A collection of documents by the author Franz Kafka is now publicly available online, following intensive restoration, cataloguing and digitisation. T

Franz Kafka: Manuscripts, drawings and personal letters go online

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2021-05-29 08:30:05

A collection of documents by the author Franz Kafka is now publicly available online, following intensive restoration, cataloguing and digitisation.

The digitised collection includes three draft versions of Kafka's story Wedding Preparations in the Country, a notebook in which he practiced Hebrew, and hundreds of personal letters, sketches and travel journals.

The collection was left to the National Library of Israel by Max Brod, a friend who Kafka trusted to burn his writings after his death in the 1920s.

But Brod refused and published them instead, leading to Kafka becoming recognised as one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.

After Brod's death in 1968, the Kafka collection disappeared and the National Library was involved in a "Kafkaesque" 11-year fight to bring the collection together.

About 15 years later Brod, also a Czech Jewish writer, was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for Tel Aviv in British Mandate Palestine and what was to become Israel.

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