Your best friend is dead. On his desk you find a note addressed to you. It asks you to destroy everything he ever wrote β unread, to the last page. You are Max Brod, and the choice is yours.
The Oppelt House, Old Town Square, Prague. Franz Kafka died of tuberculosis on 3 June 1924, a month short of his 41st birthday. His parents have asked you β his closest friend for twenty-two years β to sort his desk.
You met him on 23 October 1902, after a university lecture in Prague β you were eighteen, he was nineteen, and he walked you home arguing about Schopenhauer. For twenty-two years you were the one who believed in him. You dragged his stories to publishers. He published only a handful of slim volumes in his whole life β and burned, by some estimates, most of everything else he ever wrote.
Now, sorting the desk he will never sit at again, you find two notes. Both are addressed to you. Unfold them.
"Everything I leave behind me β¦ in the way of notebooks, manuscripts, letters, my own and other people's, sketches, and so on, is to be burned unread and to the last page."
Only six short works may live: The Judgment, The Stoker, The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist. Everything else β every novel, every diary, every letter β "is to be burned, and that you should do it as soon as possible is what I beg of you."
The stove is lit. The manuscripts are in your hands. What do you do?
Brod refused. Within a year of his friend's death he did the opposite of burning: he sat down with the chaos and started to build.
The Trial existed as 171 handwritten sheets across ten quarto notebooks β chapters unfinished, unnumbered, kept in loose bundles, because Kafka wrote them out of order between August 1914 and January 1915 and then abandoned the whole thing. Brod had one advantage no other editor on Earth had: he had heard it. Kafka used to read chapters aloud to his friends β laughing, sometimes so hard he had to stop. Working partly from memory of those evenings, Brod sorted finished from unfinished, chose an order, and sent it to a publisher.
The Trial β 1925The Castle β 1926Amerika β 1927
Three novels, published in three years, by a dead author almost nobody had heard of. Critics took a decade to catch up. Readers eventually turned Kafka into one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century β every one of those books a page Brod was told to burn.
Fifteen years pass. It is the night of 14 March 1939, and German troops are hours from Prague. Tomorrow morning the Wehrmacht will march in; tonight the last train leaves Wilson Station for the Polish border. You are Max Brod, 54 years old, with your wife Elsa, two tickets β and one suitcase.
You are a famous author yourself β dozens of your own novels and manuscripts line your shelves. There is family silver. Photographs. Warm coats. And there is a bundle that isn't even yours: every Kafka paper you've guarded for fifteen years. The suitcase holds 12 kg. Pack it. (Tap items.)
The suitcase made it. Brod spent thirty years in Tel Aviv as a writer and theater dramaturg β and the papers he saved kept living lives of their own: bank vaults on three continents, a record-breaking auction, an apartment full of cats, and a decade-long court case that asked a very Kafkaesque question: who owns Kafka? Tap the years.
Seven questions. Prove you could be trusted with a friend's last wish β or at least with his notebooks.