FOOTNOTE TEST [1]
The website of the National Library of Israel has made available to view online their recently-developed collection of diverse materials by Franz Kafka.
(Wikipedia has other images,
some illustrating this diary. )
...The illustrations date from 1905 to 1920 and include a self-portrait, portraits of others, as well as simple character sketches. One, called “Drinker,” depicts a man who looks angry and frightening, sitting before a glass of wine. Another drawing, titled “The Masses,” shows five faceless figures.
Kafka called another illustration “Beggar and Noble Philanthropist,” and another “Crazed with Joy.”
[Other items of interest include] scans of letters [and postcards] he sent to various people, including his parents, his friend Max Brod, his fiancée Felice Bauer, and the philosopher Martin Buber…
Kafka’s Hebrew notebook, a draft of his short story “Wedding Preparations in the Country,” a journal from his travels in Switzerland, pages from the manuscript of the novel The Castle and a print copy of “Letter to His Father,” which Kafka wrote to his father. With the exception of the Hebrew notebook, all of the [written] materials are in German...
The above article goes on to say that three of Kafka’s most important works, The Trial, Amerika (also translated as The Man Who Disappeared) and The Castle, came to be published because his friend and executor, Max Brod defied the provision of Kafka’s will that called for his manuscripts to be burned.
Brod was an author, composer, and journalist in his own right. After his death, other of Kafka’s materials he had preserved were illicitly deposited in vaults in Israel and Europe by his secretary’s family, who sold other items, including to the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany. Investigative journalism following his secretary’s death brought to light what had become of this legacy, and legal proceedings across more than a decade culminated in court rulings supporting stipulations in Brod’s will that the material was to go into a public archive.
Now that the material has been scanned and made publicly accessible on the National Library website, Brod’s instructions have been fulfilled, 97 years after Kafka’s death and almost half a century after Brod’s death.
The Kafka wikipedia article is wonderfully detailed, with a terrific External Links section that includes access to wikimedia’s visual collection in which are some of the contents of the NLI archive, as well as those above, and more, such as images of other artwork in homage to or portraying the writer, photos of family and friends, and so on.
Thanks for reading.
Shabat shalom
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Postscript for readers on social media May 27: #ActAgainstAntiSemitism
[1] FOOTNOTE TEST.