Heartwarming tales of books looted by Nazis from Jews, being returned or compensated for.

Nazi-Looted Books Spell Decades of Labor for Libraries

By Catherine Hickley - Apr 8, 2013 7:00 AM GMT+0800

Arthur Goldschmidt, a Leipzig dealer in animal feed and an exporter to South America, was more passionate about books than business. His private collection numbered 40,000 carefully indexed volumes and he engaged a librarian to take care of it.

After the Nazis seized power in 1933, Goldschmidt was persecuted as a Jew; his assets were liquidated and his company confiscated. For survival, he sold his treasured collection of 2,000 almanacs -- spanning three centuries -- for a pittance to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar. He fled in 1938.

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Tanzenberg Monastery

Austrian National Library, Vienna (ONB/Wien SG VIII 1 1945.09.07) via Bloomberg

British troops examine a collection of books, mostly looted from Jewish owners, at a monastery that the Nazis planned to use for an elite university in Tanzenberg in 1945.

 

British troops examine a collection of books, mostly looted from Jewish owners, at a monastery that the Nazis planned to use for an elite university in Tanzenberg in 1945. Source: Austrian National Library, Vienna (ONB/Wien SG VIII 1 1945.09.07) via Bloomberg

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Arthur Goldschmidt Almanac

Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar via Bloomberg

An almanac that once belonged to Arthur Goldschmidt, a Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis and a book collector who amassed 40,000 volumes. His grandson recently reached a settlement with the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, which will keep the books.

An almanac that once belonged to Arthur Goldschmidt, a Jewish businessman persecuted by the Nazis and a book collector who amassed 40,000 volumes. His grandson recently reached a settlement with the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, which will keep the books. Source: Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar via Bloomberg

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Duchess Anna Amalia Library

Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar via Bloomberg

The Rococo hall of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. In February the library returned a collection of almanacs to the heir of Arthur Goldschmidt, a Leipzig businessman persecuted by the Nazis. The Weimar library is one of the leaders among German libraries in returning stolen books.

The Rococo hall of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar. In February the library returned a collection of almanacs to the heir of Arthur Goldschmidt, a Leipzig businessman persecuted by the Nazis. The Weimar library is one of the leaders among German libraries in returning stolen books. Source: Duchess Anna Amalia Library, Weimar via Bloomberg

His grandson Tomas Goldschmidt, who was a toddler when Arthur died in poverty in Bolivia in 1951, and had no idea the collection had survived until he was contacted by the London- based Commission for Looted Art in Europe -- 70 years after his grandfather’s escape. The commission traced him at the request of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar.

The library has since reached a restitution settlement with Goldschmidt and, just as importantly for him, helped to illuminate an era of family history. He described his first visit to see the almanacs in 2007.
“I was so overwhelmed I couldn’t touch those books, I couldn’t swallow,” he said over coffee in a Berlin cafe. “I felt so proud. It put my family in a new light. I never knew they were so wealthy and so educated. In South America my grandfather had nothing to live on -- they were poor.”

Stolen Volumes

Goldschmidt’s story of expropriation and persecution is echoed in hundreds of thousands of Jewish biographies. The Nazis not only burned books, they stole countless volumes. There is no official estimate for how many Nazi-looted books remain in German libraries. Tracing their owners and returning them is a task that librarians say will take decades.

The Central and Regional Library Berlin estimates it has as many as 250,000 books that are potentially looted. More than 40,000 were seized from the homes of Jews who were deported or murdered. So far, the library has returned 345 books and bookplates to 29 heirs. Peter Proelss, a historian investigating the collection, says he faces “a mountain of books.”

“It would take one person 25 years to look through every book,” Proelss said.
Yet that is not enough, because few books carry visible signs of being looted. Libraries need also to comb through their acquisition records and other archival sources, according to Juergen Weber, the deputy director of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.

Rococo Hall

In Weimar, Goldschmidt’s almanacs are stored in protective gray jackets in a modern basement depot. Above it, the library’s rococo hall gleams anew in white-and-gold glory after being ravaged by fire in 2004.
Weber said about 40,000 of the library’s books were acquired during Nazi rule. So far 4,000 have been identified as looted, though the actual figure may be triple that or more.

