of the train.*

  From Germany, the Hoffes fled to Vichy France. Otto was detained in an internment camp outside of Paris. Eva and Ruth found refuge in Villard-de-Lans, a town near Grenoble. For several months, Ilse shuttled back and forth, desperate both to protect her girls and to free her husband. At last, with help from relatives in the United States, Ilse obtained certificates permitting transit to Palestine. They purchased tickets from “Messageries maritimes” shipping company and took a French ocean liner, the SS Patria, from Marseilles to Haifa.

  Eva told me that Otto Hoffe never uttered a word about his internment. “He hemmed himself into silence,” she said. Ilse, radiant in public, would liberally scatter laughter around her. (“If she were to walk in to this café, all heads would turn,” Eva told me.) But she bore the pangs of displacement in private. Eva remembers her mother pounding on the walls of their apartment in Tel Aviv, as if they could absorb her pain.

  Once safe in Palestine, the Hoffes lived in a cramped three-room apartment on Tel Aviv’s Spinoza Street shared with two other families. Otto found work as an accountant at a factory in nearby Ramat Gan that made dyes for clothing, his cubicle surrounded by boiling vats.

  In 1942, Otto enrolled in an introductory Hebrew-language class, or ulpan, where he met a fellow émigré from Prague named Max Brod. Several days later, Otto introduced Brod to his wife Ilse. In their first conversation, Brod told Ilse that he had known her mother, Hedwig Reich, in Prague. A decade earlier, they had volunteered together on a campaign to offer help to the economically devastated region of the Ore Mountains (Erzgebirge) on the border between Saxony and Bohemia.

  The three refugees found in one another what they could not find in their new environment. “My parents and Max were not Israelis,” Eva tells me. “They didn’t understand Israeli culture. They were internationalists in their ways of thinking.” Brod, recovering from the death of his wife, Elsa, and the loss of his mistress Ella, began to join the Hoffes for Shabbat dinners. At their home, Brod’s friend Shin Shalom said, “he at last found his familial nest.” Brod invited the Hoffes for classical concerts at the Israel Philharmonic and opening nights at the Habima theater, and they invited Brod to come over and listen to the radio.

  In December 1958, the pianist Glenn Gould gave a recital in Tel Aviv. Afterwards, he recalled, Brod

  came backstage with an elderly lady, whom I took to be his secretary, and made a few nice sounds, and the lady in question, whose name I didn’t catch, came up to me and in a rather heavy German accent said . . . [conspiratorial half-whisper], “Mr. Gould, ve haf attended already several of your pairformances in Tel Aviv, but tonight’s, zis was somehow, in some vay, somesing vas different, you vere not qvite one of us, you vere—you vere—your being was removed.” And I bowed deeply and said, “Thank you, madam,” realizing of course that she had in fact put her finger on something that was too spooky to talk about even, and I realized that with her obviously limited English there was no way I could convey what I’d really done.

  Before long, Brod and the Hoffes were summering together in Flims, a Swiss spa town. “The only time my father laughed was when he was with his best friend Max,” Eva told me.

  The Hoffe girls, Eva and Ruthie, loved Brod, who had no children of his own, like “a second father,” Eva said. (Childlessness runs like an undercurrent through this story: Kafka, Brod, Eva Hoffe.) Brod bought Eva her first piano. He would take Eva to classical concerts and put the score on their laps and show her the place with his finger. He would send young Eva as his courier to Shimon Finkel, actor and artistic director of the theater (the first actor to play Hamlet on an Israeli stage). “Brod was her mentor, he was the person who interpreted the world for her,” Eva’s longtime friend Yoella Har-Shefi told Haaretz during the trial. “Her identification with him is total. Her actions over the years stem from her perception as the one who inherited her mother’s authority. She is completely pure of heart in this matter. It’s all about her soul, not her pocket.”

  It was at Brod’s suggestion that Ilse Hoffe took the Hebrew name Esther, and it was at his urging that Esther agreed to help him transcribe and organize the papers he had rescued from their hometown in his suitcase. He sensed that she could understand how the manuscripts served as the slackened cord that threaded together his present to the bygone world of his own former life.

  Each morning, Esther Hoffe would come to his apartment on the third floor of a modest four-story walk-up building at HaYarden Street 16, two blocks from the beach. She would bring a paper bag of croissants when she arrived, and would heat the samovar before she left in the afternoon. Because he was growing hard of hearing, Brod relied on Esther to repeat things he hadn’t heard on the telephone. In his memoir, Brod calls Est
her “my creative partner, my most stringent critic, my help-mate and ally,” to whom he felt “infinitely indebted.” To his friend Shin Shalom, Brod remarked that she had burst into his life “like a rescuing angel.” (On some of Brod’s letters to Shalom, Esther added postscripts at the bottom margin in German or in Hebrew: “Greetings and best wishes from me too. –Esther.” Sometimes they jointly signed: “Esther und Max.”)

