Ongoing courtroom negotiations over Franz Kafka's unpublished manuscripts
The Washington Post reports on the ongoing legal struggle to obtain Franz Kafka's unpublished papers:
[...] The writer wanted his papers burned after he wasted away from tuberculosis in 1924, but they're still being fought over. It is a legal dispute pitting Israel against the heirs of Kafka's literary executor and putting the nation in competition with a German archive in a battle that comes with a new dose of mystery, including tales of a secret Swiss safe.
The papers are in at least a half-dozen bank boxes in Tel Aviv and Switzerland and may -- or may not -- contain unpublicized letters and writings by Kafka, a Czechoslovakian Jew and seminal figure in 20th-century culture. No matter what they include, academics consider them a literary gold mine likely to offer new insights into the writer of such works as "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis."
"Whether or not there is any original Kafka material, there is material that will shed light on him as a human being. It's a literary treasure," said Kathi Diamant, biographer of Kafka's girlfriend at the time of his death, Dora Diamant, and director of the Kafka Project, a hunt for the author's lost letters and notebooks.
The papers contain, for example, 70 letters written by Dora Diamant to Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, and may hold clues to the fate of about 20 of Kafka's notebooks and diaries seized by the Nazis in 1933, said Kathi Diamant, who thought she might be a distant relative of Kafka's girlfriend but has yet to find a connection.
Government archivists in Israel want to inspect the papers and, they hope, eventually possess and keep them out of the hands of a competing German archive, which is seeking to purchase them from Brod's estate.
The documents "are valuable for the history of the Jewish people and the State," said a statement by the office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, which oversees the Israeli state archives. "The State Archivist is of the opinion that it is better that these materials not be removed outside of Israel."
Those materials are now under the authority of an Israeli family-court judge trying to disentangle what has been, in effect, a 40-year-long dispute over Brod's will. [Read the article]