Librarians have also discovered Nazi-looted books acquired in recent years from booksellers, said Michael Knoche, the library’s director.

“There is not much awareness of the problem among antiquarian booksellers,” Knoche said. “We have to examine all new acquisitions too. This task will not be completed in our lifetimes.”

While the restitution of Nazi-looted art frequently makes headlines because of the value of the items, books attract less attention. Goldschmidt’s almanacs -- the Weimar library said it paid more than 100,000 euros ($130,000) to keep them -- are the biggest restitution from a German library so far.

Ghetto Death

Yet the emotional value for families can be vast. Melanie Bruce’s grandfather, Albert Friedlaender, attempted to escape Nazi Germany and follow his son to South Africa in 1941. A professor of chemistry and philosophy, he never managed to flee and died in the ghetto in Lodz. His possessions were lost.
“I got one book back from Berlin,” Bruce, a retired headmistress, said by telephone from Cape Town. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it means a lot to me. My son says he would like to have it one day.”

Most German libraries haven’t even started to search their collections for Nazi-looted books, according to Uwe Hartmann, the head of a German government office which awards funds to museums, libraries and archives for provenance research. While 57 museums have received grants from his office, only 18 libraries have qualified, he said.

“If you think how many thousands of libraries there are in Germany, that suggests there is a lot of work to be done,” Hartmann said.

Helping Libraries

In the case of paintings, lawyers are often willing to work pro bono for claimants because of the value of the objects involved. Yet few individuals or institutions offer libraries assistance. The Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has helped libraries in Bremen, Berlin, Hamburg, Marburg, Weimar and Nuremberg to track heirs, is an exception.

Anne Webber, co-chair of the commission, tells the story of an Israel-based child survivor of the Holocaust who received three books from a German library that belonged to her mother, who had died in a concentration camp. Her mother had inscribed her name on the flyleaves.

“You can imagine what it meant to receive these books with the mother’s signature, a signature the daughter had never seen, in handwriting she’d never known, of a mother she scarcely remembered,” Webber said by telephone.

Emotional Value

“The Nazis took everything, not just artworks,” she said. “For many families, there is no material evidence of the lost lives. It can take hours and hours and days and days to trace the heirs, and the books themselves may be of little financial value. But every book that is returned has tremendous emotional value.”
The Internet made tracking lost property possible for Peter Schweitzer, a New York rabbi. While planning a trip to Berlin to research family history, he plugged his great-grandfather’s name into Google Inc.’s search engine.

“I came across the listing at the Berlin library,” Schweitzer said. “I would have never known about it otherwise - - it was a total accident.”

So his Berlin schedule last year included a visit to the Central and Regional Library to pick up a periodical about Alpine travel that had belonged to Franz and Clara Fuerstenheim, his great-grandparents.

“Holding it was like reclaiming a piece of their lives,” Schweitzer said. “But how many of the lost books will actually be returned? Very few, I imagine.”

Faulkner estate sues over quotes in Woody Allen film & Washington Post ad!

 

My Comments:

 

Whether these lawsuits by the heirs of the Nobel Prize for Literature winner and two-time Pulitzer awardee poet/novelist William Faulkner (1897-1961) are legally valid or not is, I believe, besides the point. For a writer like me, what is more interesting is that these news reports will hopefully encourage more people to be curious about the great literary writer William Faulkner and his works.

 

William Faulkner was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, a giant of the U.S. south.

 

Let us read these literary masterpieces:

 

The Sound and the Fury

 

As I Lay Dying

 

Absalom, Absalom!

 

 

 

Here is one of Faulkner's interesting quotes: 
"It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work."

 

– William Faulkner

 

 

 

Here is a news report about the hullabaloo...

 

Oct 30, 2012 3:51 AM Updated: Oct 30, 2012 7:52 AM

 

By JEFF AMY

Associated Press

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - William Faulkner wrote that the past is never dead. His heirs say their copyright to that phrase is very much alive.