  Esther, in turn, grew fiercely protective of him. With Brod’s encouragement and guidance, she published a slim forty-eight-page book of poems in German, Gedichte aus Israel (Poems from Israel). “They were a threesome,” Eva recalls, though she insists that her mother’s love for Brod “wasn’t carnal, it was spiritual.”

  Kafka’s manuscripts, which so vitally linked Brod to his former heyday in Prague, now began to link Brod with Esther—the currency of their relationship. According to Eva, Esther received no regular salary for her years of work with Brod. Instead, Brod formally gave all his Kafka papers to Esther.

  _____

  One morning in the spring of 1952, after a decade of close friendship and collaboration, Max Brod invited Esther Hoffe into his book-lined study. She watched as he took a sheet of stationery from the drawer and put pen to paper. Brod wanted to express his wishes regarding the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts in gift letters, and not just in his last will and testament.

  “Dear Esther, In 1945 I gifted you all the Kafka manuscripts and letters in my possession.”

  Brod specified that the gift—intended to take effect immediately, not after his death—included: Kafka’s letters to Brod and his late wife, Elsa; Kafka’s original manuscripts of The Trial, “Description of a Struggle,” and “Preparations for a Village Wedding”; Kafka’s original typescript of his letter to his father; three notebooks of Kafka’s Paris diaries; a draft of Richard and Samuel, a novel that Kafka and Brod had started to write together in Prague; Kafka’s speech on Yiddish; aphorisms; a draft of a novella; photographs; and first editions of Kafka’s publications. Brod added that he and Esther “jointly” deposited this material in a safe in 1948.

  In the margin, Esther Hoffe wrote in German: “I hereby accept this gift” (“Ich nehme dieses Geschenk an”).

  Brod wished to leave no doubts. Five years earlier, on April 22, 1947, Brod had signed another note:

  “Kafka’s letters addressed to me, which all belonged to me, are the property of Mrs. Hoffe.”

  Some sixty years later, Amnon Bezaleli, a court-appointed handwriting expert, would examine Brod’s promissory notes and declare them authentic. (In 1987, as head of the Israeli police document identification laboratory, Bezaleli had verified the key piece of evidence in the Israeli prosecution of alleged concentration-camp guard John Demjanjuk—“Ivan the Terrible.”) To some, the very existence of these notes came as a surprise. “Neither I nor my mother were aware of any such letters being produced until long after the Israeli litigation commenced,” says Michael Steiner, son of Kafka’s niece.

  _____

  In December 1968, as Brod lay dying in Beilinson hospital, Esther and Eva took turns staying at Brod’s bedside—Esther from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Eva from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. The hospital, located in the Petach Tikva suburb of Tel Aviv, was named for the director of Israel’s General Health Fund and founding publisher of the newspaper Davar, where Brod had published his columns. It was a 45-minute bus ride each way from the Hoffe’s home on Spinoza Street.

  During one of his last nights, Eva said she arrived to find that nurses had put Brod’s wrists in restraints to prevent him from plucking out his intravenous tubes. “If ever you loved me,” she recalls Brod saying, “untie me.” She did, and she held his hand as his chin drooped to his chest and he drifted to sleep.

  Max Brod died on December 20, 1968. He once remarked to Esther that he would not like to live longer than Goethe, who died in his eighty-third year. Brod passed away a few weeks before he reached the age of eighty-five. He worked to the end—on a foreword to the English edition of his philosophical treatise, Paganism, Christianity, Judaism, and on an expanded second edition of his memoir, A Contentious Life. A month earlier, he had written to his old friend Robert Weltsch: “One must always to begin anew” (man muss immer von vorn anfangen).

  Few mourners attended Brod’s funeral in Tel Aviv’s Trumpeldor cemetery, the final resting place of H. N. Bialik, Israel’s national poet, and Ahad Ha’am, the visionary of cultural Zionism. To this day, Eva pays her respects at his grave twice a year: on his birthday in May and on the anniversary of his death in December.

  In his first will, dated March 24, 1948, Brod named Esther Hoffe as his sole heir and executor, and expressed his desire that she should arrange to give his literary estate “to a public Jewish library or archive in Palestine.” He did not mention Kafka’s manuscripts.

