Franz Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn everything he left behind. Max Brod did not burn it. This decision changed literary history. The Trial, The Castle, Amerika — none of these novels would exist if Brod had done what Kafka asked. We owe the entire Kafka canon to one act of loving disobedience.

But the story of Kafka's papers does not end with Brod's decision not to burn them. It continues for nearly a century afterward, through two world wars, the founding of Israel, the fall of communism, and a legal battle that lasted for decades and was only resolved in 2019. It is one of the strangest and most compelling stories in the history of literature.

When Brod fled Prague in 1939 — on the last train out before the Nazis closed the border — he took Kafka's manuscripts with him. He spent the rest of his life in Tel Aviv, editing and publishing Kafka's work and writing about him with a devotion that bordered on the religious. When Brod died in 1968, he left the papers to his secretary, Esther Hoffe.

Esther Hoffe did not donate the papers to a library or an archive. She kept them, and she sold some of them — including the manuscript of The Trial, which she sold to the German Literature Archive in Marbach for nearly two million dollars. When she died in 2007, she left the remaining papers to her daughters, Eva and Ruth.

This is where it gets complicated. The National Library of Israel argued that the papers belonged to them — that Brod had always intended for them to go to an Israeli institution, and that Esther Hoffe had held them in trust, not as personal property. The Hoffe daughters disagreed. The legal battle that followed wound through the Israeli courts for over a decade.

In 2019, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in favor of the National Library. The papers — including manuscripts, letters, and diaries — were transferred to Jerusalem, where they are now being catalogued and digitized. Some of them have never been published. Some of them may change our understanding of Kafka entirely.

I find this story almost unbearably moving. The idea that these fragile pieces of paper — written by a man who wanted them destroyed, carried out of a burning Europe in a suitcase, fought over in courts for decades — have finally come to rest in a place where they will be preserved and studied and read. Kafka would have hated it. But I think we can be glad.