Milena Jesenska (born 10. 8.1896 – died 17.5. 1944)

Milena Jesenskawas born in Prague a few years before the end of nineteenth century. Her father was a professor at Charles University and a successful dentist. Her mother, Milena Hejzlarova, a beautiful, though frail woman gave birth to another child, a boy, when Milena was four years old. The child died shortly after it was born.

Milena`s mother’s health gradually declined and she spent the last years of her life ill with pernicious anemia. She was at first forced to sit in a wheelchair and later when she became bedridden she was cared for by young Milena.

When her mother died, Milena was thirteen years old. She was left alone with her self-obsessed father and it was not easy for her to grow up under his strict influence. Although she liked their long walks through the Prague countryside, she detested when she was forced to help her father with wounded soldiers sent from the field hospitals to professor Jesensky´s dental surgery. Her memories of these times were etched with incidents of spanking by her dominant father.

At fifteen, Milena was a mature young woman trying to free herself from the influence of her father. She attended one of the first secondary school’s in Czechoslovakia , the “ Minerva School for Girls”, founded by a group of patriots. “The Minervans”, as the emancipated girl students were called, could later be found in the midstream of Czech cultural and political life. Milena’s personality at this time alternated between a rebellion against conventions, which she tried to deal with through aggressive arrogance, and a wild urge to live. At the same time she was a passionate reader of novels by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Hamsun, Meredith, and Thomas Mann amongst others, which formed a sense of values within her.

Milena’s first long love was Ernst Polak who worked in a Prague bank. Ernst’s main interest was to spend free time in the Café Arco together with German writers and artist who lived in Prague . Thus Ernst Polak introduced Milena to the world of Franz Werfell, Max Brod, Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Kafka. This love affair was unacceptable to her father who, as a Czech patriot, found her involvement to be disgraceful.

Together with a doctor friend of his, he had Milena committed to a mental home for nine months trying, in this way, to keep Milena away from Ernst. This did not work however, the resourceful Milena obtained a key to the garden gate from a well-meaning nurse, and was able to meet her lover at will.

Milena and Ernst married soon after her release from Veleslavins mental home in March 1918. The married couple moved to Vienna . Milena’s father immediately withdrew all his financial support and broke off all relations with her.

The marriage was not a happy one. Ernst soon lost interest in his wife, indulged himself more and more into Café Herrenhof’s artistic and intellectual life and found himself mistresses. Milena, an outsider in a new environment, soon felt alone. And she had to start making her own living. She started to give Czech lessons for German-speaking industrialist whose properties were situated in newly-created Czechoslovakia . On top of that, when she was especially short of money, she went to a railroad station to work as a porter. Then she started to write short articles from Vienna ’s varied world of culture and politics and translated from German to Czech. Her first articles appeared in the Prague newspaper, “Tribuna”.

In 1920, Milena read Kafka´s first stories and decide to translate them into Czech.

This led to an exchange of letters and a visit by Milena to the town of Merano , where Kafka was taking a cure for his tuberculosis. It was there that she and Franz Kafka fell in love. They met again for four days in Vienna and once more in Gmünd. It was a passionate love coloured by a touch of tragedy. Franz Kafka was deeply afraid of his own sentiments and feelings, and Milena was not capable of leaving Ernst Polak. This tragedy can be followed in “Letters to Milena”, a collection of Kafka’s letters, published many years later. Milena’s letters to him have disappeared without trace. They may have been burned by Franz Kafka. Nevertheless, they are now lost in the whirl wind of history.

The love affair ended, at Kafka´s request, because Milena´s vitality and hunger for his love weighed on him. They stayed close however; Milena wrote to him occasionally and visited him a few times at his parent’s house in Prague , where the ailing Kafka took refuge.

Franz Kafka, the author of Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, The Castle and The Trial died in July 1924. The world didn’t take much notice of his death with the exception of Milena´s today-famous obituary published on July 6 in “Narodni Listy”.

It begins: “The day before yesterday, Franz Kafka, a German writer living in Prague , died at the Kierling sanatorium in Klosterneuburg near Vienna . Few people knew him here in Prague , for he was a recluse, a wise man who was afraid of life.”

And a few lines down in the obituary Milena caught the essence of Kafka’s life and creativity in these fine words:

“He wrote the most important books in recent German literature. They embody in untendentious form the battle of the generations of our time. They are genuinely naked and therefore seem naturalistic even when they speak in symbols. They have the dry irony and second sight of a man, who saw the world so clearly that he could not bear it and had to die, for he was unwilling to make concessions, to take refuge, as others do, in intellectual delusions, however noble.”

It was at this time that Milena left Ernst Polak for Count Schaffgotsch and shortly afterwards, they together left Vienna for Dresden . Count Shaffgotsch was one of the Austrian soldiers who fought at the Eastern front. He had been a prisoner of war in Russia and when the revolution passed, he stayed for a while in the vastness of Russia . When he returned home he was a great admirer of Communism as was Milena. It was this mutual admiration that brought him and Milena together. After endless café discussions, what could be more powerful than straightforward ideology?