  In his last will, dated June 7, 1961 (written in German, and translated into Hebrew by his lawyer Simon Fritz Haas), Brod gave two instructions: On the one hand, he appointed Esther Hoffe as sole executor of his estate and bequeathed to her all his possessions. On the other, in paragraph 11 he instructed that after her death his literary estate should be placed “with the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Municipal Library in Tel Aviv, or another public archive in Israel or abroad. . . . Mrs. Hoffe will determine which of these institutions will be chosen, and under which conditions.” The paragraph does not mention Kafka’s manuscripts. (Kafka biographer Reiner Stach calls Brod’s last will—giving Esther the right to do with the estate as she wished but at the same time obligating her heirs to transfer the estate intact to a proper archive—“inadvisably vague.”) As for the personal correspondence between Brod and Hoffe, Brod instructed in paragraph 13 of his will that these were not to be published until fifty years had elapsed from the death of whichever of them passes away last, unless Esther Hoffe decided otherwise.

  On April 22, 1969, the Tel Aviv District Court granted probate to Brod’s last will, and appointed Esther Hoffe as executor of his estate. The manuscripts Brod had rescued from Prague she now guarded in the home on Spinoza Street she shared with her daughter Eva, and in ten safe deposit boxes: six in a bank in Tel Aviv, and four at a UBS bank in Zürich, Switzerland. Thanks to Brod, Esther Hoffe literally and figuratively held the keys to part of the legacy of Kafka, a man who once described himself as “locked away within himself with a strange key.”

  _____

  In 1973, five years after Brod’s death, the State of Israel, concerned about the prospect that Esther might sell Kafka’s manuscripts abroad, sued for their possession. The case (mentioned earlier) was brought before Judge Yitzhak Shilo of the Tel Aviv District Court.

  Kafka’s niece Marianna Steiner, invited to take part in the 1973 trial, declined the chance to contest Hoffe’s control of the manuscripts. Marianna’s son, Michael Steiner, now the executor of the Kafka estate, seventy-nine at the time of this writing, wrote to me from London to explain why:

  My mother was approached in 1973 for assistance by the Attorney General for Israel and was in fact served by post with a summons to appear in the proceedings against Mrs. [Esther] Hoffe. My mother understood that the litigation concerned the construction of Brod’s will, as to which we considered she had no locus and no views, and my mother was unwilling to incur the potentially heavy costs in appearing by legal advisers in the proceedings. An equally powerful factor was her desire to facilitate access by scholars to any manuscripts held by Mrs. Hoffe and her consequent reluctance to adopt any adversarial position in the proceedings between the Attorney General and Mrs. Hoffe. My mother did not at that time have any inventory of what manuscripts were held by Mrs. Hoffe and assumed that they consisted only of those which Max Brod had claimed had been given to him by Franz Kafka in the latter’s lifetime and which had been so asserted by Brod in a letter he wrote to my mother in April 1952.

  In the end, the state’s petition was rejected on January 13, 1974. Judge Shilo ruled that Brod’s last will “allows Mrs. Hoffe to do with
his estate as she pleases during her lifetime . . . The instructions to that end are clear, it does not seem to me that they can admit of a different interpretation.”

  According to Michael Steiner, “In 2010, I was approached by the National Library for information and it was mooted that the Kafka Estate might wish to be joined in the litigation that was in prospect. I was not able to understand how, after so many years, the construction of Max Brod’s will determined by Judge Shilo could be relitigated.”

  On February 8, 1974, Paul Alsberg, a German Jew who served as Israel’s state archivist from 1971–1990, wrote to Esther Hoffe in support of the ruling:

  I acknowledge that the Kafka manuscripts are not part of the inheritance of the writer Max Brod, but rather were given to you as a gift many years before his passing. I have therefore listed the Kafka manuscripts in the archive registry as private property.

  Alsberg alluded to a crucial distinction between a gift (an asset received from a living person) and an inheritance (or bequest) received posthumously. Property acquired by way of gift is not subject to any future inheritance disputes.

  The state chose not to appeal Judge Shilo’s verdict, but authorities kept a watchful eye on Esther Hoffe. The Israeli Archives Law of 1955 stipulates that the state archivist can prevent the removal from Israel of privately owned records that are of “national” value and “which, irrespective of where they are found, are deemed relevant to the study of the nation’s history, its people, the state, and society.” The law also makes it a criminal offense to remove archival material from the country without the permission of the state archivist. On July 23, 1974, Esther was detained at Tel Aviv’s airport under suspicion of attempting to smuggle handwritten documents abroad. A search of her luggage revealed six envelopes with photocopies of Kafka letters, but no originals.