Show caption Franz Kafka bequeathed his writings to his longtime friend, Max Brod. Photograph: CSU Archives/Everett Collect/Rex Franz Kafka Unseen Kafka works may soon be revealed after Kafkaesque trial Zurich court rules safe-deposit boxes can be opened and shipped to Israel library Associated Press in Jerusalem Wed 17 Apr 2019 11.28 BST Share on Facebook

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A long-hidden trove of unpublished works by Franz Kafka could soon be revealed after a decade-long battle over his literary estate that has drawn comparisons to some of his surreal tales.

A district court in Zurich upheld Israeli verdicts in the case last week, ruling that several safe-deposit boxes in the Swiss city could be opened and their contents shipped to Israel’s national library.

The papers could shed new light on one of literature’s darkest figures, a German-speaking Jew from Prague whose cultural legacy has been hotly contested between Israel and Germany.

Experts have speculated the cache could include endings to some of Kafka’s major works, many of which were unfinished when they were published after his death.

Israel’s supreme court has already stripped an Israeli family of its collection of Kafka’s manuscripts, which were hidden in Israeli bank vaults and in a Tel Aviv apartment. But the Swiss ruling would complete the acquisition of nearly all Kafka’s known works.

Kafka, whose name has become an adjective to describe inscrutable legal or bureaucratic processes, was known for his tales of everyman protagonists crushed by mysterious events. In The Trial, a bank clerk is put through excruciating court proceedings without ever being told the charges against him.

“The absurdity of the [legal process] is that it was over an estate that nobody knew what it contained. This will hopefully finally resolve these questions,” said Benjamin Balint, a research fellow at Jerusalem’s Van Leer Institute and the author of Kafka’s Last Trial, which chronicles the affair.

On his death, Max Brod instructed his secretary, Esther Hoffe, to transfer Kafka’s unpublished papers to an academic institution. Photograph: Imagno/Getty

Kafka bequeathed his writings to Max Brod, his longtime friend, editor and publisher, shortly before his death from tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40. He asked for his writings to be burned unread, but Brod ignored his wishes and published most of what was in his possession – including the novels The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, which made the previously little-known author posthumously one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century.

But Brod didn’t publish everything and on his death in 1968, he instructed his personal secretary, Esther Hoffe, to transfer the Kafka papers to an academic institution.

Hoffe instead kept the papers stashed away and sold some. The original manuscript of The Trial was auctioned for £1m at Sotheby’s in London and went to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, near Stuttgart.

Franz Kafka’s Hebrew vocabulary notebook at Israel’s national library in Jerusalem. Photograph: Sebastian Scheiner/AP

When Hoffe died in 2008 at the age of 101, she left the collection to her two daughters, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, both Holocaust survivors like herself, who considered Brod a father figure and his archive their inheritance. Both have since also passed away, leaving Wiesler’s daughters to continue fighting for the remainder of the collection.

Jeshayah Etgar, a lawyer for the daughters, said his clients legitimately inherited the works and called the state seizure of their property “disgraceful” and “first degree robbery”.”

Israel’s National Library claims Kafka’s papers as cultural assets that belong to the Jewish people. “We welcome the judgment of the court in Switzerland, which matched all the judgments entered previously by the Israeli courts,” said David Blumberg, the chairman of the library, a nonprofit and non-governmental body.