July 13, 2008	Sunday	Rajab 9, 1429

JERUSALEM: Does the Tel Aviv apartment of a lately deceased centenarian hold a trove of mouldering manuscripts that could rewrite our understanding of Franz Kafka?

Or does it hold, at best, the makings of footnotes in future editions of the German-speaking Jewish writer’s work?

Generating an air of perplexing, “Kafka-esque” mystery, a Tel Aviv newspaper report this week marking the 125th anniversary of Kafka’s birth has sparked a flurry of speculation among literary scholars and archivists in Israel and in Europe.

Leading experts said on Wednesday they did not expect material to emerge that would prompt major revisions. But diaries and other papers left by Kafka’s friend and biographer Max Brod, whose late secretary owned the apartment, could shed new light on Kafka’s life and times in Prague before he died in 1924.

The intrigue is all the greater because of the history of how Kafka’s writings were saved from obscurity Brod defied his friend’s dying wish that his unpublished work be destroyed and later fled Nazi Europe with a suitcase full of papers.

“It’s very difficult to know what might be in her flat,” said Ritchie Robertson, the professor of German at Oxford University, which holds the bulk of Kafka’s known manuscripts.

“But my own suspicion would be that there would be nothing of any significance by Kafka,” he said. Any of Brod’s papers could nonetheless be interesting, he added, not least as they might give a different view of Kafka from the “saintly” figure that emerged from Brod’s 1937 biography of his friend.

The two daughters of Brod’s secretary Esther Hoffe, who died last year at 101, inherited the flat but have yet to grant access to any possible documents, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper said this week, quoting Israeli scholars and officials.

Israel’s state archivist told the newspaper that he would not let material important to Jewish history leave the country.

Brod eventually gave much that was Kafka’s to the writer’s niece by sending most manuscripts to a Swiss bank during the 1956 Suez crisis.

They ended up in Oxford after a chance meeting between an English academic and the niece’s son – Kafka’s great-nephew.

Then, when Brod died in Israel in 1968, his own archive passed to Hoffe. She frustrated scholars by denying them access to the papers though she sold Kafka’s manuscript of his novel “The Trial” for a reported $2 million in the 1980s.

The handwritten version of the surreal story of Josef K, who wakes to find himself on trial for a crime his accusers refuse to specify, was bought by the Germany’s Literature Archive.

Its keeper of manuscripts, Ulrich von Buelow, told German Radio this week he hoped that opening the Hoffe apartment might throw up fragments of Kafka’s unfinished 1907 story “Wedding Preparations in the Country”, and other material.

—Reuters