A lengthy, complicated court battle has finally drawn to a close. This one had, at its centre, a treasure chest of unpublished writings, handwritten manuscripts and letters of one of the most enigmatic literary giants of our times — Franz Kafka.

The brawl stemmed primarily from people failing to honour their dying friend’s wishes. On his deathbed, the reticent writer had asked his close friend Max Brod to burn all the papers. Instead, Brod, recognising the tremendous cultural worth of these manuscripts, retained them when he fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

At his own deathbed, he bequeathed the papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, asking her to give the papers to the “Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the municipal library in Tel Aviv or another organisation in Israel or abroad”. The papers were passed down to Esther’s daughters.

This ignited a legal war. In 2009, Israel demanded that the papers be handed over to it, just as Brod had wished. The Hoffe sisters clung on to the manuscripts, whose worth is estimated to be in millions of dollars, asserting that they had inherited the documents and were the rightful owners. The sisters planned to sell the papers to the German Literature Archive, claiming that “In Israel there is no place to keep the papers so well as in Germany.” This was a frail, self-serving claim, given that the National Library of Israel has played a monumental role in the preservation of pre-Holocaust heritage.

The court has ruled in favour of the National Library of Israel. The relief at the end of this battle is momentary, since this verdict sparks a much more complicated debate on whether Israel should have absolute ownership of these cultural assets.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 14th, 2016