In 1925, they both moved to Alice Gerstl’s, a friend of Milena’s who lived with her husband, Otto Rühles, in a small village outside Dresden. Otto Rühle’s was a former member of the Reichstag for a Social Democratic party and was a founder of the German Communist party. He left the party soon after it was founded however, but remained a Marxist as long as he lived. It was here, in the company of her hostesses and their friends, that Milena probably acquired her fondness for, and at the same time her scepticism of, the Communist ideology.

Her contributions to the Czech newspapers grew, not only in “Tribuna” but also “Narodni Listy”, the conservative Prague newspaper where Milena edited the Woman’s Page. This became more and more her arena.

She moved back to Prague in order to be able to work more effectively. She was able to enjoy once again Prague society, and spent long, joyful hours at Metro Café, Národní kavárna or The Slavia. A collection of her articles was published in 1926 under the name, “The Way to Simplicity”. Count Shaffgotsch was unhappy though, he knew no Czech language, and without friends of his own or any sort of work, he slowly faded away.

In the summer of 1926, at an outing, organised by the Creative Artist´s Association (called “Mánes” in Czech), Milena met an architect, Jaromír Krejcár. They married in 1927 and their first and only child, Jana, was born 1928. Milena´s maternity was a protracted period of pain and sickness which, in the end, led to her hospitalization. The doctors who assisted her eventually gave her up for lost. She did not die, however, although she became addicted to morphine which she was given to control the pain. Her left knee was affected by multiple metastases from septicaemia. She finally lost all flexibility in it after years of struggling.

It was another Milena who re-entered life after more than a year of convalescence.

She left the bourgeois “Narodni Listy” and took over the woman’s pages of the liberal “Lidove Noviny”. However, the articles she now wrote had lost the edge of her previously published ones. In 1931, she officially joined the Communist Party and started to write for the party newspaper “Tvorba”. To begin with, she was an ardent party member, convinced of the party monopoly on the truth and participated in demonstrations and meetings. But to feed her morphine addiction required money of course and to deal with this permanent shortage, she started to contribute to the Social Democractic newspaper “Pravo Lidu”, under various pseudonyms. She tried to be cured from her drug addiction several times but without success. Even though Milena´s home life became increasingly unhappy she and her husband started to talk about moving to the Soviet Union in 1934. Their child Jana would soon be of school age and the Prague schools seemed to them to be too bourgeois and corrupt. In the end it was only her husband, Jaromir, the admirer of Le Corbusier, who, after receiving an invitation, went to Moscow . He was carried away by the dream of unlimited possibilities to build modern cities for the working heroes. After two years he came back, divorced Milena and remarried with his Russian love Riva whom he brought back with him. He also appeared to be totally disappointed with the stern Communist style of life. It was around this time that Milena was expelled from the Communist Party which she increasingly started to regard as lifeless, mechanical and even inhuman.

She started to write for the liberal democratic “Pritomnost” (The Present) in 1937 and threw off all traces of her Communist past. Her campaign against all threats to freedom, whether from the left or the right, brought her into conflict with left wings intellectuals. At last she successfully underwent a detoxification treatment and by that gained renewed strength and stability. Milena became a political journalist, reporting about growing tensions between the Sudet Germans and the Czechs, two Czech mobilizations and the situation of the Jews in the Sudeten land. Her skill in German enabled her to talk with all sides involved in the conflict on an equal footing. Nevertheless, always the patriot, she hoped that the Czech army and people would be able to resist Hitler.

After the Munich Agreement and even more so after the occupation of the rest of former Czech part of Czechoslovakia by Nazis, fugitives from repression, Jews and German and Czech intellectuals, found refuge at the home of Milena. Although Czech officers and fliers hid there before being driven by car across the occupied territory to the vicinity of the Polish border by a young German, count Joachim von Zedtwitz. Some of these refuges tried to save their lives; others wanted to join the French army in the war they were convinced was soon coming. Thus Milena became step by step involved in the resistance movement. And she continued to write articles filled with Czech patriotism for the growing underground press. One day Milena was arrested, sent to Dresden for trial, and then sent from there directly to the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Here she met Margarete Buber-Neumann a widow of a German communist leader executed by Stalin. Margarete Buber-Neumann spent some time in Gulag camps before being handed to the Gestapo, together with fellow German Communists shortly after the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty was signed in August 1939. Milena and Margarete became close friends and this helped them to fight off the hate from imprisoned Communist comrades who saw them as renegades and traitors.

Three weeks before D-day, on May 17, 1945 , Milena Jesenska died after a long kidney illness. Her body was cremated and the ashes spread on the lake near the entrance to the concentration camp.

Written by Dalibor Svoboda