thegoodfellas/blogset-br huggingface dataset:
understand what has been presented to it in the person and work of Kafka, Brod writes, it would undoubtedly be in a quite different position.Pinning his hopes of a new world order onto Kafkas oeuvre onto, that is, a collection of abstruse literary fiction, mostly dealing with the lives of Prague white-collar workers and animals Brod was following a dream logic common to Kafkas own characters. In Amerika, Karl believes that he can have a direct effect upon his American environment by playing the piano in a certain way; Josephine the Mouse Singer believes that when the Mouse Folk are in a bad way politically or economically, her singing will save them. In 1941, Brod published an extraordinary column in the Hebrew paper Davar, recounting his arrival in Palestine with only one plan rising from a mist of many obscure thoughts: to act for the memory of my friend Franz Kafka in this country that he missed. (According to Brod, only Kafkas sickness and sudden death prevented his immigration.) Having transported Kafkas manuscripts by train and ship to the soil of Zion, Brod had already found a few fellow thinkers for whom Kafka is more than any other modern writer he is the 20th-century Job. Once they had fulfilled their true purpose namely, the establishment of a Kafka archive and a Kafka club in Palestine the Hitler era, the era of destruction would be followed by an age of the infinite creation in the spirit of Kafka, a good era for humanity, and for Judaism, which has again professed salvation to the peoples by one of its finest sons.Kafkas actual relationship to Zionism and Jewish culture was, like his relationship to most things, highly ambivalent. (In 1922, Kafka compiled a list of things he had failed at, including piano, languages, gardening, Zionism and anti-Zionism.) Although Brods attempts to convert Kafka to Zionism were a source of tension in the early years of their friendship, Kafka grew increasingly sympathetic to the cause. As early as 1912, he discussed a journey to Palestine with Felice Bauer, a dictating-machine representative with whom he was to pursue a long, anguished, mainly epistolary romance. (The two were twice engaged to be married before separating in 1917.) In 1918, Kafka drew up his vision of an early kibbutz. The only nourishment would be bread, dates and water; notably, in light of recent developments, there would be no legal courts: Palestine needs earth, Kafka wrote, but it does not need lawyers.Kafkas plans to move to Palestine grew more concrete only as their fulfillment grew less likely. He began studying Hebrew in 1921. According to his teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, he already knew he was dying and seemed to regard their lessons as a kind of miracle cure, preparing long lists of words he wanted to know; rendered speechless by coughing, he would implore his teacher with those huge dark eyes of his to stay for one more word, and another, and yet another. In 1923, Ben-Tovim visited Kafka and Dora Diamant in Berlin. She found them living in bohemian squalor,
reading to each other in Hebrew and fantasizing about opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv, where Diamant would work in the kitchen and Kafka would wait on tables. Dora didnt know how to cook, and he would have been hopeless as a waiter, Ben-Tovim observed. Then again, in those days most restaurants in Tel Aviv were run by couples just like them. Ben-Tovim left one of Kafkas Hebrew notebooks in the National Library, where I saw it this spring: a long list of those words from which Kafka expected such miracles: tuberculosis, to languish, sorrow, affliction, genius, pestilence, belt.Brod's interpretation of Kafka as a Zionist manque is now on trial: if not, technically, in the court of law, then certainly in the court of public opinion. Why does Kafka belong here? asks Mark Gelber, a literature professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Because the Zionist enterprise was important to him. Gelber told me he considers Kafkas animal stories to participate in a Zionist discourse, from which Kafka removes the particularist markers, erases the particularist traces. (This lack of particularist markers makes Kafka particularly susceptible to different interpretations and ascriptions: those same animal stories caused Elias Canetti to call Kafka the only essentially Chinese writer to be found in the West.) Many European critics for example, Reiner Stach, Kafkas most recent and thorough biographer object to the view of Kafka as a Zionist or a religious author. The fact that specifically Jewish experiences are reflected in his works does not as Brod believed make him the protagonist of a Jewish literature, Stach told me. Rather, Kafkas oeuvre stands in the context of European literary modernity, and his texts are among the