A Yearslong Battle Over Kafka’s Legacy Ends in Jerusalem / Isabel Kershner. In: NYTimes Aug. 7, 2019

In one of his notebooks — revealed to the public for the first time in Jerusalem on Wednesday — he sketched a man lying in bed, perhaps depicting his own terminal illness and auguring the end. The drawing was a fitting, if grim, coda to a yearslong, labyrinthine legal battle over the author’s legacy nearly a century after his untimely death.

The notebook and materials arrived recently at the National Library of Israel from Zurich, where they had been held in safe deposit boxes. They are the final batch of a vast trove of original texts and manuscripts by the celebrated German-speaking, Jewish writer that had been entrusted to a friend.

The retrieval of this last portion of the archive from a Swiss bank vault is the culmination of more than a decade of tortuous courtroom wrangling over the writer’s papers that many have likened to a Kafka novel, as well as a more scholarly argument between Israel and Germany over the ownership of the cultural legacy and its rightful home.

Kafka left the documents to his close friend and literary executor, Max Brod, upon the writer’s death from tuberculosis, at 40, in 1924. ... [mehr] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/kafka-archive-jerusalem-israel.html