Kafka's Last Trial

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A highly entertaining story of literary friendship, epic legal battles and cultural politics centred on one of the most enigmatic writers of the 20th century . . . An exquisitely human drama peopled with an eccentric cast of characters that beautifully evokes the early days of Israel, the sadness of the exiles, and the long shadow cast by the Holocaust.' Financial Times When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil the writer's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod took them with him when he fled from Prague to Palestine in 1939, and devoted the rest of his life to editing, publishing and canonizing Kafka's work. By betraying his friend's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. Nearly a century later, as Kafka is regarded as one of the crucial writers of the modern world, his work owned by readers and critics, Marxists and psychoanalysts, his papers have become the subject of a bitter legal dispute between Germany and Israel. In Kafka's Last Trial, Ben Balint tells the gripping and fascinating stories of Kafka's papers, of Germany and Israel, and of Kafka himself. 'A legal and philosophical black comedy of the first water, complete, like all the best adventure stories, with a physical treasure to be won or lost . . . A deep yet entertaining look at something we should all care very much about: the absurdity of our modern obsession with "authenticity" and "ownership".' Spectator