The writer Josef Kodicek remembered a meeting with Milena in those years: “A sunny scene—I can still see it as clearly as if it were today. Sunday, shortly before noon, on the Pfikope. Prague is still a provincial town…. And provincial towns tend to have their corso. The Prague corso was the Prikope. I see fashionably dressed Germans, I see students promenading, Austrian officers pausing to exchange greetings, smiling, making appointments. On Sunday morning the Pfikope was old-Austrian territory. The commanding figure of Count Thun, the six-foot, eight-inch governor of Prague, towers over the crowd. He’s as thin as a stork and the best dressed man on the continent. He stands serenely, in celestial calm, with one foot tucked into the crook of his other knee, surveying the ebb and flow of the crowd through his black-rimmed monocle. Just then two young girls stroll by, arm in arm. They are both something to look at. The first Prague girls to give themselves a deliberately boyish look. Their style is perfect. Their hairdos are modeled on the English Pre-Raphaelites; they are as slender as willow withes, and there is nothing petit bourgeois about their faces or figures. They are probably the first Czech girls of the prewar generation to extend their world from the Czech promenade on Ferdinand Street to the Pfikope’ corso, thus making contact with the younger generation of German literati. They are genuine European women, a sensation! Count Thun swivels on one leg to look at them, and a wave of enthusiasm and curiosity passes through the crowd. Then Willy Haas, Kornfeld, Fuchs, and a few others of Werfel’s circle appear and introduce the two girls to us: Milena and Miss Sataša. Clearly, it’s Milena who sets the tone.
“Wild stories were told about them: Milena spent money like a drunken sailor; to avoid being late for an appointment, she had swum across the Vltava with her clothes on; she had been arrested in the city park at five o’clock in the morning for picking the ‘municipal’ magnolias so dear to her lover. Her generosity was as boundless as her extravagance. Bursting with vitality, she burned her candle at both ends.
“To look at them—how shall I put it?—with a somewhat critical eye, there was something stylized, slightly affected about both of them. But how could they have helped it? Those were the days when the Klimt and Preisler period in painting was breathing its last, when the ‘Silvery Wind’ of the poet Frana” Sramek was blowing over the fields. The Jugendstil of Ruzena Svobodova was giving way to a new trend that was a lot more earthy and robust. Young people were beginning to laugh again. Werfel’s Friend of All the World decreed the joy of living and the brotherhood of man. Decadence was giving way to robust vitality. Werfel was at work on his second volume of poems. A short while later, Milena became the magnetic pole of a whole generation of literary Czechs and Germans, among them a few who had already acquired a European reputation.” *
Milena felt drawn to German and Jewish intellectuals, not only because they were new to her, but also because among them she encountered an old culture that was very different from the narrow, petty provincialism in which she had grown up. The longing to break away from the Czech culture in which she was still rooted and become a part of a more cosmopolitan movement was characteristic of Milena.
The development of German literature in Prague was an extraordinary phenomenon, for it occurred, as it were, in a vacuum. These German writers had no roots in the country and found no audience among the great mass of Czechs surrounding them. Franz Kafka once wrote to Milena: “I have never lived among the German people. German is my mother tongue and consequently natural to me. “f This encapsulation in the German language was especially true of the Jewish writers such as Kafka, but also to a lesser degree of the few German writers living in Prague. Of Rainer Maria Rilke, for example. He found no audience among the Czechs, which makes his poetic achievement all the greater. Perhaps it is the encounter between two alien worlds that accounts for the strong mutual attraction between the lively Czech girls and these sensitive writers, an attraction favored as much by the divergence as by the similarities in their ideas, and further encouraged by the fact that all concerned, the Prague Germans and the Czech women, had grown up in the same surroundings, in this city with its ancient streets and bridges and sleepy squares, with its red, gray, and green roofs at the foot of the proud Hradcany castle, in the same Czech landscape, under the same trees, on the gentle banks of the same twining river, the Vltava. In this sharply divided city, they came from very different environments. But now—and this was the new factor—young people on both sides of the divide dropped their deep-seated prejudices and found their way to one another. But for all her interest in new things and people, Milena always remained independent and never imitated anyone. However many Germans and Prague Jews may have attracted her and shared their thoughts with her, she always remained the same warmhearted, thoroughly Czech girl.
