![]() For the maximalist that Kafka was, writing represented his struggle for achieving the highest possible goals, a struggle against the impossible. Brod had given several minor manuscripts to his friends and collaborators. Some of Kafka’s manuscripts remained at Brod’s collaborator, Esther Hoffe. Later, during the Suez Crisis, it was transferred to the safety of a Swiss bank and in 1961 handed over to Kafka’s niece, Marianna Steiner in London, who entrusted it to the care of the Bodleian Library in Oxford. After World War II, Brod deposited most of the Kafka’s estate he had in his holding to the Schockner Library Archive in Tel Aviv. What remained in the possession of his family in Prague included letters to family members and the manuscript of the Letter to His Father and The Metamorphosis, Willy Haase’s relatives kept Letters to Milena that Milena Jesenská deposited at Haase’s in 1939. When in 1939 Brod was fleeing Prague to escape from the Nazis, he took most of Kafka’s manuscripts to Palestine. In 1933 they were seized by the Gestapo and have been unaccounted for since. Similarly, Brod did not have access to manuscripts from Kafka’s early years, which had remained in the possession of Dora Diamant. Brod did not have access to letters written to Felice Bauer, who had entrusted them to the Schockner Publishers in New York five years before her death in the United States. The family only had Kafka’s letters addressed to the family members. The majority of Franz Kafka’s manuscripts were preserved within his family who handed it over over to Max Brod, who also received manuscripts form Milena Jesenská and possessed some from earlier times. Fischer Publishing House in Frankfurt, Germany. It was Max Brod, Kafka’s friend, who facilitated the posthumous publication of his works, first by the Schocken Publishers in Berlin, then by the Mercy Publishers in Prague, and even later, expanded by new findings and deciphered fragments by the Schocken Publishers in New York and concurrently also by the S. He burned many manuscripts before his death and demanded that all that he could not destroy himself would be destroyed on his behalf. ![]() He only published at the insistence of his friends and even this was not very frequent. Kafka was only satisfied with a few works of his to the extent that he would agree to having them published. Kafka’s literary work includes short stories and many fragments thereof, three unfinished novels, diaries and correspondence.
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