A Tel Aviv court ruled on Sunday that manuscripts by Franz Kafka and Max Brod are to be transferred to the Israeli National Library - the newspaper Haaretz reports.

This decision puts an end to a highly complex and drawn-out dispute. Judge Talia Pardo Kupelman, who presided over the case, described it as "a window into the lives, desires, frustrations and the souls of two of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century."

The documents’ private owners, Eva Hoffe and Ruth Wiesler, supported by the German Literature Archive, had sought to retain ownership over the manuscripts. This was challenged on the basis of Brod’s will, which left the documents to Israel’s National Library.

Kafka died in 1924, but Brod, who had been his friend and editor, took the manuscripts with him when he fled the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

This ruling means that the manuscripts will now be accessible by the public.