Kafka in Love (23 page)

By 1955, Kafka had been translated into almost every language and honored in almost every nation. They could guess the extreme interest this discovery would arouse. Did they consult Max Brod in Tel Aviv, who still had his friend’s manuscripts and letters?

Where are the letters that Felice wrote to Franz a century ago? Were they burned? By Franz, as he suggests in a letter to Robert Klopstock? Might there be a few of them in Israel in the files of Max Brod?

GRETE BLOCH

She had neither Felice’s foresight nor her luck. Against the advice of her friends, she fled to Italy, where she was arrested and most likely deported. She had entrusted the second half of her letters from Kafka to an attorney in
Florence. At the end of the war, this attorney gave them to Max Brod, who sent them to Schocken Books in New York. The entire batch, some seventy letters in all, was then published. None of those that Grete sent to Franz has survived—the letters he refused to give back.

JULIE WOHRYZEK

Of the letters that Franz Kafka sent to Julie, probably quite small in number, none are known to exist. And nothing is known of Julie in the years that followed her engagement to Franz, beyond her death in a psychiatric institution.

MILENA JESENSKÁ

In 1924, the year of Kafka’s death, Milena obtained a divorce from her husband and took up with an Austrian count, a Communist. In 1927 she married a talented architect, Jaromir Krejcar, with whom she had a daughter, Honza. After contracting septicemia during her pregnancy, Milena suffered such unbearable pain that she turned to morphine for relief and had difficulty weaning herself from it.

In 1936, separated from her husband, she devoted herself to politics. A Communist, she was excluded from the party for having denounced the Stalinist purges.
When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, Milena—though a non-Jew—wore the yellow star in the streets of Prague. Was it her relationship with Kafka that she was acknowledging publicly with this yellow star sewn to her collar?

Active in the Resistance, she was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940 and sent to Ravensbrück, where she died on May 17, 1944. At this concentration camp, she told the story of her life and loves to Margarete Buber-Neumann, who, once freed, wrote a biography of the liberated and radiant woman she so admired,
Milena
. The name is forever linked to Kafka’s.

The
Letters to Milena
were the first to be published, well before the
Letters to Felice
. Milena had put them in the hands of the editor Willy Haas, the husband of her close friend, Jarmila. The incomplete 1951 edition was corrected in 1981. The definitive edition appeared in 1983.

When Kafka died, Milena wrote an obituary published in the Prague newspaper
Narodni listy:

DORA DIAMANT OR DYMANT

Her life reflects the historical upheavals of her time and, more specifically, the trials of Communists and Jewish Communists, who were victims of Hitler’s and Stalin’s persecutions.

After a short stay in Poland, Dora returned to Berlin, where she studied theater. In 1929 she joined the Communist Party and met a Marxist economist, Lutz Lask, whom she married in 1932. Shortly after the birth of her daughter, Marianne, Lask was arrested by the Gestapo. He escaped and fled to Moscow, where Dora and
Marianne joined him. He was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag, returning twenty years later a broken man, almost blind, but still a Marxist! He owed his release to the extraordinary tenacity of his mother, who for over twenty years wrote petitions to every department of Soviet authority and to the president of East Germany.

Separated from her husband, whom she was never to see again, Dora lived first in Sebastopol, then in Yalta. In 1938 she managed to cross into Switzerland with her daughter and then to reach The Hague and finally England. Classified as an enemy alien, she was detained on the Isle of Man. She was freed in 1942 and moved to London, where she worked as a seamstress, a cook, and a theater critic.

At the invitation of the Tel Aviv city council, Dora traveled to Israel in 1950. She stayed there for four months, thanks to Kafka’s English royalties. She renewed her acquaintance with Max Brod, once again regretting that, despite his insistent entreaties, she had not given him the trove of Franz’s manuscripts and letters. She had obstinately refused, faithful to the promise she had made her fiancé to burn his writings.

In Israel she discovered that the new immigrants, having escaped from hell, read Kafka differently from Europeans. They found comfort in his writings, took courage
from his work, which they understood immediately and unreservedly. Dora spent several weeks at the Kibbutz En Sharod, where she inquired into the rules and ideals of the pioneers. She told them about Kafka and the dream that haunted him of an ideal community, whose laws he had set down as a jurist and an ascetic in a very brief text, “The Community of Non-owning Workers.” It was written in 1919, though at whose request is unknown. Women are excluded from this community, its members are forbidden to possess or accept money, and each must earn his keep solely by his work. Lawyers are barred from membership.

On the trip home, she stopped in Paris, where she met the French actor and director Jean-Louis Barrault. He was directing a production of
The Trial
in an adaptation by André Gide. At that time she also met Marthe Robert, who was engaged in translating Kafka’s
Diaries
into French. A lively friendship developed between the two women. Marthe Robert traveled to London several times to hear Dora talk about Kafka.

Haunted by her memories, Dora transcribed them as they flooded back to her. These were gathered as
Notes inédites de Dora Dymant sur Kafka
and published in France in 1952 by Éditions Évidences.

Dora died at the age of fifty-three in total poverty. She was buried in London on August 15, 1952, and Marthe
Robert was one of the few people present. Today, her headstone carries these words of Robert Klopstock’s: “Who knows Dora, knows what love means.”

The thirty-five letters from Franz, her “treasure,” along with twenty notebooks and a large stack of loose pages, were confiscated from her by the Gestapo during a search of her apartment. Dora never forgave herself for not saving these materials by entrusting them to Max.

To this day, no portion of these texts has resurfaced, despite extensive research.

What remains are Dora’s letters to Max Brod and to Marthe Robert. But none of those written to Franz.

