Israel gets missing Kafka papers, ending long legal battle

The Israel National Library on Wednesday unveiled a missing batch of Czech Jewish writer Franz Kafka's papers, ending more than a decade of legal wrangling over ownership in Israel and Europe.

As he battled with tuberculosis in an Austrian sanitorium, the author of "The Trial" and "The Metamorphosis" asked his close friend Max Brod to destroy all his letters and writings.

After the writer's death in 1924, Prague-born Brod, also Jewish, felt he could not carry out his friend's wishes and in 1939 he fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia for Tel Aviv, carrying Kafka's papers in a suitcase.

Brod then published many of the works and played a key role in establishing Kafka's success as one of the 20th century's key literary figures.

Brod's own death in 1968 ushered in what library spokeswoman Vered Lion-Yerushalmi called "the Kafkaesque story" of the Brod archive, with the hoard being split up and part of it stolen and offered for sale in Germany.

Since March 2008, the national library has been fighting to reassemble the collection and house it in Israel, its chairman David Blumberg told a press conference on Wednesday.

"The national library claimed the transfer of the archive to it because that was Brod's wish in his will," he said.

"We stated a process that took 11 years until we completed it two weeks ago."