Franz Kafka manuscripts hidden in Switzerland discovered in Israel

Franz Kafka wanted the manuscripts he left to die to be destroyed. His wish has never been granted. Nearly a century later, hundreds of documents hidden for decades in the coffers of a Swiss bank mark his life and his literary work was discovered in Jerusalem.

After a twelve-year lawsuit over his property, the National Library of Israel He has exhibited hundreds of letters, diaries, notebooks, sketches and writings by the author, who arrived in July from Zurich, and was ranged in sixty files in the personal archives of his close friend, Max Brod, to whom he bequeathed his papers for him to burn them.

This, however, did not destroy them, traveled with them to Palestine in 1939, edited some of them and contributed to its publication. Thus, about 99% of the archives exhibited today have already been published. EFE Stefan Litt, file manager.

The manuscripts will be on display and will be released soon on the Internet and, according to the director of the library center, David Bumblerg, what's more interesting than they see now, it's all over again. to have "in front of the original writings of Kafka, observe his writing" or "how he distributed the text between his pages ".

"The newest thing is a notebook with logical texts in Hebrew, which surprised us in Israel to see that Kafka could write short texts and even letters that he sent to his Hebrew teacher. , something that until now was rather neglected "in the writer's investigations, says Litt, who believes that" it was a facet of Kafka that should be further valued. "

The experts knew that the novelist had been studying the language since 1917, but they were not sure they could write it fluently, as the notebook found, which Litt sees as a "great discovery," demonstrates. Other interesting discoveries These are the drawings of the writer.

Kafka (Prague, 1883-1924), who wrote almost daily letters to his friends and family, left a long correspondence in which epistolary notes with Brod or a 47-page letter addressed to his father in 1919 stand out. in which his difficult relationship is obvious, the terror that infused him throughout his childhood. "

Among the archives of the author of The process, kept until recently in a maximum security box of the Swiss bank UBS, are three versions of Preparations for a wedding in the countryside, a story in which he worked between 1907 and 1909but that never ended, and the fragment of the story was finally published after his death.

Decades after death, Kafka's papers Brod did not want to destroy They have spread all over the world. Litt notes that many of his manuscripts were left to his nephews in England in the early 1960s and are in Oxford.

The rest of the documents remained with Brod, who, before his death in 1968, sent some of them to Switzerland to keep them, while others remained in Tel Aviv. At his death, he left them as an inheritance to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, who later bequeathed them to his daughter, Eva. who fought legally until his old age to keep them on their property.

In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Kafka's inheritance would belong to the National Library of Israel, a decision executed by the Swiss judiciary. which gave the green light to the transfer of papers in Israel, which allows today to be consulted.

EFE Agency.