foundational documents of this modernity.In a perfect world, Kafka could be both engaged with a specifically Jewish discourse and a foundational author of European modernity. As Brod himself observes of The Castle, a specifically Jewish interpretation goes hand in hand with what is common to humanity, without either excluding or even disturbing the other. But an original manuscript can be in only one place at a time. The choice between Israel and Germany could not be more symbolically fraught.For the proponents of Marbach, the debate is really about storage conditions. In Israel there is no place to keep the papers so well as in Germany, Eva Hoffe has stated; Stach corroborates that scholars everywhere outside of Israel are in agreement that the papers would be better off in Marbach. Anyway, Marbach already has The Trial, and it would be more convenient for scholars to have everything in one place. In hopes of securing the cooperation of the National Library, Marbach has proposed to grant Israeli scholars priority access to the collection and to lend the papers to Jerusalem for a temporary exhibit.But in a battle between expediency and ideals, the two sides are speaking different languages. Otto Dov Kulka, an emeritus professor of history specializing in the situation of Jews during the Third Reich, describes the claim that Israel doesnt have the resources to take care of the papers as outrageous
and hypocritical. I spoke with Kulka in his office at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I found him editing a document titled, in an enormous font legible from across the room, Between the Periphery and the Metropolis of Death. A diminutive, dynamic figure in his 70s, wearing ergonomic sandals and a short-sleeved khaki shirt that exposed a five-digit number tattooed on his forearm, he repeatedly jumped up from his chair to retrieve books from the shelves that towered above us.Kulka produced and read aloud from a long list of German-Jewish intellectuals whose papers are in the National Library: Albert Einstein, Stefan Zweig, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Else Lasker-Schuler, Martin Buber. We are taking care of Einsteins theory of relativity, and we will take care of Kafka, he said. They say the papers will be safer in Germany, the Germans will take very good care of them. Well, the Germans dont have a very good history of taking care of Kafkas things. They didnt take good care of his sisters. He fell silent. I was together with Kafkas sister Ottla, he added, in a conversational tone.Oh, really? I said, not understanding what he meant.Yes, he said, smiling vaguely. In Theresienstadt, before she was murdered. Kulka, 9 years old at the time, never spoke to Ottla but described her as a kind and selfless person, who voluntarily escorted a group of Jewish orphans from Bialystok to Auschwitz.Oded Hacohen, Eva Hoffes attorney, maintains that moral positions about Germany are irrelevant to the case. People ask me, Dont you care that those manuscripts could end up in Germany? he said. I care much more that those Holocaust refugees cannot pay their electricity bills here in Israel.Brod met his future secretary Esther Hoffe and her husband, Otto, shortly after his arrival in Tel Aviv. After Brods wife died in 1942, he and the Hoffes became extremely close. Our home was his home; he didnt have another one, Esther told a reporter for Haaretz in 1968. Esther had an office in Brods apartment. She and Otto and Max took vacations together in Switzerland. Although acquaintances of Brod described the relationship as a menage a trois, Eva has denied that her mother and Brod were romantically involved. The relationship will presumably be illuminated in Brods diaries, which are believed to be in one of the vaults.The opening of the safe-deposit boxes might also elucidate the central mystery in this case: given Brods evident intention for the papers to end up in an archive, why did he make them a gift to a private individual? And why did he choose an individual who proved capable of hanging onto them for 40 years?Brods surviving acquaintances at the Hebrew University, including Otto Dov Kulka, are convinced that the 1952 gift letter, in which he seemingly bequeathed the papers to Esther, has been altered and that Brod never wavered in his intention for Kafkas work to remain in Israel. They maintain that the vaults will yield proof that Brod changed his will in later years to name a new executor: Felix Weltsch,
