Max Brod

Max Brod was told to burn his friend's manuscripts, refused, and is the reason anyone has read Kafka. He was a Prague German-speaking Jew, a novelist and critic with a real reputation of his own by his mid-twenties, who met Kafka at a university lecture in 1902 and spent the next twenty-two years pushing him into print against his own inclination. Kafka published almost nothing in his lifetime and left two notes instructing Brod to burn everything unread; Brod, who had told him plainly years before that he would not do it, edited and published The Trial, The Castle and Amerika in the years after 1924. His editorial hand was heavy - he rearranged chapters, smoothed texts, and shaped a religious reading of Kafka that scholars have spent decades undoing - which is a real charge against him and does not touch the larger fact. He fled Prague in 1939 on the last train before the border closed, carrying a suitcase of Kafka's papers, and worked in Tel Aviv for the Habimah theatre. The ownership of those papers was litigated in Israel until 2016. He wrote around eighty books of his own, including a novel on Tycho Brahe that Einstein admired, and was an early champion of Janacek, translating his operas into German and effectively making his international career. He introduced Kafka to Felice Bauer at his own flat. He was a committed Zionist from before the First World War and argued about it with Kafka for years. He left the papers to his secretary Esther Hoffe, whose daughters sold pages at auction; the Israeli supreme court ruled in 2016 that the archive belonged to the National Library. He died in Tel Aviv at eighty-four.

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