The author's literary estate is suing Sony Pictures Classics for using a paraphrase of the line in Woody Allen's 2011 film, "Midnight in Paris." It's also suing Northrop Grumman Corp. and The Washington Post Co. for using another Faulkner quote in a newspaper ad by the defense contractor.

The first lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Oxford, Miss., says Sony infringed on the copyright when actor Owen Wilson slightly misquoted the line from Faulkner's "Requiem for a Nun." He said, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past."

The second lawsuit, filed Friday in Jackson, Miss., makes similar claims about the ad, which used a passage from a 1956 essay Faulkner wrote in Harper's Magazine. The quote, which says in part "We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it," was the conclusion to an essay criticizing the South's response to school integration.

Sony says the quote is "fair use," a legal term meaning the user doesn't have to license or pay for it.

"This is a frivolous lawsuit and we are confident we will prevail in defending it," a Sony Pictures spokeswoman said in a written statement.

Northrop Grumman declined comment. The Washington Post did not return a phone call Monday.

David Olson, a Boston College law professor who specializes in patent law and copyright, said he agrees that the estate is over-reaching legally.

Lee Caplin, who represents the estate, disagrees. He said these are the first lawsuits it has ever filed. Caplin said that the estate recently licensed a quote to the sitcom "Modern Family." He contrasted that to Allen's use of the quote in the movie.

"He just wanted to kind of take it and he felt entitled," Caplin said of Allen.

Caplin said the suit is not a "money grab." He said Sony was dismissive of his attempts to license the quote after the movie came out.

Under the fair use principle, people can take and reuse part of a copyrighted book, song or movie without permission. Generally, excepts can be used if they're short and if they're part of a new artistic work, scholarly work or a parody. Noncommercial uses are generally more permissible, Olson said.

"If it's for a commercial use, they do have to pay for it," Caplin said.

Olson, though, said that's a flawed understanding of copyright law.

"Commercial use isn't presumptively unfair," he said. He said no one watches "Midnight in Paris" as a substitute for buying "Requiem for a Nun."

"The Faulkner estate's interest is not being harmed in any way," Olson said. "If anything it draws a little more interest."

Caplin argued that even though the movie snippet is short, it's a key summing-up of the whole film, and that Allen took it because Faulkner said it better.

"This is Mr. Faulkner's most famous quote," Caplin said.

In the Northrop case, Caplin said he's not sure the heirs would have wanted Faulkner's name to be associated with an arms manufacturer.

Olson said the Northrop case may be stronger, but he fears that authors are using copyright to limit the political context in which works are quoted or used.

Olson said some estates are zealous about enforcing copyright, to increase revenue or limit discussions that

heirs find disagreeable. The suits could just be warning shots by the estate to other users.

"Part of what they could be doing is just trying to get the word out," Olson said.

One reason to visit New York City! One of the exhibits in the Jewish Museum New York titled "Crossing Borders: Manuscripts from the Bodleian Libraries" (Sept. 14, 2012 - Feb. 3, 2013)





My Comments:

I'm in awe and very impressed with this exhibit on books, especially in this modern 21st century era when the popularity of ebooks, social media, computer games, 24-hour cable TV channels, online movies, texting and shopping malls try to make reading of books less of a pastime than it used to be. I love books! 

Over 50 manuscripts, many of them illuminated, from the famous Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, highlight "the role of Hebrew books as a meeting place of cultures in the Middle Ages".

There is even the "Mishneh Torah" of Maimonides written in his own hand! Egypt, circa year 1180, found in the Cairo Genizah, 9 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches (23.5 x 16.5 centimeters), MS. Heb. d. 32, fols. 53b-54a.

This is a draft of a portion of the Book of Civil Laws, a section of the "Mishneh Torah" of Maimonides (1135– 1204), written in his own hand. The philosopher and royal physician wrote his masterpiece on rabbinic law in Hebrew, whereas his earlier works had been composed in Judeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew characters). Maimonides’s cursive Sephardic script is similar to contemporary Arabic script. The pages seen below deal with the laws of hiring (right) and the laws of borrowed and deposited things (left). See image below:





Many of these amazing and ancient books are on exhibit in the United States for the first time.