ERNST WEISS

A surgeon and a talented writer, Weiss emigrated to France in early 1933. On the day Hitler entered Paris, he shot himself in the head.

FRANZ WERFEL

He became the fourth husband of Alma Mahler (who, after the composer’s death, married Oskar Kokoschka, then Walter Gropius). A successful author, Werfel managed to leave occupied Paris and reach the United States in the company of a large number of artists and writers. He settled in California, where movie adaptations of his
Song of Bernadette
and
Jacobowsky and the Colonel
made him famous. He died, just after Germany’s surrender, on August 25, 1945, at the age of fifty-six. Alma’s friends, including Otto Klemperer, Igor Stravinsky, Otto Preminger, Bruno Walter, and Thomas Mann’s sons, attended his funeral, while Alma remained confined at home.

MAX BROD

He left Prague on March 14, 1939, with his wife, Elsa. His train left five minutes before Nazi troops closed the Czech border. A Zionist since his youth, he declined a professorship at an American university—an offer made to him thanks to Thomas Mann. Instead, he went to Palestine, his luggage containing the manuscripts, letters, and notebooks, the thirteen blue exercise books, the drawings and scribbles that he had recovered from Franz’s desk at the request of Hermann and Julie Kafka and kept at his home ever since.

Once in Tel Aviv, the prolific Max Brod (eighty-three publications) became the dramaturge for the famous Habima Theater, which was founded in Moscow in 1918 to preserve Hebrew language and culture.

Until his death on December 20, 1968, Max devoted his energies to sorting the chapters, texts, and notes that Kafka had jumbled together in a sort of Chinese puzzle, starting his notebooks at both ends.

It was thanks to Max that
The Trial
was published in 1925,
The Castle
in 1926, and
Amerika
in 1927, all republished in the mid-1930s by Salman Schocken. In 1937 Max issued his biography of his friend,
Franz Kafka
, the only one of his books still in print. Like a satellite, it continues to orbit around “the one who forged the path,” the destinies of the two men forever linked.

In 1948—by then Kafka had been translated into Hebrew—Max received one of the highest literary awards in Israel, the Bialik Prize.

A premonitory shadow, a forerunner of coming storms: when Max asked Schocken to return the manuscripts of Kafka’s three posthumous novels, the publisher refused and, to protect them from the violence in the Middle East, locked them away in a Swiss safe-deposit box. The two men had a falling out.

In 1960 a new figure entered the scene, an English baron, born a great distance from Prague or Tel Aviv in the Indian city of Rajkot. This was Sir Malcom Pasley, a professor of German literature at Oxford. While teaching a course on Kafka—whom he loved, as he put it, like a younger brother—he was approached by one of his students, Michael Steiner, who told him that he was Kafka’s grand-nephew, and that his mother, Marianne, lived in London. There she had met and befriended Edwin and
Willa Muir, her uncle’s English-language translators. Pasley, as it happened, was convinced that Brod’s editorial hand had distorted Kafka’s work. He secured permission in 1961 from the author’s heirs—Marianne, Vera, and Helen—to bring back to England in the trunk of his car two-thirds of the manuscripts deposited in Switzerland, including the thirteen notebooks of the
Diaries
. The experience was so traumatizing that Pasley felt the hairs on his head stand straight up throughout the trip. He consigned his treasure to the Bodleian Library at Oxford, where the manuscripts are preserved to this day. Assisted by eminent specialists, Jürgen Born among them, Pasley restored the original texts and their idiosyncratic punctuation. The English edition of the
Diaries
is to this day more complete than the German.

Max Brod watched these developments with growing irritation. Critics were attacking him more and more vocally: he had not executed his friend’s will and burned the manuscripts, he had made cuts, changed the order of the chapters, and even invented certain passages. Reproaches were accumulating.

Max, who was childless, left the Kafka texts in his possession,
The Trial
in particular, to his secretary and mistress, Esther Hoffe. In 1988 Esther sold this manuscript to the German Literature Archive in Marbach,
Germany, at an auction organized by Sotheby’s for $1.9 million. Hoffe had previously sold twenty-two letters and ten postcards that Kafka had written to Brod at private sales in Germany.

When Esther Hoffe died in 2007 at the age of one hundred, she bequeathed her “possessions” to her daughters, Eva and Ruth.

Israel contested the will and brought a suit against Hoffe’s daughters.

So began Kafka’s last trial.

Like Joseph K.’s trial, it has mobilized the efforts of dozens of lawyers.

Eva, single and in her seventies, still lives in Tel Aviv in her mother’s modest apartment at 23 Spinoza Street. From the moment the trial started, Eva was besieged around the clock by journalists from all over the world. In her dark two-room apartment, stacks of papers rise toward the ceiling and a hundred cats purr and prowl among Kafka’s manuscripts, as though sensing that the man who blackened these pages disliked their cold eyes and burning claws. The pets give off a stench that travels to the end of the street and regularly provokes complaints from the neighbors and visits from the police.

To none of the journalists who have staked out her front door, fingers on the bell, has Eva opened the door.
One of them, Elif Batuman, in an article published in the
New York Times
in September 2010, compared Eva to the doorkeeper who guards the entrance to the Law (
The Trial
, Chapter IX), a doorkeeper who, over the course of days, months, and years, allows no one to enter.

Eva and Ruth, like K., lost their case. Kafka’s papers, which lay dormant in Zurich and Tel Aviv, now belong to the Israeli state. In July 2010, the ten safe-deposit boxes were emptied. What was found in them? The mystery has not been dispelled, as Eva and Ruth, despite their advanced age, brought an appeal. The judgment has been stayed, and no information has filtered out. Another lawsuit is in preparation. The suspense continues. How could this come as a surprise?

Author’s Note