Kafka manuscripts

Many people know this story. When Kafka died in 1924, he made one last request to his friend Max Brod: "... everything I leave behind me [is] to be burned unread." But Brod did exactly the opposite. (Of course, according to reports, he agonised over it. We don't know if that is really is the truth, but it sounds more romantic that way.)

Brod devoted the rest of his life to preserving and "editing" his friend's work. He then fled the Nazis (again by catching "the last train" from Prague in 1939 -- I see a movie in it), with a suitcase of Kafka papers, including The Trial, and ended up in Tel Aviv. Kafka was a Czech Jew who wrote in German. (Even today, many claim Kafka as their own. Several years ago, the Austrian Ambassador came to Silverfish Books looking for books by Austrian writers. I told him that I didn't have many but that he was welcomed to look. Soon, he deposited some books on the counter, telling me that they were all Austrian. In the lot was Kafka. I said I thought Kafka was Czech. He assured me otherwise. I told the Czech Ambassador and his wife this the next time we met. They were both livid, and I could not disagree with them, and I don't know the outcome of the diplomatic exchanges that subsequently ensued. BTW, Wikipedia lists Kafka as a Czech, an Austrian and a German writer.)

Apart from the papers in Brod's suitcase, Kafka's legacy was also with his nieces, especially Marianna Steiner who arranged for the transfer of almost all his papers (including The Castle and Metamorphosis) to Oxford from 1961 to 2001, in a display of "rare nobility and generosity of spirit' of the Kafka family, holocaust survivors. Many Kafka scholars visit Oxford in order to study the large collection of Kafka manuscripts housed in the Bodleian Library. The author's handwriting is described as 'spidery, intense and completely legible, with barely a line blotted" by Robert Crum in his Guardian blog, accepting an invitation to inspect Bodleain's Kafka collection.

Robert Crum adds: 'One of the most moving manuscripts is Das Urteil (The Judgment), a story of some 30 pages written ... in a single sitting from 10 o'clock at night to six in the morning. Dated 23 September 1912, it is followed by a diary note expressing Kafka's joy at "the only way to write, only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul".'

The Guardian Blog