Address of Jewish Museum: 1109 5th Ave at 92nd Street, New York City, New York 10128, USA 

Free entrance on Saturdays because of the Jewish Sabbath, a day of rest and a special time for spiritual enrichment free from the concerns of schedules, everyday work and commerce



(Below) Kennicott Bible, scribe: Moses ibn Zabara, artist: Joseph ibn Hayyim, commissioner: Isaac, son of Solomon di Braga, Corunna, Spain, 1476.Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS.
Kennicott 1, fol. 7b

 

The New York Times newspaper's Exhibition Review

What Books Said to One Another

‘Crossing Borders’ Opens at the Jewish Museum

Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

Crossing Borders A 15th-century book showing the Virgin riding a unicorn in this show at the Jewish Museum.

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

Published: September 14, 2012

If you listen closely at the subtly startling new exhibition at the Jewish Museum, “Crossing Borders: Manuscripts From the Bodleian Libraries,” you can hear manuscripts murmuring across millenniums.

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Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

Books of many eras displayed in vitrines at the exhibition “Crossing Borders: Manuscripts From the Bodleian Libraries,” at the Jewish Museum.

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Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

A page from the Kennicott Hebrew Bible.

 

Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

A miniature of Thomas Bodley painted by Nicholas Hilliard.

 

Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times

The Virgin Mary with a unicorn in a 15th-century Italian manuscript.

Some defer to others: they are commenting on sacred texts. Some supplant others: sacred texts of one faith argue against those of another. But, as presented here, many also engage in unexpected dialogues, emulations, even dissections. Scripts imitate one another, even if they are in different languages; images and designs recur in manuscripts from different conceptual worlds. Some texts remain unflustered while everything changes around them. And all of this takes place among just 52 works, some of which are astonishingly ancient, many of which are beautifully illuminated, and most of which are written in Hebrew.

It would be a challenge just to give individual items the attention they demand, let alone attend to their interactions: a third-century fragment of papyrus with Philo of Alexandria’s interpretation of scripture; a fifth-century codex of the Four Gospels written in the ancient Aramaic dialect Syriac; a 12th-century autograph manuscript of legal commentary written in Arabic by the Jewish scholar Maimonides using Hebrew letters; a 16th-century Persian Koran with exquisite decoration; a 16th-century Hebrew poem written for Queen Elizabeth I, urging her to support Hebrew scholarship at the University of Oxford, as had her father, King Henry VIII.

It all comes from the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, which has one of the world’s most important collections of Hebrew manuscripts. These examples were first gathered in 2009 for an exhibition at Oxford called “Crossing Borders: Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Culture.” Its curators, Piet van Boxel and Sabine Arndt (who also edited an informative catalog), suggested that as exiled Jews established communities in vastly different cultures, their manuscripts both reflected the world around them and influenced it in unusual ways. Even when the texts themselves were relatively unchanging, their script and illumination testified to a dynamic, shifting relationship to the dominant cultures and religions of Christianity and Islam.

The curator at the Jewish Museum, Claudia Nahson, uses most of the same material but organizes it slightly differently to highlight the multilingual conversation, forming a capsule history of a people’s textual sojourn. The manuscripts have also been hauntingly mounted by the exhibition designer, MESH Architectures, in vitrines, each illuminated by beams from LEDs projected down, so that when a visitor looks across the galleries, the open codices seem to hover against the deep red walls, a sensation at once reverential and elevating. (MESH also designed the show’s rich Web site: bodleian.thejewishmuseum.org.)

There are some problems that come up, but the overall impact is powerful, with each display creating a miniature colloquy among texts. In some of the earliest material, for example, we see a vertical Hebrew scroll (a “rotulus”) of the 10th or early 11th century. But by that time, we learn, another form of textual presentation had become dominant: the codex, which is close in form to our printed books. And, indeed, the other items in the case, though older than the rotulus, are from codices.

Why were Hebrew codices so late in appearing? In the catalog the scholar Anthony Grafton suggests it may have been deliberate, perhaps to emphasize religious differences, particularly since the codex had become widely used as a portable means of proselytizing for Christianity.

