Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Benjamin Balint, "Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy" (Norton, 2019)
Description: When Franz Kafka died in 1924, his loyal friend Max Brod could not bring himself to fulfill Kafka’s last instruction: to burn his remaining manuscripts. Instead, Brod devoted his life to championing Kafka’s work, rescuing his legacy from both obscurity and physical destruction. Nearly a century later, an international legal battle erupted to determine which country could claim ownership: the Jewish state, where Kafka dreamed of living, or Germany, where Kafka’s three sisters perished in the Holocaust? In Kafka's Last Trial: The Case of a Literary Legacy (Norton, 2019), Benjamin Balint offers a gripping account of the controve...