a Zionist and philosopher who worked at the Jerusalem library. (Brod mentions this change in a 1964 letter to Weltsch, but the codicil has never been found.)Reiner Stach, Kafkas biographer, sees things differently. He maintains that Brod was torn between Marbach, with its impressive facilities, and the library in Jerusalem, where so many of his friends worked. Unable to announce that he was leaving Kafkas papers to the country of the perpetrators, as Stach puts it, Brod left Hoffe to play the bad cop. Stach also suggests that although Brod didnt wish to profit financially from Kafka, he might have wanted to compensate Hoffe for her long years of secretarial work by allowing her to sell the materials to a well-financed institute.Etgar Keret, a best-selling Israeli short-story writer who considers Kafka to be his greatest influence, proposes that Brod had no idea that Hoffe would sit on the papers for so long. Half of us are married to people who say, Im just going to buy a pack of cigarettes, and never return, he told me. I think this is the literary version of that, with this Hoffe chick. Keret characterizes Brod as a good judge of texts, for sure, but a very bad judge of human characters. If Brod could see what was happening now, Keret says, he would be horrified. Kafka, on the other hand, might be O.K. with it: The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if youre ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?Kafka wasnt the only ambivalent one. Some part of Brod clearly wasnt ready to let the papers out of the vaults. Most scholars agree that Brod was reluctant to give up his control over Kafkas image. Materials in the estate will probably testify to the friends visits to prostitutes which Brod excised from his edition of Kafkas diaries or to Kafkas occasional anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic comments, like the wish he once expressed to stuff all Jews (myself included) into a drawer of a laundry basket. Furthermore, Brods view of Kafka as the savior of mankind made the papers a huge, life-consuming responsibility, which Brod himself must occasionally have wished to stuff into the drawer of a laundry basket. Everything was at stake the memory of Kafka, the fate of world literature, the future of Israel and nobody could be trusted.Meir Heller, an attorney for the National Library, told me he believes that Brod turned to Hoffe when, in his old age, he began to suspect everyone else of distorting his friends legacy. She was wiping him, she was making his food, Heller said. He thought, I can trust her. He describes Brods school of interpretation of Kafka as a sect into which only true believers were permitted. Heller mentioned a 1957 letter from Brod to Hoffe, specifying that, after Esthers death, the Kafka papers should pass to one of Brods friends (although her daughters would still receive royalties from their publication);
in later years Brod periodically returned to this letter, adding and subtracting the names of those he considered trustworthy. The publisher Klaus Wagenbach was there for a while, but Brod crossed him out after Wagenbach published a Kafka biography that Brod didnt like.Hellers recurring metaphor for the papers comes from The Lord of the Rings. You remember the precious? he said, alluding to the magic ring that causes its possessor to guard it obsessively. Thats how it is. Whoever touches these papers it distorts their vision.One afternoon during my stay in Tel Aviv, I headed to Spinoza Street on the off-chance that Eva Hoffe was home and felt like talking to the press. I was accompanied by Avi Steinberg, an American writer living at the time in Jerusalem. I had become acquainted with Steinberg two months earlier, when he mailed me the galleys of a memoir he wrote about his experiences as a prison librarian. In subsequent correspondence, I mentioned my impending Kafkaesque assignment to report on a Kafka archive kept for decades in a cat-infested Tel Aviv flat, confessing to some apprehensions that I would be unable to locate the apartment. Steinberg promptly replied that the address was 23 Spinoza Street, that he had recently rung the doorbell himself but had no answer and that last week in court, Eva Hoffes sweater was covered in animal hairs, possibly originating from a cat or cats.Walking through the city center, we discussed the mystery of Kafkas testament. Steinberg saw in Kafkas cryptic letter to Brod another version of the parable of Abraham and Isaac. (Kafka wrote several retellings of this story in 1921, the same year he first mentioned to Brod that he wanted his work to be burned.) Kafka, Steinberg suggested, wanted to prove that he was ready to incinerate the child of his creation, simultaneously knowing and not knowing that Brod would step in and play the role of the angel.The thing is, Steinberg said, we only have Brods word for any of this. What if Kafka never even told him to burn his stuff? Has anyone ever seen that letter? What if this is all some big idea Brod had?Similarly paranoid thoughts cross the mind of nearly everyone who studies Kafka. At a certain point you realize that everything even the picture of Brod as a good-natured busybody who ignored Kafkas wishes comes from Brod himself. Dont write this down I dont want to be the laughingstock of the academic community, one scholar told me, having ventured the idea that Brod himself had composed all of Kafkas writings and, alarmed by their strangeness, attributed them to a reclusive friend who worked at an insurance office.Spinoza Street is in a quiet residential neighborhood lined by flat-roofed stucco buildings. The dingy off-pink stucco facade of No. 23 was partly obscured by a tree with enormous glossy leaves that were apparently being eaten away by something. Parked under the tree were a broken shopping cart and an old bicycle. Behind a large protruding window, enclosed by two layers of metal grillwork, lay an
