The Life of Milena Jesenská

Photo:  Milena Jesenská,  Kouřímská 6, Prague Vinohrady

Peter Demetz

To judge from an increasing number of biographies, anthologies, and learned essays, Milena Jesenská was the most famous Czech woman of the twentieth century, and analogies to Frida Kahlo, though with a few modifications, are entirely farfetched. The question remains whether her brief affair with Franz Kafka in 1919-20, at a time when she was married and he engaged to Julie Wohryzek, deserves more attention than what she achieved later in life as  a political writer and courageous conspirator against the occupying German powers in Prague. Legends abound, including a few feminist ones, and it seems almost impossible to delineate her character, because as her biographer Marta Marková-Kotyková suggets, she changed so often and eradicated all traces of what gone on before, including husbands, partners, and lovers, famous or not.

Milena was born on August 10, 1896, daughter of a young and impecunious physician who had married a shy rich girl from a good middle-class family; he patriotically described himself as a descendant of Dr. Jan Jesenius, the rector of Prague University who has decapitated with other Protestants in 1621 after the battle of the White Mountain, won by Catholic powers. Milena belonged to the elite. She entered the Minerva Gymnasium, established to further the academic education of young women (another minervist was Alice Masaryk, daughter of the sociologist who became president of the First Republic), and while Milena’s father made a quick career as a professor of stomologz at the faculty clinics, she had sufficient time (though loyally caring for her ailing mother, who died in 1916) to write for the school paper, to cultivate crushes on her admirable class teacher Albína and a few other young and older men, preferably artists, and to provoke Prague’s stolid citizens by promenading with her friends Staša and Jarmila, pretending to be lesbians à trois wearing flowing robes, no corsets, and rarely stockings. What was worse, Milena did not care for the ever-important ethnic delineations of Prague life, and infuriating her nationalist father, she began to hang around the café Arco, close to the Hybernská railway station, where young German Jewish intellectuals and writers gathered to gossip about their ideas and manuscripts.

Though Milena did not speak much German, she felt intensely taken with the articulate Ernst Pollak, a bank clerk seriously interested in recent philosophy. (Kafka made only rare appearances at the Arco.) After an abortion she was sent by her father to a psychiatric institution to keep her away from mischief and her Jewish lover. But when she was allowed to marry Pollak, though she had to leave Prague immediately for exile in Vienna, where he obtained another banking position as a foreign-language correspondent.

Her Vienna years with Pollak, from 1918 to 1924, were an almost unmitigated disaster, because he continued his many affairs and spent much time at the cafés Central and Herrenhof with the most important Viennese intellectuals of the moment. Milena was distraught and, rather helplessly confronting the Viennese idiom, looked “like seven volumes of Dostoyevsky,” as Franz Blei remarked. But she wanted to assert herself, planned to give Czech lessons, and began to write, in Czech, for Prague newspapers. Her first article, about hungry and cold Vienna, was published on December 30, 1919 in the Tribuna; in the 1920s she made regular contributions to Národní listy and the liberal Lidové noviny. She was not exactly pleased when Kafka, intending a compliment, told her how close her text was to the wording of the original.

After writing long and irresolute letters to each other, Milena and Kafka were happy together in Vienna or a few days between July 29 and August 4, 1920, roaming the woods and basking in the sun, then miserable on August 14, in a shabby little hotel at Gmünd, on the Austrian-Czech border. She had been touched by the tender sympathy and compassion of his letters, and he, after his calamity with Felice Bauer and again on the rebound, engaged to another woman, was intrigued and repulsed by the corporeality of love. (He had fewer hesitations with prostitutes.) Milena was wondrously alive, like a raging “fire”, Kafka told his friend Max Brod; but he was disgusted by his own body, not just because he was sick, and felt unable to escape the abrupt recurrence of happiness and horror. After the hapless tryst at Gmünd, both Milena, who continued to love Ernst Pollak, and Kafka knew they were not made for each other, much as it might have seemed that way earlier, yet it was Milena to whom he handed over his diaries of the preceding years, clearly a sign of inordinate trust.

In 1924 Milena left her apartment on the Lerchenfelderstrasse in Vienna and Ernst Pollak (who later acquired a doctorate of philosophy and in his London exile married a woman of high birth), and together with Ernst’s close friend Franx Xaver Count Schaffgotsch, who had returned from a Russian POW camp¹, went to a place near Dresden to join a colony of independent left-wing intellectuals, but not for long. After leaving the “red Count”, she finally returned to Prague and assiduously worked for the middle-class Národní listy and the editorial offices of a popular illustrated weekly, mostly writing about fashion as an expression of style and character, interior architecture, and living progressively.

She moved easily among the avant-garde, married Jaromír Krejcar, a young architect of bold functionalist ideas, and bore him a daughter, whom she liked to call Honza, as if she had been a boy. Her life was far from easy, because she suffered from inflammation of the joints, spent months in the hospital, and an inevitable operation left her right knee immobilized and, worse, made her increasingly dependent on painkilling drugs. By 1928-29 she was ready to join the Communist Party line. In 1934 her second husband departed for the Soviet Union, where he hoped to build some of his modernist projects (he was thoroughly disappointed), but after the Moscow show trials in 1936, Milena herself could no longer accept what the Soviet political functionaries werde demanding. Krejcar returned from Russia with another woman, and Milena wanted to start all over again.

