It is time to share Franz Kafka’s works. The whole world is looking for them now.
Kafka left his writings and unpublished works to his close associate Max Brod. Then Brod left them to his secretary Esther Hoffe, with whom he appears to have had an amorous relationship.
Years later, Hoffe said she had the writings and in 1988 she sold the manuscript for “The Trial” for $2 million. After that, everyone was aware that Kafka makes a profit.
Later on, when Hoffe died at 101, her daughters came onto the scene. Now it was their turn to make some profit out of Kafka. Hoffe’s daughters Eva and Ruth claimed that they should own the manuscripts. And the world witnessed how Kafka had turned to a commodity.
But the most ironic thing about it is that the situation contradicts the Kafkaesque style. For Kafka, writing was never the main purpose. Writing was a tool for him; a tool that he used to express his anger about his father, his job and his life. He never meant to sell his writings. Maybe he did not even value them.
But in the “modern” day, it is not a must to make some money and profit out of the old, antique, artworks and manuscripts, and Hoffe, nor her girls or Brod stopped.
So thanks to Kafka, now they are very rich and dead. But, apart from those people, no one tried to own Kafka’s manuscripts.
An article in the London Review of Books published March 3 by Judith Butler claims this is changing because the Hoffe girls own a fortune thanks to Kafka. There are lots of manuscripts and also unpublished works by Kafka and so the whole world is trying to own Kafka.
The National Library of Israel claims that Kafka belongs to the “public good,” a.k.a. the Jewish people.
On the other hand, there are the Hoffes. According to Butler’s article, they said that if they get an agreement, the material would be offered for sale as a single entity in one package. It will be sold by weight. On the other hand, there is the German government claiming that Kafka writes in German and therefore he belongs to German writers.
What is funny about all of this is that Kafka was never a man like this. He was a really introverted person who hated going to the office every day, who was a rebel inside and never outside; he would never have thought that he would become one of the most profitable “commodities” of all time.