I'm fascinated by the preservation of Kafka's diaries. Kafka gave them to his Catholic girlfriend, Czech journalist Milena Jesenska, in 1921. Kafka was slowly dying of tuberculosis then. I like to think he gave them to her because he anticipated the Holocaust. He saw anti-Semitism blackening the horizon.
Kafka died three years later, at age 40. And after he died, Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executor, really started the Kafka industry, to the world's
great benefit, and to Brod's honor. Brod began publishing Kafka's work. In doing so, he famously overruled Kafka's
written instruction to burn most of his work.
I get the impression that Jesenska turned the diaries over to Max Brod. Where else did he get them? Brod escaped the Holocaust by emigrating from Czechoslovakia to Palestine, and he began publishing the Diaries in 1949, with the great house Schocken.
By then Jesenska was dead in the Holocaust. She worked to save Jews, and was killed for it. She's
a righteous gentile, her name's at Yad Vashem.
But she got the diaries to Max Brod, somehow, and Brod got to Palestine.
So whatever I think about Zionism today (thumbs down), I have to say that Palestine, which Kafka dreamed about, played an important role in preserving these amazing documents of our civilization.
Now to shift the subject slightly:
Max Brod was not a top-drawer talent. It comes through in a lot of ways. Here's one way it comes through: Last night, trying to figure out how he got the Diaries, I read his Postscript to the Diaries and came to one of those lines that makes you want to throw a book across the room. Brod writes about everything he cut out of the diaries for publication:
Wow. That bugs me. How is a reader to correct any such impression? First of all, Kafka didn't say just "a little" about Brod. There's a lot. So when Brod says he cut out just a few other comments about others, I bet he cut out a lot of comments. And his view of public figures is accurate–so why is he saving anyone from Kafka's commentary??
I want to know who that Kafka is. That living breathing scathing man of Prague intellectual/literary life. Which Kafka was. He was somewhat-well-adjusted to modern conditions.
A lot of writers get a Max Brod. In fact, Brod's reputation today rests on his relationship with Kafka. Here's a brilliant analysis of the Kafka-Brod relationship by Walter Benjamin, in a letter to the scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem, in 1939:
No, Scholem wouldn't. Didn't have it in him. Meanwhile, his friend Benjamin, who repeatedly blew off Scholem's urgings to come to Palestine, died fleeing the Holocaust in 1940. And Scholem lived to the ripe age of 85 or so. A lot of his reputation today rests on his friendship with Walter Benjamin.