But elsewhere in the exhibition, imitation is more the rule than rejection. Biblical commentary by the 11th-century Jewish scholar Rashi influenced Christian texts, and we see a 13th-century Hebrew Psalter extensively annotated in Latin and French. We also see how Islamic decorative style affected Hebrew scripts and influenced illuminations of both the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible.

One of the most beautiful objects here — the show’s centerpiece — is the 922-page Kennicott Bible, “the most lavishly illuminated Hebrew Bible” to survive from medieval Spain. It was completed in 1476, less than 20 years before the expulsion of the Jews, and is so elaborate it almost undermines itself, a sacred text more enticing for its decoration and its encyclopedic embrace of Islamic, Christian and folk styles than for its content. Its entire text has been scanned and put online by the Jewish Museum; each of its pages can also be examined at the exhibition on a sequence of mounted iPads.

Other examples of transformations of religious symbols are fascinating. Three manuscripts here display a common Christian motif in 15th-century Italy: the Virgin with a unicorn on her lap, defending it from a hunter.

The unicorn had become a symbol of Christ, so the image was an allusion to the Incarnation. But even seemingly secular images of unicorn hunts could be seen as allegories of persecution. With its status as a targeted innocent, the unicorn also became a Jewish symbol, the hunt invoking another kind of persecution.

So when the first page of an elaborately illustrated 1472 Hebrew Bible from Italy includes an image of a woman with a unicorn, as well as an image of Adam and Eve about to eat from the forbidden tree, how is this to be interpreted? This is a manuscript with a considerable scholarly “apparatus,” including commentary and readings, meant, we are told, for a synagogue. Was a Christian illustrator of the Hebrew text engaging in a subtle polemic? Or had the symbols become so bipolar they could sustain incompatible meanings?

These are difficult matters, but the currents of cultural influence run through these texts. We see a 15th-century book of fables in Hebrew that is a 13th-century translation of an Arabic translation of a 4th-century Sanskrit source: a collection of stories about scheming jackals. It is adjacent to a 14th-century Arabic version of the fables from Syria, and a 15th-century printed book from Strasbourg that is a Latin translation of an early Hebrew translation of the Arabic. We learn, too, that such texts led to the development of original Hebrew stories during the same period.

And while examples of the transmission of knowledge during this era have become more familiar in recent years, there is still something uncanny about seeing three examples of Euclid’s “Elements” open to the same diagrams and proofs in 13th-century Arabic, 14th-century Hebrew and 13th-century Latin.

The final gallery here also begins to put the collection itself in context, another astonishing phenomenon: how English Protestants in the late 16th century established Hebrew as a central subject for study. Thomas Bodley, a Hebraist and humanist, re-established a library at Oxford that had been plundered and provided the foundation for its renowned holdings.

There is one issue that is missing here, though it would have been difficult to explore it without considerably more explanation (and perhaps other manuscripts). In the early examples of the influence of Hebrew commentary on Christian scholars, we see a bit of what was at stake in these cultural and religious interactions: religious reinterpretations had to be grounded in a thorough understanding. But then the show ends up paying very little attention to substance, focusing instead on similarities of style, script and image that lie more on the surface of these texts.

Such cosmetic resemblances encourage a sense of vague ecumenism. The interactions among the three religions were described as “practical cooperation” at Oxford and here as “intellectual exchange,” but we don’t really understand much more about the content behind the form.

When stylistic influences were present, for example, were there intellectual or religious transformations that accompanied them? Did beliefs change along with textual styles? What was the nature of the relations among these communities? Even the rise of Protestant Hebraism might have been explored more deeply. In a way, we are its heirs: early Puritan settlers imagined the New World’s possibilities through the imagery of the Hebrew Bible.

But this is also asking for far too much, as if we were seeking elaborate discourses instead of appreciating the muted conversations. An acknowledgment of the complexities would have sufficed. As for inspiring deeper inquiry, that, after all, is a measure of the exhibition’s success.

“Crossing Borders” is on view through Feb. 3 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, at 92nd Street; (212) 423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.

Congratulations to Asia and to China

writer Mo Yan wins 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature

Asia is rising not only economically, but hopefully also culturally. 

