Israel is laying claim to a stash of unpublished mouldy Kafka works. Why?
Franz Kafka was born in Prague in 1883 which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a member of the German speaking community and also happened to be Jewish. He died in 1924, a mere five years after the state of Czechoslovakia was founded. So, given this multi-cultural history any number of modern day nation states could argue for Kafka's legacy. Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Germany even Switzerland as a german-speaking country might stake a claim.
So why Israel, a state that did not exist when Kafka died? Well, Kafka's friend Max Brod was a Zionist and emigrated there. When Brod died, he left a pile of Kafka's writings with his secretary in a cat-infested Tel Aviv flat. Some connection!
Now the Israel National Library has gone to court for the papers. They're outraged that the daughters of the deceased secretary want to sell the papers to Germany's Marbach Archive. The sisters argue that Germany will be a safer place for the papers.
Germany makes sense. More people are likely to benefit from having the papers in the middle of Europe, instead of tucked away in Israel in some vault between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
But the real question is, how can a nation-state truly own Kafka? It is the individual reader of say, Metamorphosis or Amerika who is enthralled by the ingenious tangle of events the author relates. In many ways Kafka owns his readers as much as they own him. Literature is the most democratic artform of all and it is only the illiterate who are truly unable to own it.
A final thought - those mouldy notes may amount to nothing more than a pile of Kafka's old shopping lists and doodlings. It's the same as people forever trying to discover some new Jimi Hendrix recordings. The best stuff was published years ago. When will we realise that even genii have their off days?
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