As literature nerds awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, they found themselves transformed into the probable recipients of a trove of Franz Kafka’s writing.
This was no dream.
Stacks of unpublished papers, including perhaps the endings to some of his unfinished novels, have been stuck in legal limbo for a decade. Now, according to the Associated Press, they could be freed from locked vaults in Zurich, Switzerland, and sent to Israel’s National Library.
Both Israel and Germany have tried to claim the surrealist novelist as their own, as Kafka was a German-speaking Jew. Last week a Zurich district court upheld Israeli verdicts in the case, a win for the country over what the library has called “cultural assets belonging to the Jewish people.”
The papers ended up in Zurich after several moves following Kafka’s death. After the writer died in 1924, his friend Max Brod received his unpublished works, which Brod had been instructed to destroy.
Instead, he published many of them, including Amerika, The Castle, and The Trial. Thanks to Brod, Kafka became one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.
But what Brod didn’t publish changed hands after his death, and the papers ended up in locked safes owned by his secretary’s daughters.
A battle of private versus public access to the manuscripts ensued, and Israel has largely won. If the papers leave Switzerland within a month as expected, almost all of Kafka’s known works will have been acquired.
“It is very unlikely we are going to discover an unknown Kafka masterpiece in there, but these are things of value,” Benjamin Balint, the author of Kafka’s Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy, told AP.
Even if the papers turn out to be no more than notes, perhaps they’ll generate more interest in the author of The Metamorphosis. High schoolers and book nerds alike could use it: Researchers at the University Of California, Santa Barbara, found that reading surrealist works such as Kafka’s enhanced cognitive mechanisms responsible for learning. Of course, good literature can make you smarter, but Kafka makes you think differently.
There aren’t many authors who write books about waking up to discover one has turned into a giant insect. Kafka’s imagination, like the 10-year legal battle over his work, makes his legacy characteristically bizarre.
