Milena Jesenská was much more than the heroine of the passionate correspondence she had with Kafka: she was a brilliant journalist, a free and committed woman who became a ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in 1994. With her intelligence and strength of character, she captivated Kafka, inspiring him to write some of his finest letters. She also captivated Margarete Buber-Neumann, with whom she was deported to Ravensbrück and to whom she dedicated a splendid book-portrait. On the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of Milena’s death, Christine Lecerf expressed her admiration for the woman whom Kafka wanted “to carry in his arms out of the world”.
As Franz Kafka wrote to his friend Max Brod, about this young Prague woman with whom he had just begun an epistolary exchange: “She is such a living fire as I have never seen before.” Attempting to contain this fire within the space of a few pages would be completely beyond my reach. Margarete Buber Neumann’s book Milena, published by Seuil in 2024, is a masterful example of this: you must have experienced this fire yourself to be able to convey its radiance. That is why I will limit myself to showing, through a few examples, how Milena Jesenská, this extraordinary woman, passed through the life of a Czech writer like a comet, as well as that of a camp comrade.
Even today, “Milena” is first and foremost a first name, magnificent, radiant, mysterious, almost mythical. A first name like Lou, Laure or Alma, all those nameless women whose identity remains inseparable from the famous man they crossed paths with. Like many others, it was through the pen of Franz Kafka that I first heard the name Milena: “Milena, what a rich and dense name, so rich, so full that one can hardly lift it!”, Kafka wrote to her, “so marvelous in the color and figure of a woman whom one carries in one’s arms out of the world, out of the fire”. The date is June 1920. Milena Jesenská is 24 years old. And I was to discover much later, with emotion, on reading Margarete Buber Neumann’s book, that this name had had the same striking effect on her when she had heard it for the first time in October 1940 in the Ravensbrück camp where Milena had just arrived, having been deported as a resistance fighter: “She introduced herself as ‘Milena of Prague’. For the rest of the day, I remained deaf and blind to everything going on around me. The name Milena completely overwhelmed me; I reveled in its harmony.”
At the time when Kafka began this correspondence, Milena Jesenská was a very emancipated young woman. She read a great deal and was passionate about the artistic and literary life then bubbling in the young Republic. She was married to Ernst Pollak and lived with him in Vienna. She was taking her first steps in writing, and had already written a few articles for the Czech magazine Tribuna, which her husband would glance through with a disdainful air. It was on Pollak’s advice that she undertook to translate a Kafka short story into Czech (“Der Heizer” – “The Stoker”). They began by writing to each other about this, then every day, more and more, sometimes several times a day. “This thirst for letters is insane,” Kafka wrote to her, “and yet we drink the letters and all we know is that we want to continue drinking. Explain that, Milena!” But Milena remains silent. Not because she would have nothing to say, but because her own letters had disappeared, probably burnt, or seized in 1939 by Hitler’s men.
For a long time, I read these Letters to Milena, without trying to find out which real woman they were addressed to. I was satisfied with the image I had of her through Kafka’s letters. It must be said that these letters are magnificent, among the most beautiful and sensual that Kafka ever wrote: “I love you, therefore, you the recalcitrant, as the sea loves a tiny pebble at its bottom, that is exactly how my love covers you”. And, because that is the whole force and purpose of Kafka’s letters, I had the false impression that Milena was there. I felt her everywhere, she slipped in everywhere, between each word, each line. I was getting used to her mysterious, almost ghostly presence. Was it so untrue, anyway? Margarete Buber-Neumann said no less during the four years she spent at the camp with her: “It was the mystery emanating from her entire physical presence that fascinated me the most. Milena did not advance in this world with a firm, assured step. She moved by sliding.” Nevertheless, this Milena was not the real Milena Jesenská; it was her ghost that the writer brought to life with words. Kafka was also fully aware of the compulsive and de-realizing nature of these letters. He wrote to Milena: “Writing letters means baring yourself before ghosts, which they eagerly await. Written kisses do not reach their destination, but the ghosts drink them on the way down to the last drop.