Chinese author Mo Yan has just won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature! 

The Nobel Prize is worth around US$1.2 million, but this achievement is priceless for the writer and for all of us Asians.. 

(Below is illustration of author Mo Yan by Adolfo Arranz from the October 13, 2012 article of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post on his forthcoming four new works http://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1059912/new-books-way-nobel-laureate-mo-yan) 

(Below is DVD of director Zhang Yimou's first and award-winning 1987 movie Red Sorghum, based on a novel by Mo Yan and also  starring the actress Gong Li. The movie won the prestigious Golden Bear Award for best film at the 1988 Berlin International Film Festival )

The Swedish Academy’s official announcement read, “Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

(Below images of writers Gabriel Garcia Marquez and William Faulkner)

As an aspiring literary writer who used to write poetry as a student, who penned two unpublished novellas and other works, and as an ethnic Chinese born and raised in the Philippines of which I am its citizen, as an Asian and as a lover of books and literature, I congratulate  the 57-year-old writer Mo Yan for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize for Literature.

  

CHINA DAILY / REUTERS

Chinese writer Mo Yan smiles during an interview at his house in Beijing

Below is video of writers celebrating the win of the Chinese author.... 

Chinese author Mo Yan wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Chinese author Mo Yan has been awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature.

By British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) October 11, 2012

A prolific author, Mo has published dozens of short stories, with his first work published in 1981.

The Swedish Academy praised his work which "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".

The 57-year-old is the first Chinese resident to win the prize. Chinese-born Gao Xingjian was honoured in 2000, but is a French citizen.

Mo is the 109th recipient of the prestigious prize, won last year by Swedish poet Tomas Transtroemer.

Presented by the Nobel Foundation, the award - only given to living writers - is worth 8 million kronor (£741,000).

"He has such a unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognise it as him," said Peter Englund, head of the Academy.

He said Mo had been told of the award, adding: "He was at home with his dad. He said he was overjoyed and terrified."

Born Guan Moye, the author writes under the pen name Mo Yan, which means "don't speak" in Chinese.

He began writing while a soldier in the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and received international fame in 1987 for Red Sorghum: A Novel of China.

Made into a film which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, the novella was a tale of the brutal violence in the eastern China countryside, where he grew up, during the 1920s and 1930s.

Mo Yan "merges folk tales, history, and the contemporary", said Secretary of the Swedish Academy, Peter Englund, announcing the award

Favouring to write about China's past rather than contemporary issues, the settings for Mo's works range from the 1911 revolution, Japan's wartime invasion and Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

"He has a very impressive oeuvre," Michel Hockx, Professor of Chinese at the University of London, said.

"He has a large readership and he addresses the human condition in a way in which the Nobel Committee likes to see."

Mo's other acclaimed works include Republic of Wine, Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out and Big Breasts and Wide Hips.

The latter book caused controversy when it was published in 1995 for its sexual content and depicting a class struggle contrary to the Chinese Communist Party line.

The author was forced by the PLA to withdraw it from publication although it was pirated many times.

After it was translated into English a decade later, the book won him a nomination for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

Chinese people react to the news that writer Mo Yan has won the 2012 Nobel Prize for literature

Despite his social criticism Mo is seen in his homeland as one of the foremost contemporary authors, however critics have accused him of being too close to the Communist Party.

"A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature," the author said in a speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009.

"Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions."

His latest novel, Frog, about China's "one child" population control policy, won the Mao Dun Literature Prize - one of his country's most prestigious literature prizes - last year.

Mo and the other Nobel laureates for medicine, physics, chemistry and peace, will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm and Oslo on 10 December - the anniversary of the death of prize creator Alfred Nobel in 1896.

Excited with Franz Kafka Papers, finally to be released to the world soon!

 

This is Good News to all literature lovers of the world! I am celebrating this good news by starting this blog.

I couldn't forget my 2008 visit to the beautiful historic Prague City in the Czech Republic, and the highlight of the trip was my retracing the life of the great Jewish writer Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)---from where he lived, worked, where he and the German Jewish scientist Albert Einstein had met/dined at a restaurant, to the synagogue and to the Jewish cemetery where he was finally buried.



