When Franz Kafka died from tuberculosis at 40 in 1924, he left one last instruction to his closest friend and confidant, the celebrated author Max Brod: Burn [my] remaining manuscripts, diaries, and letters unread.

Brod did not follow the request.

Instead of destroying Kafka’s manuscripts, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient writer of the twentieth century.

In Kafka Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (W. W. Norton & Company, $26.95 hardcover) Benjamin Balint, one of our most perceptive and engaging scholars of Jewish literature, tells the tale of the fate of Kafka’s works—from Max Brod’s harrowing escape to Palestine with the manuscripts as Nazi invaders closed in  on Czechoslovakia in 1939, to a gripping account of the contentious international legal battle over the ownership of Kafka’s oeuvre, which reached its climax in Israel’s high court in 2016.

In addition to the gripping legal drama, the book doubles as a first-rate biography of both Kafka and Brod. Balint details the course of their heady friendship, marked by Kafka’s introversion and self-scrutiny and Brod’s exuberance. Brod was a critic, novelist, translator, and a seminal figure in the group of intellectuals known in the early years of the twentieth century as the “Prague Circle,” and Balint illuminates how the literary debates and disputes in taste between Kafka and Brod animated much of Kafka’s own writing. Despite the lackluster reception of Kafka’s early works, Brod worshipped Kafka and was the first to recognize his literary genius. This recognition led Brod to betray his friend’s dying wish and preserve for the world such foundational works of literary modernism at The Castle, The Trial, Kafka’s diaries, and the harrowing Letter to His Father.

With compassion, wit, and erudition, Balint unpacks the complicated trial—dense with dilemmas legal, ethical and political, and filled with surreal ironies worthy of the term “Kafkaesque.” The case pitted three powers in the struggle for the legacy: the National Library
of Israel, which asserted that Kafka’s work belonged in the Jewish homeland; the deep-pocketed German Literature Archive in Marbach, which had been negotiating to purchase the estate of
Max Brod—and therefore the materials left behind by Kafka; and the elusive Eva Hoffe, who had inherited Kafka’s estate from her mother, Esther Hoffe, Brod’s secretary and erstwhile
lover. When the dust of the case settled, only one of these parties would be granted the literary legacy of this cryptic genius.
Balint also reveals Kafka as a man inhabiting a borderland between cultures—steeped in German literature and culture, but also fascinated by Zionism, by the Hebrew language, and by Yiddish theatre. Balint situates Kafka’s life and cultural heritage within the larger strains of the cultural diaspora, revealing the motives behind Israel’s insistence on laying claim to Kafka’s manuscripts.

Provocative and compelling, Kafka’s Last Trial is the definitive account of this captivating and tortuous case, as well as a brilliant meditation on cultural ownership and national identity.