Milena

by Margarete Buber-Neumann

  Love affairs between SS men and inmates were rare. I know of one case in which a German political prisoner working in one of the camp annexes became pregnant; in her despair she committed suicide with sleeping pills obtained at the infirmary.

  In No. 1 Tailor Shop, where I worked for a year and a half, an SS man named Jiirgeleit and one of the prisoners fell in love with each other. Countless love letters were exchanged, but nothing came of it.

  Another such case went further. A young SS man was in charge of a sewing-machine repair shop, where some half a dozen Czech women, including Anicka Kvapilová, a friend of Milena*s, were working. This SS man—his name was Max Hessler and he was only eighteen—fell in love with one of the Czech girls. They saw each other every day, and his love was as passionate as it was hopeless. In the course of time, he took a great liking to all the Czech women, to the whole Czech nation, in fact. In the end he conceived a daring project—a trip to Prague for his love’s sake. He informed his superiors that his sewing machines were in urgent need of certain spare pans, which were available only in Prague, Travel orders were issued and off he went, carrying numerous letters from Czech women to their relatives. In Prague he went from family to family, delivering letters, and the delighted families gave him not only letters but food parcels and other presents for the prisoners. The young lover returned to Ravensbruck with an enormous suitcase, which he somehow managed to smuggle into camp. The letters and presents were distributed. The women were overjoyed and infinitely grateful. But unfortunately too many people were in the know, and Max Hessler’s escapades came to the ears of the authorities. He was arrested and some of the women were locked up in the camp prison.

  As I later found out, the young man was given a suspended sentence and sent to the front, where he was soon taken prisoner by the French. After the war two former Czech inmates took a trip to France, and went from one POW camp to another until they finally found the brave lover. As a result of their intervention he was soon released.

  One gray spring day during working hours, as I was walking along the deserted camp street, I saw a man’s shorn head sticking out of a manhole. He had the brutal, crafty face of a hardened criminal. He was looking in the direction of the women’s barracks. An “asocial” woman was wriggling her hips in a way that was supposed to be alluring. She had hitched up her dress, a sort of striped sack, well above her calves! And what calves! Her legs were like sticks, covered with blotches. But her posture, her smile, were all feminine coquetry. She had forgotten that starvation had long since ravaged her charms. And her round-headed admirer, leering at her from his manhole, found her desirable.

  I described the scene to Milena. She didn’t think it funny, but said with a sigh of relief, “Thank God, love is indestructible. It’s stronger than any barbarism.”

  The name Milena means “loving one,” and, true enough, her whole life was a story of love and friendship. She first fell in love when she was sixteen. The heroine of a novel she was reading fell in love with a singer, and apparently under its influence Milena fell in love with a singer. His name was Hilbert Vavra. She loved him passionately and without reserve, but the affair proved disappointing. She was too young and Vavra was not the sort of man to bring out her capacity for love. It was not until years later that she encountered a man worthy of her.

  One night Milena went to a concert; she was sitting on the steps of the center aisle, immersed in the score. She was wearing a purple evening dress, as though at a royal reception. A man looked over her shoulder and read along with her. The man was Ernst Polak. It was the love of music that first brought them together. Ten years older than she, he was a cultivated man with a profound critical understanding of the arts. In this love affair Milena was to experience supreme happiness and deepest suffering. In a letter to Max Brod, Franz Kafka wrote, “She is living fire, such as I had never seen, a fire, incidentally, that burns only for him [Ernst Polak]. At the same time, extremely affectionate, courageous and intelligent. She puts all that into her sacrifice or, if you prefer, comes by it through sacrifice. But what a man to inspire all this,”

  The morning after her first night with Ernst Polak, and to complete her happiness, Milena wanted the two of them to watch the sunrise together. Polak, a notorious cafe dweller, was far from enthusiastic about what he called her crazy idea. But, as he said, “What won’t a man do for love?” So in the gray of dawn they climbed one of the hills near Prague, with Polak groaning all the while and complaining about the unaccustomed exertion. Shivering in the cold morning air, he kept asking, “Hasn’t it risen far enough?” and making nasty remarks about the “harmful effects of such foolishness.”

