Kafka's last trial : the case of a literary legacy / Benjamin Balint.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-266) and index.

The last appeal -- "Fanatical veneration": the first to fall under Kafka's spell -- The first trial -- Flirting with the promised land -- First and second judgments -- Last son of the diaspora: Kafka's Jewish afterlife -- The last ingathering: Kafka in Israel -- Kafka's last wish, Brod's first betrayal -- Kafka's creator -- The last train: from Prague to Palestine -- The last tightrope dancer: Kafka in Germany -- Laurel & Hardy -- Brod's last love -- The last heiress: selling Kafka -- The last judgment -- Epilogue.

The gripping story of the legal battle over the work of the most enigmatic writer of the twentieth century: a priceless lost cache of papers, an unprecedented international custody battle, and the unlikely trajectory of a trove of manuscripts from Prague to Palestine.

When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend and champion Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfil Kafka's last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted the rest of his life to canonizing Kafka as the most prescient chronicler of the twentieth century. By betraying Kafka's last wish, Brod twice rescued his legacy - first from physical destruction, and then from obscurity. But that betrayal also led to an international legal battle over which country could lay claim to Kafka's legacy: Germany, where Kafka's own sister perished in the Holocaust and where he would have suffered a similar fate had he remained, or Israel?