Kafkas Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy Balint Benjamin (2019)

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to follow Kafkas final instruction to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafkas work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted over which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka had dreamed of living, or Germany, where his three sisters perished in the Holocaust. Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controversial trial in Israeli courts, filled with legal, ethical and political dilemmas, that determined the fate of Kafkas manuscripts.