  When Jan Jesensky heard that his daughter was having an affair with Ernst Polak, he flew into a rage and forbade her any further contact with “that Jew.” Of course Milena ignored his remonstrances.

  Ernst Polak worked as a translator in a Prague bank. But his real interests were elsewhere. He was intimate with numerous writers both in Prague and in Vienna, and acted as a mentor to many of them. Though himself not creative, he had a remarkable feeling for style. He introduced Milena to Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, and many other writers, including Urzidil, Max Brod, Rudolf Fuchs, and Egon Erwin Kisch, Though very much men of their time, they were largely unpolitical. As they met in the Cafe Arco in Prague, Karl Kraus, the playwright, in his periodical Die Fackel (The Flame, spoke of them contemptuously as “Arconauts.” He especially had it in for Ernst Polak, and immortalized him as a comic character in one of his plays: Literature, or Wait and See, a Magical Operetta, Vienna, 1922.

  During the First World War, Milena made the acquaintance of Wilma Lovenbach. Their friendship was to last for two decades. Concerning her first meeting with Milena, Wilma was to write: “In midsummer 1916, driving a cabriolet drawn by a little brown horse, I pulled up outside the Hotel Prokop on Mount Spicak, an unpretentious inn at the top of a mountain pass, offering a magnificent view of the woods and meadows of the Bohemian forest. The sun was just setting. To the right and left of the stairs leading up to the inn, I saw two figures that might have been painted by Botticelli, in almost identical flowing robes: Milena and Jarmila. I had long known them by sight; I kept running into them in Prague, on the street or at concerts. I had been struck by their clothes—the goods, the cut, the unusual simplicity, the choice of colors. Milena never wore solid colors. She liked gradations from blue to a cool fight gray or to purple and violet. I had heard stories about the two of them from Minervans of my acquaintance. But they spoke almost exclusively of one of them: Milena. Some were critical of her eccentric life style, some envied her, but all admired her.” During those weeks at the Prokop, where Professor Jesensky also spent his summer and winter vacations, Wilma and Milena formed a friendship based on their love of poetry. Nineteen sixteen was a great year for Czech poetry; a number of outstanding collections appeared, reflecting no doubt the widespread feeling that national liberation was not far off. For centuries Czech-language literature had either been totally suppressed or hampered in its natural development. Only one art form was able to develop unimpeded in Bohemia. That was the folk song, and it was in folk songs that the poets now sought inspiration. They were the soil from which twentieth-century Czech poetry drew its strength.

  The German publisher Franz Pfemfert had commissioned Otto Pick, a Prague journalist and translator, to compile an anthology of German translations of Czech verse for the second issue of his (Pfemfert’s) journal Aktion. But since Otto Pick had just been drafted into the Austrian army, the writers Jan Lov-enbach and Max Brod took over, while Rudolf Fuchs, Pavel Eisner, and Emil Saudek advised them on the choice of material. Wishing to help with the editorial work, Wilma Lovenbach had brought sheafs of Czech verse with her to Mount Jjpicak. Naturally Milena joined in, and when Ernst Polak turned up one fine day at the neighboring Hotel Rixi, he was drawn into the circle. They sat on the sloping meadows or surrounded by ripening strawberries in the shaded fringe of the forest, reading poem after poem,
praising, criticizing, arguing, declaiming, and making their selections. They recited poems by Stanislav K. Neumann, Otakar Fischer, Kficka, Sramek, and Bfezma, When an unsatisfactory translation called for a new hand, Ernst Polak, who up until then had confined himself to literary theory and criticism, was seized with a passion for translation. Within a few hours he rejoined the others on the meadow with a German translation of Otakar Fischer’s “Evening and Soul” and read it to his attentive friends.

  One morning Wilma was awakened by a knocking at her door. In came Milena wearing a heliotrope-colored dress and holding a bunch of wildflowers. Her bare feet were wet with the dew of the meadows where she had picked the flowers. She jumped up on Wilma’s bed, hugged her, and whispered, “Ernst spent the night with me.” She was radiant, utterly exhausted, and en-trancingly beautiful.

  But the story didn’t end there. It became known at the Prokop that Ernst Polak, who was staying at the Rixi next door, which was frequented by Germans and therefore despised by the Czechs, was spending his nights with Milena. Mr. Prokop, an imposing man in his forties, who had known Milena all her life, told her that he wasn’t born yesterday, he knew these things happened, but he couldn’t allow them in his house, especially not with someone who was staying at the Rixi. Still, because they were old friends, he promised not to tell anyone. Had Milena’s father found out, she would have been in trouble, for he had sent her to Mount Spicak to get her away from “that Jew Polak.”

  A year later, Jan Jesensky, for whom as a Czech patriot Milena’s affair with a German Jew was the worst possible disgrace, committed his daughter to a mental home at Veleslavin. He was seconded by Dr. Prochaska, Sataša’s father who, despite his reputation for kindness and liberalism, was willing to have Milena locked up if that was the only way of “saving” Sataša from her influence,

  Milena had no suspicion of her father’s plan to rob her of her freedom. She had arranged to meet some friends at a bathing establishment on the day when she was taken away by force. Her friends waited in vain, until Alice Gerstl, a close friend of Milena’s, came running and told them what had happened.

  As was to be expected, Milena suffered unspeakably and resisted at every step. Her impressions of Veleslavin are summed up in a letter she wrote to Max Brod after her release. “You have asked me,” she wrote, “to provide some sort of proof that Mr. N. N. is being maltreated in Veleslavin. Unfortunately, I can give you very little definite information that would stand up in court, though I would be very glad to do so. I was in Veleslavin from June 1917 to March 1918; I lived in the same villa, but all I was able to do for him was to lend him books now and then, for which I was locked up several times. He is not allowed to talk to anyone. If it is found out that he has had a conversation, even about the weather and in the presence of a nurse, both parties are locked up and the nurse is dismissed.” Max Brod comments: “She goes on to describe the desperate situation in which the inmate found himself. The following sentences many have related to her own experience: ‘Psychiatry is a terrible thing when misused. Anything can be interpreted as abnormal, and every word can provide the tormentor with a new weapon. I could swear that there is no good reason why Herr N. N. should not live a normal life out in the world. But unfortunately I cannot prove it.’ “*

  Milena did not resign herself to her life in Veleslavin. She looked for a means of escape and found one. Touched by her pleas, one of the nurses supplied her with a key to the garden gate, and from then on Milena slipped out to meet Ernst Polak as often as she pleased.

  At the end of nine months Jan Jesensky realized the absurdity of what he had done. Milena was released. She married Ernst Polak. Her father withdrew his financial support and broke off al! relations with his daughter.

  * Max Brod, Franz Kafka, eine Biographie, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1954), p. 276.

  6

  THE LOWEST DEPTHS

  …I, I, Milena, know in every fiber of my being that you will be right whatever you do…. What would I do with you if I didn’t know that? Just as in the deep sea, every tiniest spot is under the heaviest pressure, so is it with you, but any other life would be shameful….

  —KAFKA, BRIEFE’ AN MILENA

  In 1918 Milena went to Vienna with Ernst Polak. It must have been hard for her to leave Prague, for she loved this city with its narrow streets and idyllic squares, its cafes and the little restaurants of the Old Town…. Milena needed the atmosphere of Prague, and she was attached to the countryside of Bohemia, her native land.

  At first they lived in a run-down furnished room on Nussdorfer Strasse. Later they moved to a gloomy apartment on Lerchenfelderstrasse. Milena never really got used to Vienna; she was lonely. Her married life was beset by crises. To what extent Milena was responsible for the tension I do not know. She had character traits that are hardly conducive to a harmonious marriage. She had a sharp tongue and was capable of cruel sarcasm; but Polak was arrogant and inconsiderate, conceited and domineering. But the real reason for the breakdown of their marriage was that, like so many of the young artists and writers of the day, Polak was a believer in free love. Even before leaving Prague, he had had affairs with other women. Milena thought it her duty to be broad-minded. She tried to make herself believe that he was entitled to his freedom and affected to be “above all that,” but this was only a mask behind which she hid her despair. She was young, passionate, and in love with Polak. Little by little she lost her self-assurance. Fearing that he had ceased to love her, she became frantically jealous and went to unreasonable lengths in the hope of winning back the love for which she had sacrificed so much.