Among the girls at the Minerva School, there were quite a few strong personalities, quite a few shining lights, but Milena outshone them all. What distinguished her most was her strong feeling for others, thanks to which she won the affection of all sorts of people, men as well as women. She recognized no social barriers; she made friends in all walks of life, but she was gifted with a sixth sense that enabled her to detect pretense, to see through the veneer of acquired habits to the heart and core of the human being. Social forms and conventions mattered little to her, least of all those of the narrow bourgeois society in which she had grown up.
The Minervans were in no sense a formal or exclusive group. They never engaged in organized activities on the order of the German Youth Movement. They were all such out-and-out individuals that the mere thought of forming a group would have struck them as absurd. Up until the early thirties, when she joined the Communist party, Milena belonged to no group whatever, though there were several among the Prague intellectuals. She moved freely among artists and writers of all trends and schools, and was likely to turn up anywhere.
While most of her girlfriends were unduly given to sensual pleasures, Milena, though quite capable of enjoying herself and often accused of amorality, was more intellectual in her ways. The others, the “Bacchantes,” regarded her as a kind of bluestocking.
Milena, the most daring and most anarchistic, was almost the only one who was able, thanks to her energy and vitality, to fulfill the expectations justified by her great gifts. Thanks to some secret force within her, she was able, after sinking to the lowest depths, to rise again and find her way back to normal life and the pursuit of high ambitions.
The young people of those years were molded not only by literature, but also by the feminist movement, which in Bohemia could boast of a particularly romantic tradition. A good friend of Milena once said, “I always thought of heron horseback with a pistol in her belt.” He may have been thinking of the “war of the maidens,” a legend often invoked by the members of the Bohemian feminist movement. The story is that long, long ago, when Princess Libusa ruled over Bohemia, women were held in high esteem. Wishing to maintain her dynasty, she cast about for a prince consort and chose Pfemysl, a simple peasant, sur-named Pfemysl the Plowman. When the princess died, Pfemysl became ruler over Bohemia, and it was all up with the women’s power and prestige. But the women insisted on their old rights and rejected the rule of the new prince and the men. They left Pfemysl’s castle of Vysehrad and built one of their own on the Vltava, which they named “Devin,” the Maiden’s Castle. They then made war on the male sex by force of arms and by guile, but were finally defeated in a decisive battle, in which their leader Vlasta and several hundred maidens lost their lives.
One of the most remarkable Bohemian women and a pioneer of the faninist movement was the writer Bozena Nemcová (1820— 1862), whose beautiful book The Grandmother is still popular today. Apart from her own writing, she collected and transcribed Czech folktales. Milena has often been likened to her, and in speaking of Milena’s style Franz Kafka once said, “In the Czech language I know (with my limited knowledge) only one music, that of Bozena Nemcová; here I see a different music, but comparable to the other in determination, p
assion, tenderness, and above all a clairvoyant intelligence.”* There is also a certain similarity in the two women’s lives. Both overstepped the bounds of bourgeois morality, both loved with all their hearts, both suffered deep and repeated disappointments, and both subscribed, for a time at least, to the radical political left.