"And yet Kafka was Prague and Prague was Kafka. Never had it been Prague so perfectly, so typically, as during Kafka's lifetime, and never would it be so again. And we, his friends, 'the happy few'...we knew that the smallest elements of this Prague were distilled everywhere in Kafka's work."
- Johannes Urzidil in The World of Franz Kafka 

I believe outstanding writers like Franz Kafka are indeed immortal! He was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.

(Below images of Franz Kafka and his handwritten letter)

 

 

 now, sharing the good news...

Israeli Court Rules Library to Get Kafka Papers, Lawyer Says

By Gwen Ackerman - Oct 15, 2012 12:01 AM GMT+0800 Bloomberg

A cache of as yet unseen Franz Kafka manuscripts will be made available online to scholars after an Israeli court ruled they weren’t given as a gift to the secretary of the author’s executor and friend Max Brod.

According to the Tel Aviv Family Court decision, the papers, which were stashed away in safes and attics for years, will become the property of the National Libraty of Israel, which promised in a statement to scan and put them on its website.

Papers that once belonged to Franz Kafka have been the subject of a court case as archivists collect other material by the late author. This photo shows a collection of photographs of the writer and his friends.


Source: The National Library of Israel via Bloomberg.

An undated handout photo, provided to the media on Thursday, Aug. 28, 2008 shows Franz Kafka. Source: Schocken Books via Bloomberg News

“We are talking about a historical decision that brought justice to Max Brod and his friend Kafka,” Meir Heller, lawyer for the library, said by telephone. Harel Ashwall, the lawyer for the secretary’s two daughters, disagreed and said he planned to appeal the ruling.

Kathi Diamant, director of the Kafka Project at San Diego State University, has said in the past that papers that may be part of the collection may help scholars locate some Kafka notebooks that the Gestapo confiscated from the author’s companion, Dora Diamant.

The dispute over the papers began with Brod, a German- language author best known for his Kafka biography and historical novels. Though Kafka’s last wish was for his papers to be burned, Brod kept them, ensuring the publication of “The Trial” and “The Castle.”

Literary Estate

When Brod died in 1968, he left his estate to his secretary Esther Hoffe, who then left it to her daughters. The court ruled today that the will intended for Brod’s literary estate, including the Kafka manuscripts, to be given to a public institution and kept intact.

“We think that the decision does not reflect the intentions and desire of Max Brod, in fact the opposite is true,” Ashwall said in an e-mailed response to the ruling. “We also think the ruling is flawed in legal terms.”

For decades, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of Israel  intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

Internet Plan

The library plans to catalog and preserve the papers, then, “in the not so distant future scan and open them up to all on the Internet, in this way fulfilling Brod’s will,” Oren Weinberg, director of the library, said in an e-mailed statement.

During her lifetime, Hoffe sold a handwritten manuscript of Kafka’s “The Trial” for $1.98 million at a 1988 Sotheby’s auction in  London.

Heller said he hoped that all Kafka papers that were bought from Hoffe in the past will now be returned to their proper place at the library in Jerusalem so they can be presented together to scholars.

Muse highlights include New York Weekend, Lewis Lapham on history and Richard Vines on food. s, Hoffe declined to make the papers available to the public, frustrating archivists and scholars alike. Kafka specialists had hoped her daughters would open the files, providing new insights into the author, who died of tuberculosis in 1924.

When the sisters, now in their 70s, attempted to ratify their mother’s will in January 2008, the state of  Israel intervened. The case landed in the family court, where the National Library became a party to the proceedings.

To contact the reporter on this story: Gwen Ackerman in Jerusalem at gackerman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff or.

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The following are images I had researched in the Internet, on places and memorials in Prague City associated with the great writer Franz Kafka)


(Photo below is that of the unique Franz Kakfa Monument in Prague)




(Photo of the Franz Kafka grave in the Jewish Cemetery of Prague City)




(Photo below of the Jewish synagogue of Prague)




(Photo below of Prague's Spanish Synagogue)





(Photo of the entrance to the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague)