Much of Franz Kafka’s work can be viewed …

After a long legal battle that lasted half a century, the National Library of Israel published on the Internet the letters, manuscripts and drawings of the Czech writer Franz Kafka, which can now be viewed in a online by whoever wants it.

“The National Library of the Franz Kafka Collection of Israel is now online for the first time, after an intense process of conservation and restoration, cataloging and digitization over several years,” the institution announced in a statement. communicated.

In the collection, he clarified, there are a few 120 drawings, more than 200 letters addressed to his friend, the writer Max Brod, and the original of his literary testament in which he asked him to burn all his writings.

The works could be preserved thanks to the disobedience of Brod, who in 1924, after the death of Kafka, decided to preserve the works of his friend. In 1939, he left Czechoslovakia, then occupied by the Nazis, and settled in Tel Aviv. In his luggage he carried Kafka’s writings and drawings.

Over the years, Brod has published many of these works and built the reputation of the writer, who is considered one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. In 1968After Brod’s death, the dispute over the rights of the work began and the controversy involved several countries, to academia, to the heirs of Kafka and also to Brod.

At 2019, after a judgment of justice Switzerland, part of the files that were in a safe in Zurich were turned over to the National Library of Israel, based in Jerusalem.

The vast majority of documents now available online, digitized by photographer Ardon Bar-Hama thanks to the sponsorship of businessman George Blumenthal, had already been published by Brod. This is the case with “Preparations for the wedding on the ground”, considered to be Kafka’s first unfinished novel.

In the catalog there are however some surprises: unpublished drawings without signature or date and a blue notebook in which Kafka had written in Hebrew, signed ‘K’, your usual signature. In this notebook, for example, there is a text dated 1920, in which Kafka asks his Hebrew teacher not to get angry for mistakes in his exercises.