Since Bozena Nemcová there have been other outstanding women in Bohemia who have made a name for themselves either in literature or in public affairs. Two of these were Ruzena and Marie Jesenská, Milena’s aunts and her father’s sisters. Marie Jesenská, the younger, was known for her translations of Dickens, George Eliot, and other English novelists. Ruzena, the elder, was one of the best-known woman writers of her time. Her early works were sentimental, neoromantic poems, often suggestive of folk songs. Later, she turned to prose, love stories, at which she was more successful. She had the courage to deal with erotic problems, a novelty at the time, especially for a woman writer. She never recovered from her first unhappy love affair. The search for true happiness in love is the main theme of her work. What the well-known Czech literary historian Arne Novak has to say of Ruzena Jesenská seems almost to foreshadow the life of her niece. He speaks of her “steadily improving work …”and, in connection withher later novels, of’lovingly delineated figures of courageous women who, whether in happiness or in shipwreck, follow only the prompting of their hearts.”
For years Aunt Ruzena and Milena disapproved of each other. Horrified at Milena’s wild life, her rigidly bourgeois aunt kept trying to mother her. But Milena rebuffed her aunt and made fun of her old-maidishness and sentimental books. Later on, when life had dealt Milena cruel blows, when she had proved herself as a writer and shown political courage as well, mutual respect developed into loving tenderness. Milena fled to Aunt Ruzena when in need of comfort and support. In her she found boundless devotion; Ruzena loved her despite, or possibly because of, all her faults. Once, when Aunt Ruzena was seventy-three years old, she remarked sadly, “I fear I’m growing old; I haven’t fallen in love for three years now.”
Throughout the history of Bohemia, women distinguished themselves by their courage and combativeness. The same longing for freedom from convention that inspired Milena and the Mi-nervans, the same courage to swim against the stream, runs like a red thread from generation to generation.
Milena may have inherited her spirit of independence. As Jan Jesensky never wearied of pointing out, he was descended from an old Czech family. There is still a memorial tablet in the Old Town Hall listing his ancestor Jan Jessenius among the martyrs of the Czech nation. Born in 1566, Jessenius studied in Breslau, Wittenberg, and Padua, where he took his degree as a doctor of medicine. He then returned to Breslau, became an instructor at the university, and at the same time personal physician to the elector of Saxony. In 1600 he was called to Prague, where the astronomer Tycho Brahe recommended him as physician to the emperor Rudolf II and later to the emperor Matthias.
In Prague, Jan Jessenius soon became a celebrity, both in scientific circles and among the people. In June 1600 he was the first man in Central Europe to dissect a cadaver. In 1617 when a new rector of Charles University was to be elected, the name of Jan Jessenius was put forward. Jessenius, who was a nobleman of Hungarian-Slovak descent, spoke no Czech but only German and Latin, and many thought it inappropriate that a foreigner unversed in the language of the land should be made rector of the Czech university. In the end, however, he was elected, the decisive factor being his Protestantism.
Jessenius fought fearlessly for the progressive ideas of his time, notably freedom of conscience and freedom of scientific investigation, against the opposition of the Church. He resisted the efforts of the emperor Ferdinand II to gain control of the Charles University.
After the “defenestration” of the Catholic councillors in Prague, the revolt of the Bohemian Protestants erupted. Jan Jessenius was among the rebels. After their defeat in the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, he was arrested along with more than twenty other leaders of the uprising and condemned to death. When the death sentence was read to him, he is quoted as having said, “You are treating us disgracefully, but I want you to know that others will come who will bury with honor our heads, which you will have desecrated and put on show.” The manner of his execution was cruel in the extreme; before he was beheaded, his tongue was cut out.
*Josef Kodicek, “Radio Free Europe,” Munich, broadcast of June 2, 1953, fFranz Kafka, Briefs an Milena (Letters to Mtletw) (New York: Schocken Books, 1952), p. 22.
* Kafka, Briefe an Milena, p. 28.
5
THE LOVING ONE
Milena, what a rick, heavy name, almost too full to lift, at first I didn’t like it very much, it struck me as a Greek or Roman who had strayed into Bohemia, been brutalized by the Czechs, and cheated out of its accentuation; yet in color and form it is marvelously a woman, whom one carries in one’s arms, out of the world, out of the fire, I don’t know which, and she nestles willingly and trustingly in one’s arms….
