![]() They miss no opportunity to malign “Dearest Max.” The Nobelist J.M. Indeed, Max Brod has become the whipping boy of the current generation of scholars who have gained access to Kafka’s original manuscripts and identified Brod’s expurgations. ![]() Neither the image of the saintly invalid nor the redemptive reading of novels such as The Trial and The Castle endures. Today Kafka’s personal and literary reputations are not what they were in 1941. Auden said about Kafka in 1941: “Had one to name the artist who comes nearest to bearing the same kind of relation to our age that Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe bore to theirs, Kafka is the first one would think of.” Auden’s view was, to quote Kafka authority Ritchie Robinson, “encouraged by Max Brod’s hagiographic memoir…which portrayed Kafka as having a constructive spiritual message for distressed moderns.” In fact, Brod’s memoir described Kafka’s writings as redemptive and “sacred” and said of the man, “I do not wish to suggest that he was a perfect saint… was on the road to becoming one.” Brod escaped the Nazis on the last train out of Prague, carrying two suitcases filled with the material he was supposed to burn.The works he saved and edited made Kafka the most important literary figure of the middle of the 20th century. ![]() Brod, an ambitious and prolific writer himself, would have long since been forgotten had it not been for his role as the custodian, editor and publisher of Kafka’s writings. “Dearest Max, my last request: everything I leave behind me…in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, to be burned unread…Yours, Franz Kafka”ĭearest Max was Max Brod, who famously decided not to obey the last wish of his best friend, who died in 1924 of tuberculosis one month short of his 41st birthday.
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