indistinct heap of cats. Some commotion involving a blackbird took place in one of the trees, causing six or so cats to look up in unison, elongating their necks. The breeze turned. A terrible smell wafted toward us.The smell was stronger inside the building. We knocked on Hoffes door several times. Someone or something was moving inside, but nobody answered. Steinberg, who has a mild cat allergy, began sneezing. The sneezes echoed terrifyingly in the empty stairwell.Back in the yard, we squinted in the hazy sunlight. Two cats staggered out of a rhododendron bush, looking drunk. I kept remembering a line from The Trial: The wooden steps explained nothing, no matter how long one stared at them. Having taken the precaution of bringing some cat toys with me, I began waving an artificial mouse at a gray kitten I had just noticed under the shopping cart. After some hesitation, the kitten ran out from under the shopping cart and pounced on the mouse, then scooped it up with its little white paws and bounced it off its chest.What would Brod have made of it all? The situation struck me as enormously sad. It was sad that Esther had gotten so terribly old and died, and that Eva, the beautiful girl whom Brod once taught to play the piano, was now making French headlines as the cat woman septuagenaire who guards Kafkas papers amid feline miasmas and angora toxoplasmosis. Ostensibly trying to defend her privacy and financial interests, Eva was plagued at all hours by journalists, while presumably racking up a fortune in legal fees. Nor would Brod conceivably have been delighted that Kafkas papers had generated decades of acrimony and become the playthings of lawyers. He might have felt gratified by his friends extraordinary fame; but it was thanks to that very fame, which Brod himself both predicted and created, that Kafka didnt belong to Brod anymore. Brod always knew that he couldnt hold on to Kafka forever, but he never really faced up to it, and this was the result.The more I learned about the papers stormy history, the more convincing I found the Lord of the Rings analogy invoked by Meir Heller, the attorney for the National Library. Brod really does seem to have regarded Kafkas work as one ring to rule them all. Ever since he brought it to Israel, it has been guarded with a secrecy and fanaticism unusual even within the contentious world of literary estates.The first conflict over Kafkas papers arose in the 1930s between Brod and Salman Schocken, a former department-store magnate who took over the publication of Kafkas works in 1933. During the war, Schocken continued to publish Kafka from Palestine and, later, New York, but retained the original manuscripts at his library in Jerusalem. Several sources confirm a fraught letter exchange between the two, with Brod demanding the return of certain manuscripts. In 1956, Schocken moved the papers in his possession to Zurich. The Zurich papers were eventually acquired for the Bodleian Library at Oxford through the offices of Sir Malcolm Pasley, an
Oxford Germanist and a friend of Kafkas great-nephew Michael Steiner.Esther Hoffe was notorious for her elusiveness regarding the papers that she inherited from Brod. According to Der Spiegel, she backed out of a plan to lend The Trial to a Kafka exhibition in Paris because she didnt get a personal phone call from the French president. Later a German publisher reportedly paid her a five-digit sum for the rights to Brods diaries, but she never produced the goods.In 1974, at the request of the Israeli State Archives, an Israeli court reviewed Hoffes claim to the Brod estate. The judge ruled that she could do whatever she wanted with the papers during her lifetime. The following year, Hoffe was arrested at the Tel Aviv airport on suspicion of smuggling Kafka manuscripts abroad without first leaving copies with the State Archives (a stipulation of the Israeli Archives Law of 1955). A search of her luggage yielded photocopies of letters written by Kafka and, reportedly, originals of Brods diaries. (An estimated 22 letters and 10 postcards from Kafka to Brod were sold the previous year, presumably by Hoffe, in private sales in Germany.)Hoffe was released. Soon