Benjamin Balint on 'Kafka's After life'

Today We have Benjamin Balint with us speaking about his book 'Kafka's Last Trail'.

Kafka’s Last Trial begins with Kafka’s last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924, Brod could not bring himself to burn the unpublished works of the man he considered a literary genius—even a saint. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s writing, rescuing his legacy from obscurity and physical destruction.

By the time of Brod’s death in Tel Aviv in 1968, Kafka’s major works had been published, transforming the once little-known writer into a pillar of literary modernism. Yet Brod left a wealth of still unpublished papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who sold some, held on to the rest, and then passed the bulk of them on to her daughters, who in turn refused to release them. An international legal battle erupted to determine who could claim ownership of Kafka’s work: Hoffe's Family, Israel, where Kafka dreamed of living but never entered, or Germany as Kafka wrote exclusively in German.

Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts—brimming with dilemmas legal, ethical, and political—that determined the fate of Kafka’s manuscripts.

Benjamin Balint is the author of Bruno Schulz' S Biography and Kafka’s Last Trial,. He was awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, and is the coauthor of Jerusalem: City of the Book. A library fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, he regularly writes on culture for The Wall Street Journal, the Jewish Review of Books, and other publications.

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