Franz Kafka wanted no evidence left behind—at his death, at age 40 in 1924, he left behind instructions for his friend Max Brod to burn all surviving manuscripts, unread. Had these wishes been followed, many of Kafka’s most famous works, including The Trial and The Castle, would have been destroyed. Yet other, even more daunting obstacles to Kafka’s legacy came posthumously from Nazi censors, who first limited the sale of his books to Jewish readers, and then finally banned them outright as “harmful and undesirable."