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN MILENA
One Sunday the SS man in the guard room was in a good mood and treated us to music. He turned up the volume of the radio and Schubert’s Trout Quintet came, pouring out. We strolled back and forth in delight, surrounded by thousands of women in striped clothes, a promenade of ghosts. Would we ever go to a concert again? Or listen to Mozart? But only too soon we were shaken out of our reverie. In Ravensbruck not even a Sunday stroll was free from perils. Suddenly, a woman overseer rushed in among the strollers and began to beat one of them brutally. What had happened? Two of the inmates had been caught walking arm in arm.
The spell was broken, our enjoyment of sunshine and music was at an end. And to make matters worse, Schubert was replaced by the detested Nazi marches. Our nerves were on edge. I started back to the barracks, but Milena had a better idea, something forbidden, of course. She would go to the infirmary and find the key to the consultation room. No one would think of looking for us there on Sunday. We’d be perfectly safe. She found the key, we opened up and locked ourselves in.
The opaque, rippled windowpanes sparkled like a lake in the sunlight. Sitting side by side on a table with our legs dangling, we forgot the world. When you are condemned to be always in a crowd, it’s an enormous pleasure just to be alone in a room. I felt like singing, and I began to hum: In einem Bächleim helle …
It was then that Milena for the first time called me clovek bozi. The words are so close to the Russian that of course I knew what they meant. A rough translation might be “divine woman.” I was more bewildered than pleased. In all my life I had never been able to conceive of anyone loving, let alone admiring, me. When I asked her what was lovable about me, Milena answered very gravely, “You have the good fortune to love life without reserve. You are as strong and good as the fruitful earth, a little blue village madonna…,”
At first I didn’t know what attracted me so strongly to Milena; I thought it must be chiefly her intellectual superiority. But soon I realized that what fascinated me most was the aura of mystery surrounding her whole being. Milena did not walk through life with a sure, firm step. She glided. Sometimes, when I saw her from a distance on the camp street, it seemed to me that she had just popped out of nowhere. Even when she was happy, her eyes were always veiled by some bottomless grief. This was no ordinary grief connected with our daily lot; no, it was the grief of one who felt herself to be a stranger in this world, and knew that for her there was no salvation. This evasive, water-nymph-like quality captivated me completely, for I knew 1 could never get through to her. All my dreams of Milena are haunted by this feeling of hopelessness.
Far from ceasing with the loss of freedom, the need for love and affection becomes more imperious than ever. Some of the women in Ravensbruck took refuge in passionate friendships, others eased their heartache by talking endlessly about love, and still others resorted to political or even religious fanaticism.
The passionate friendships of the politicals usually r
emained platonic, while those of the criminals and asocials often took on a frankly lesbian character. Such relationships, when discovered, were punished with flogging.
In my next to last year at Ravensbruck, when conditions were becoming more and more chaotic, I heard of a lesbian prostitute. Her name was Gerda, but she called herself Gert. She serviced a number of women, but not for money. Every Saturday and Sunday her customers brought her their rations of margarine and sausage, which were distributed only on weekends.
There was also a men’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck, but the male and female inmates rarely caught sight of one another. When a column of women on their way to some outside job chanced to pass a group of men, one or the other group would be ordered to halt and about face. They would have to wait with averted eyes until the “temptation” had passed.
Despite the horrors of the camp, the close quarters at which thousands of women were living made for an erotic atmosphere. Once, for example, during the night shift in the SS tailor shop, I heard Gypsy girls, sitting at their sewing machines, sing languorous love songs in spite of the heat, dust, and fatigue. Others worked off their erotic cravings in dance. In the farthermost corner of the stinking latrine, two of them swayed to the languid rhythm of a tango, while their comrades stood guard at the entrance in case the SS should look in.
Milena Page 4