By then she had come truly into her own. She was now forty years old, mother of a growing daughter, and physically handicapped because of her intractable knee. She resolved to break with her past, to help other people, and to confront squarely the danger increasingly threatening The Czechoslovak Republic. She continued to attract intelligent men of the left, and in a radical decision, she freed herself from her drug dependence, though not of her habit of dragging her daughter to a daily movie because she could not live without a regular dose of the cinema, and began to write for the liberal weekly Přítomnost (The Present) and its friendly editor in chief, Ferdinand Peroutka, whom she had once despised as an enemy of the people. When Peroutka was arrested in the spring of 1939, she immediately stepped into his place, editing the weekly until it had to cease publication. Then, being supported by the young poet Lumír Čivrný, Honza’s teacher and Milena’s lover, she wrote for the illegal newspaper V boj (Into the Fight!), published by the resistance organization of the Czech Army (In Defense of the Nation), run by intrepid officers, and helped distribute it in Prague.

That was not all. Together with Count Joachim Zedwitz, a German medical student in Prague who owned a sporty small Aerocar and cut an appropriate figure in leather coat with a little swastika attached, she selflessly helped people escape via the Polish border: Communists, liberals, Trotskyites, Jews, Czechs, Germans. She was arrested by the Gestapo on November 1, 1939, and sent to the centration camp of Bergen-Belsen in July 1940. Life in the camp, if it could be called such, was made particularly difficult for Milena because many of her Czech fellow prisoners were organized Communists who strongly believed in the future mission of the Soviet Union and who despised her as hateful “Trotskyite” who had betrayed the movement and written for the liberals. Among these women was Gusta Fučíková, especially inimical to Milena because she suspected her of having had an affair with her martyred husband, later a Communist Party saint. Milena arrived at Bergen-Belsen racked by arthritic pains and was ordered to work in the medical department guarding the records of women infected by venereal disease and particularly endangered by medical experiments. At least she was protected — by an older Viennese Social Democrat in the camp administration — and enjoyed a sudden friendship with Margarete Buber-Neumann, whom the NKVD² had handed over to the Gestapo in the days of the Hitler-Stalin pact because she was the widow of a leading German Communist functionary arrested and shot in his Moscow exile.

Milena's state of health deteriorated. She was diagnosed with an inflammation of the kidneys, and after one had been removed, received an inordinate number of blood transfusions, and died on May 17, 1944. She never knew that Count Zedwitz, who himself had been imprisoned for fifteen months, tried with the help of a Berlin lawyer to bring about her release; the Berlin office was destroyed by Allied bombers and the lawyer killed; nothing came of his desperate attempt to help.

In an early essay for the liberal Přítomnost, Jesenská seized on the chance to speak openly about the CP, which had quietly disappeared from the public scene after the Czech government had prohibited its activities on October 20, 1938. Undoubtedly she revealed something of her own experience when she wrote that to be a party member always created “difficulties” and “risks” because the party, in spite of or because of its revolutionary claims, had little influence on practical social legislation, usually initiated by the Social Democrats, the CP’s prime enemies. In 1933 the Communist Party had abruptly changed its policies, proclaiming that it was necessary above all to fight Fascism together with liberals and Social Democrats, but the change, totally in the service of the Sovien Union, had come too fast, and the “mind of the worker was not so fickle”. In changing, the party had lost its inner democracy and thereafter could do nothing but demand “blind faith” and “complete obedience”, which did not exactly combine with “independent political thinking”. Where thought did not flourish, she added, poems did not flourish either.

In other Přítomnost essays, Jesenská constantly and resolutely challenged her countrymen, who were drifting to a new nationalism of the right, with her combative ideas, which closely reflected T. G. Masaryk’s legacy. She reported with horror what happened to Jews in Vienna after the Anschluss and could not help noticing that many refugees from Austria and the Sudeten, Jews and non-Jews, were streaming into Prague: “people … without documents, on foot, with empty hands. Wandering among us is the reflection of many hundreds of appalling human fates, hundred of thousands of painful partings, suicides and injustices.”

Almost alone among her unwilling fellow citizens, she tried to understand why the republic had lost so many friends among working class German Socialists, and her arguments came close to those of the philosopher Emanuel Rádl, who believed that the economic crisis hit the Sudeten regions more heavily because of insufficient attention given to them by the central offices in Prague, that while “people in the country were unemployed for three years”, as Jesenská worte, in the Sudeten regions “it was six years”. With these refugees in mind, Jesenská pleaded for an international solution to the problem caused by the Munich declarations signed by France and Britain; when confronted with the well-meaning admonitions of a friend that it was her duty to be “first and foremost a Czech” at the present moment, she came, in an essay of May 10, 1939, to the thoughtful conclusion that it was more important to be “a decent person”; being Czech did not mean anything in itself as long as it “was not bout to particular qualities” and the “highest moral standards”.

On February 12, 1994, the Medal of the Righteous Among the Nations was posthumously awarded to Milena Jesenská by the Jerusalem Commission, and it was resolved that her name be “forever engraved on the Honor Wall in the garden of the Righteous”, at Yad Vasem.

Page 128—133, Prague in Danger
The years of German occupation, 1939-45

PETER DEMETZ,

Sterling Professor Ermeriuts of Germanic Language and Literature at Yale University, was bonr in Prague in 1922 and immigrated to the United States in 1948.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008

¹ A prisoner-of-war camp (often abbreviated as POW camp) is a site for the containment of enemy fighters captured by a belligerent power in time of war.
² Наро́дный комиссариа́т вну́тренних дел: Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del; Russian pronunciation: [nɐˈrod.nɨj kə.mʲɪ.sə.rʲɪˈat ˈvnut.rʲɪ.nʲɪx̬ dʲel]), abbreviated NKVD (НКВД was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.