after, an archivist from the State Archives came to Spinoza Street and, in the presence of Esther, Eva and an attorney, tried to inventory the estate. The archivist reported finding more than 50 feet of files, including originals of Brods diaries, letters to Brod from Kafka and letters to Brod and Kafka from unspecified personages. Most of the files, however, consisted of photocopies. When asked about the originals, Hoffes attorney, according to the archivist, hesitated for a moment, then said that the material is not here, adding that he, the lawyer, always counseled to leave a photocopy in Israel, in compliance with the Archives Law.The incompleteness of the inventory leaves many questions about the contents of the estate. The answers may well be in a more thorough catalog compiled in the 80s by a philologist named Bernhard Echte, now the publisher of Nimbus Books in Switzerland. Copies of Echtes inventory, which lists some 20,000 pages of material, are closely guarded. Heller has been trying vainly to get one for years.Echte, the rare scholar whose brush with the Kafka papers doesnt seem to have injured his sense for the magic of literary discovery, is also the only interviewee in this story who described Esther Hoffe with genuine warmth. Echte told me in an e-mail interview that Hoffe really tried to fulfill Max Brods will because she admired and loved Max Brod like a young girl (and I liked her very much for it). Although her preference for books with a good and interesting story led her to find Kafka strange, Echte said, she nonetheless recognized Kafkas importance to world literature and was prevented only by old age from placing the papers at Marbach. Echte fondly recalled all the discoveries we made Mrs. Hoffe and me. Inside quite a normal folder for example, they found two or three sheets of paper with Kafkas last notes from Kierling, the sanitarium where Kafka
died. In Zurich, they unearthed a letter that Kafka sent to Brod in 1910, enclosing two birthday gifts: a small stone, still in the envelope, and a damaged book which turned up two years later at Spinoza Street and proved to be a novel by Robert Walser. Other treasures that Echte described to me included a copy of Tristan Tzaras Premiere Aventure Celeste de M. Antipyrine, the first Dada publication, with a personal dedication of the author to Kafka. Imagine that!What else is in the vaults? Most experts agree that the estate is unlikely to contain any unknown major work by Kafka. On the other hand, Kafka often embedded lapidary parables and short-short stories in his letters and diaries. Brod published everything he saw fit, but Peter Fenves, a literature professor at Northwestern University, speculates that there might still be some literary gems left: Perhaps a story like Jackals and Arabs, which I can imagine Brod would have suppressed if Kafka hadnt published it himself. (In this fable, a European traveler is informed by some jackals sometimes interpreted as a caricature of Jews that they have been waiting for generations for him to slit the throats of their unclean enemies, the Arabs.)The estate is of great interest not only to literary scholars but also to historians and biographers. Reiner Stach, who has already published Volumes 2 and 3 in his three-volume life of Kafka, told me that he has been waiting for years for the vaults to divulge materials necessary for Volume 1: an early notebook by Brod that is said to contain a good deal about Kafka ; Brods unpublished diary from 1909; and letters from Kafkas hitherto unknown early friends.Kathi Diamant Dora Diamants biographer and the founder of the San Diego-based Kafka Project, which in 2000 discovered Kafkas old hairbrush at a kibbutz in Jezreel Valley is eagerly awaiting the release from the vaults of 70 letters written by Dora to Brod. In one letter, Dora, to whom Kathi says she may or may not be related, confesses to having burned at Kafkas request a number of his manuscripts, perhaps including an unpublished story about a blood-libel case in Kiev. But Dora also saved 20 notebooks and 35 letters, which were seized from her apartment by the Gestapo in 1933. Kathi says that information from the Brod correspondence may help her track down these materials, possibly to a sealed archive in Poland. Both Kathi and Zvi Diamant, Doras last living nephew, repeatedly tried to contact Esther Hoffe about the letters: She refused to help and hung up, Kathi recalled.On my last night in Tel Aviv I found myself back at Spinoza Street, to meet the filmmaker Sagi Bornstein, who is working on a documentary about the Kafka case. We met at the end of the block, just as dark was falling. Bornstein, wearing a striped knit cap and a lapel button that said simply K (the gift of Dutch Kafkologists), was accompanied by two crew members and a medium-size dog named Babylon Fighter. We sat on a public bench, and