Kafka told Max Brod to burn his papers; Brod saved them, and the fight over them ended in a Swiss bank vault in 2019

Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis of the larynx in a sanatorium at Kierling, Austria, aged 40. He had already burned much of his work. He left a note to his friend Max Brod beginning "Dearest Max" and asking that everything else be "burned unread." Brod refused and published the novels. In 1939, as the Nazis took Prague, Brod left on a train with a suitcase of Kafka's papers. Kafka's three sisters were later killed in the Holocaust. Brod settled in Tel Aviv. He died in 1968 and left the papers to his secretary, Esther Hoffe, with instructions to give them to the Hebrew University, the Tel Aviv municipal library or another institution. Hoffe kept them and sold some. In 1988 she sold the manuscript of The Trial at Sotheby's in London for 3.5 million Deutschmarks to the German Literature Archive in Marbach. She died in 2007, aged 101, and her daughters inherited. The National Library of Israel sued. Tel Aviv courts ruled for the library, and in August 2016 Israel's Supreme Court unanimously rejected Eva Hoffe's appeal and awarded her nothing. Eva died in 2018. A Zurich court upheld the Israeli rulings in April 2019, and the last papers left UBS vaults for Jerusalem that August. In 2026 the Brod and Kafka papers are at the National Library of Israel; the Trial manuscript remains in Marbach.