When Hoffe died in 2007, at age 101, she left the Kafka manuscripts, along with control of the Brod estate, to her daughters, Eva and Ruth. At this point, Israel took action again, challenging the probate of her will and once more claiming that the Kafka papers were cultural assets and, thus, state property. The case dragged on for years until, in 2016, it was finally decided by Israel's Supreme Court, which ruled that the Brod and Kafka materials were, in fact, cultural assets and put be transferred to the National Library of Israel."...
Leaving aside the issue of whether the collection belonged specifically in Israel, the state's broader contention was that Brod's and Kafka's papers belonged not in private hands but in an archive-- i.e., that literary artifacts have a cultural importance that exceeds their monetary value, and therefore they deserve to be public property....
The Marbach archive's position in the case was a delicate one. While it had the financial resources to buy Kafka's manuscripts and the scholarly resources to process and maintain them, there were obvious political reasons why the acquisition of an important Jewish writer's papers by a German institution might be questioned. Israeli scholars attacked the archive in the press. "They say the papers will be safer in Germany," the Israeli historian Otto Doc Kulka write in 2010. "There Germans will take very good care of them. Well, the Germans don't have a very good history of taking care of Kafka's things. They didn't take good care of his sisters" -- all three of whom were killed by the Nazis. Elsewhere the issue was lined to the larger one of Israeli statehood: "[T]he struggle to keep Brod's archive in Israel is one of the most important of the struggles over our continued existence here," the literary scholar Nuri Pagi insisted in 2011.
COMMENT
Kafka died before he ever became famous. His friend Max Brod is the person who promoted his work posthumously. Without Brod, it seems unlikely that any library would have cared much about the literary debris of an obscure Czech writing in German. But once Kafka was famous his papers were gold.
It wasn't just fame that triggered this legal battle over Kafka's papers, though. Israel wanted to have the papers in the National Library as a matter of identity. In the lawsuit, the library is described in two different roles -- access and identity. The lawsuit emphasized universal public access to knowledge, but the German archive would have made the papers public, too. Israel wanted the papers for the National Library because of the way they represent Israeli/Jewish identity.
One thing I find interesting about this account is how clearly Israel understood the library as a place to represent identity and place. In the world of librarians, knowledge is often considered purely from an access standpoint-- universal and detached from a specific place. This assumption of placelessness underlies proposals to consolidate library collections in digitized online libraries or large, remote regional book warehouses with delivery on demand. Nonetheless, studies have shown that the unique items in library collections are largely related to geography and place-based differences. [1] The library is not actually as placeless as it seems since the geographic dispersal of library collecting is essential in order to represent the true breadth of human knowledge and experience [2]
It strikes me that there is a kind of synergy between this identity-based collecting and in situ library stories about search for identity in library collections. By obtaining the papers the archivists are consciously creating a collection that represents Israeli/Jewish identity.
[1] Brunvand, Amy (2006) "Missing Information and the Long Tail: How Distributed Collection Development Assures the Continued Relevance of Libraries," Against the Grain: Vol. 18: Iss. 4, Article 10.
[2] Dempsey, Lorcan, Brian Lavoie, Constance Malpas, Lynn Silipigni Connaway, Roger C. Schonfeld, JD Shipengrover, and Günter Waibel. 2013. Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC Research
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