Franz-Kafka-Sammlung an der Israelischen Nationalbibliothek

In 1921 and 1922, Kafka wrote two notes to Brod asking that all his manuscripts, paintings and letters be destroyed after his death. In defiance of this clear directive, from June 1924 Brod collected all of the materials from the various locations, examined them and began to publish what Kafka had stored away during his lifetime. The three unfinished novels The Trial, America ​​and The Castle are among the most well-known of these works. Brod took all of Kafka’s writings with him when he left his native Czechoslovakia for Mandatory Palestine in March 1939, just hours before the Nazis invaded the country. In the early 1960s, he returned most of them to Kafka’s heirs.

These materials are preserved today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, while hundreds of letters, a number of short manuscripts and even many of Kafka’s drawings remained in Brod’s possession, comprising a significant part of Kafka’s literary legacy. Between 2016 and 2019, Brod’s own extensive personal archive, along with Kafka’s items, was deposited in the National Library of Israel. A number of other original items of Kafka’s, including notebooks in which he practiced his Hebrew, are also preserved today at the National Library, and together these materials represent the third largest collection in the world of the great writer’s original material.