  Ernst Polak, who was working toward a doctorate, was an enthusiastic participant in a philosophical seminar presided over by the logical positivists Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath, which was to become the nucleus of the “Vienna Circle.” The enthusiasm of its members bordered on religious fanaticism. When the writer Felix Weltsch, an old friend from Prague, ran into Polak in Vienna, Polak told him about his studies and the thesis he was working on. Amazed at the tone in which Polak spoke of the seminar, Weltsch cried out, “But, good Lord, you people sound like a cult.” To which Polak promptly replied, “Yes, that’s exactly what we are!”

  Ernst Polak was a habitué of the Café Herrenhof, where he and his friends met almost every afternoon and stayed until late into the night, as was then customary both in Vienna and in Prague. The cafes were the center of artistic and intellectual life; writers, painters, and philosophers would sit there for hours over a cup of black coffee, gaining inspiration from the click of the billiard balls in the back room, the street sounds, and the hum of conversation around them. In addition to Franz Werfel, whom they had known in Prague, Polak’s and Milena’s friends included Franz Blei, Gina and Otto Kaus, the psychoanalyst Dr. Otto Gross, Friedrich Eckstein, Hermann Broch, and Willy Haas.

  Unwilling to break off their absorbing conversations, the Vienna café dwellers were in the habit of seeing one another home. As the streetcars had long stopped running at that late hour, this custom often took them from end to end of the city, and it was sometimes broad daylight before the last good-byes were said. Once, while Milena, Werfel, and Eckstein were walking back and forth, taking one another home, a heavy rain set in. They had just arrived at Werfel’s place and he suggested, first jokingly, then not so jokingly, that Milena should spend the night with him. When he took her by the arm and tried to drag her into the house, Eckstein, who had been standing in the doorway pretending not to notice, became thoroughly alarmed. To his relief the incident ended in good-natured laughter, and they all really went home.

  Strangely enough, Milena didn’t think much of Werfel as a writer. While still in Prague, she had been impressed by his first three books of poems, Der Wettfreund, Wir sind, and Einander (Friend of All the World, We Are, and One Another), but later, comparing his work with that of others who were less successful, she came to regard his meteoric rise as unjustified. And she found Werfel’s Catholicism, grafted onto h
is Jewish origins, rather ridiculous. But another reason for her poor opinion of Werfel may have been her increasingly strained relations with Ernst Polak, who was a close friend of Werfel’s. In one of his letters to Milena, Kafka reproached her for her unfairness to Werfel. “Where is your understanding of human nature, Milena? I’ve doubted it on several occasions, for instance, when you wrote about Werfel, maybe there was love in what you said, and perhaps only love, nevertheless it’s wrong to ignore everything else about Werfel and harp only on his fatness (and incidentally, he doesn’t seem at all fat to me); in my opinion Werfel is growing more handsome and more charming from year to year, though it’s true that I don’t see much of him—didn’t you know that only fat people are trustworthy?”*

  Polak often brought his café friends home with him in the middle of the night. Milena, who was usually asleep by then, had to get up and sit sleepily in her dressing gown, listening to discussions of the most esoteric philosophical problems. Some of the guests would stay on for the night, and one had the strange habit of rolling up in the carpet. It was a different kind of bohemianism from what she had been used to in Prague. If she was isolated in Vienna, it may have been only because, being unhappy, she always seemed sad and distraught. Once when she joined the others at the Café Herrenhof, Franz Blei said maliciously, “Take a look at Milena; there she is again, looking like six volumes of Dostoevsky.”

  Milena had none of the easy charm and coquetry characteristic of Viennese women. Her beauty was of a kind that did not encourage familiarity. Her figure suggested an Egyptian statue. There was nothing soft and round about it, and she was always rather pale. One was struck by her penetrating blue eyes, which owed their special quality not to the contrast with her dark brows and lashes but to her inner fire. Her sensual lips contrasted with her firm, energetic chin. She struck people as independent and self-assured; nothing in her appearance suggested that she was in need of being protected and cosseted—yet that was just what she longed for.