It was much later, when reading Margarete Buber Neumann’s book, that I understood what it was that tied me so powerfully to these unanswered letters. It was because I saw unfolding, in action, one of Milena’s great qualities, the one that underlies all her relationships with others and that is expressed in all the articles she wrote, whether cultural, sociological or political, whether they dealt with women’s clothing, the first day of a war or the truth in politics. This is what Margarete Buber Neumann calls: “the force of her questioning”. “Milena knew how to ask questions,” she writes, “she created an atmosphere of closeness in every conversation, (…) she had the gift and the strength to put herself in the other person’s shoes.” And it is true that, under the fire of her questions, Kafka never opened up to such an extent about himself as in these Letters to Milena: “You ask me if I am Jewish?” or “I will therefore answer the question of fear”. And Kafka opens up as he has never done before, about his childhood, his Jewishness, and above all about this fear (fear of life, fear of love), this fear that overwhelms him more and more as their first and true meeting approaches. Kafka writes to her: “The most beautiful of all your letters (and the most beautiful is saying a lot, because they are in their entirety and in each of their lines what has happened to me most beautiful in life) are those in which you give reason to my ‘fear’ while trying to explain to me why I must not have it”.
This fear, which will ultimately be the downfall of their love story, is momentarily tamed by Milena during the four days they spend together in the Vienna Woods. And I never tire of reading and rereading this extraordinary letter of August 9, 1920, in which Kafka appears as a happy man, as a man who has momentarily shed his fear and who uses words to express it: “When you once asked me how I could call Saturday ‘good’ with fear in my heart, it is not difficult to explain. How I love you, I love the whole world and your left shoulder is part of it too, and your face above me in the forest and your face below me in the forest and resting on your almost naked breast. And that is why you are right when you say that we have already been one, and I am not afraid of that at all.”
Milena Jesenská’s correspondence has not been completely destroyed. The letters she wrote to their mutual friend Max Brod in January-February 1921, after her break with Kafka, have been preserved. In one of these letters, she evokes this unique moment in Kafka’s life and describes very precisely what I propose to call “the Milena effect”: “I know his fear to the very last fiber. It existed long before me, before he knew me. I knew his fear before he knew it himself. I armored myself against it by understanding it. During the four days that Franz spent by my side, he lost it. We made fun of it.” I was all the more shocked to discover in Margarete Buber Neumann’s book the testimony of this young Czech woman, on her arrival at Ravensbrück in October 1940, who says the following: “Dejected and overwhelmed by our first impressions of the camp, by the horror we discovered there, we waited fearfully for the next torture. And then Milena appeared at the door at the top of the stairs and, with a friendly wave of her hand, said to us, ‘Welcome, girls!’ (…) I will never forget how I felt then. It was the first real manifestation of humanity in the midst of all this inhumanity.” Milena Jesenská thus continued to arm herself against fear, to understand it and to make others lose it, even in the camp.
Margarete Buber-Neumann’s book has, as we can see, permanently changed the image of the living flame that was Milena Jesenská. But it is not the only one. And I strongly encourage you to read, if you have not already done so, Life of Milena Jesenská, published by her daughter, Jana Černá, or Milena Jesenská by Alena Wagnerova. You will discover who this “Maman Milena” was, as she was sometimes called by Kafka but also by some of her fellow deportees, and what deeply attached “the Milena of Prague” to her native Bohemia. What these three women have in common is that they have paid a vibrant tribute to the “free being” that was Milena Jesenská. But they have also all recognized in her the writer, her pen, her style, her words. Kafka wrote to her immediately, as soon as he received her translation: “She is not just any writer, the one who wrote that. In Czech I only know one kind of music of the language, that of Božena Němcová. Here there is another music, but one that is related to her in terms of determination, passion, kindness and above all lucid intelligence”. Božena Němcová was the great Czech writer of the 19th century. Her novel Babička, Grandma, is still one of the most widely read novels in Czech literature.
If Milena’s letters to Kafka had not been destroyed, we would not be reading Letters to Milena today, but the Correspondence of Milena Jesenská and Franz Kafka. There is no doubt that it would constitute a jewel of amorous epistolary exchange. And I like to think that it could take pride of place alongside the prodigious correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, two poets who also loved each other intensely and painfully in the same city of Vienna, where Franz and Milena had met.
For all these reasons, 80 years after her death, I believe it is time to call Milena: “Milena Jesenská”. It is just as beautiful. And it adds to the strength of her influence.
Christine Lecerf
Christine Lecerf is a Germanist, literary critic and producer at France Culture. We would like to thank her for sending us the text she wrote for the evening dedicated to Milena Jesenská at the mahJ on October 9, 2024.
