Kafka's Manuscripts

Before his death, Franz Kafka explicitly requests that the majority of his manuscripts be destroyed. His friend Max Brod nevertheless decides to disobey. This decision triggers one of the 20th century's most complex literary histories: manuscripts transported during exile, scattered archives, international trials, and decades of conflicts around texts that could have disappeared entirely.

When Franz Kafka dies in 1924, he leaves behind numerous unfinished manuscripts, notebooks, and correspondence. In several letters addressed to his friend Max Brod, he clearly requests that these documents be burned after his death.

Brod takes the opposite decision. Convinced of the work's exceptional importance, he preserves the texts then undertakes to publish them gradually. Without this disobedience, novels like The Trial or The Castle probably would never have been read. The story becomes more complicated with the rise of Nazism. A Prague Jew, Brod flees Europe in 1939 and takes the archives with him to Mandatory Palestine. Part of the manuscripts then remains scattered among private collections, banks, and heirs.

After Brod's death, several decades of legal conflicts pit national libraries, families, and cultural institutions against each other over document ownership. Some manuscripts are kept in safes for years. This situation poses an unusual literary and philosophical question: how far should an author's will be respected concerning the destruction of their own work?

The Kafka case is particularly paradoxical because his entire work rests partly on the author's own explicit refusal. Today, his manuscripts are considered major pieces of world literature when they nearly disappeared several times during the 20th century.