SOURCE: “Max Brod as a Novelist: From the Jewish Zeitroman to the Zionist Novel,” in Von Franzos zu Canetti: Judische Autoren aus Osterreich Neue Studien, Mark H. Gelber, Hans Otto Horch, Sigurd Paul Scheichl, eds., Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996, pp. 25-36.

In the following essay, Bahr examines Brod's contributions to several novelistic genres.

Brod's reputation as a prose writer was overshadowed by his fame as Kafka's friend, biographer, interpreter, and editor of Kafka's posthumous writings.¹ By 1948, Brod's Kafka biography was widely read, but hardly any of his own works of fiction. This was not always the case. Around 1915, when Kafka had published only a few titles, Max Brod was considered an important representative of early Expressionism, if not one of its initiators, and his novel Schloβ Nornepygge of 1908 was hailed as “the most modern of modern books,” as one critic said on its dust jacket.² But as soon as...