…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 his 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.
Willy Haas paints the following portrait of Milena at that time: If any friend expressed a wish in her presence, and if she felt that this wish meant a great deal to him, she didn’t hesitate for one moment—she took immediate action. Once Willy Haas was in urgent need of a room; he had just fallen in love. Milena arranged for the loan of a good friend’s room and decorated it with armloads of flowers and shrubs. As a rule, she had hardly enough money for food, so she must have borrowed the large amount she spent on these flowers. Such generosity came naturally to Milena, and she expected the same of her friends, who only too often disappointed her.
When Willy Haas came home from the First World War, he had eight hundred crowns’ worth of pay vouchers, which to his surprise he was able to redeem. On hearing that the war was over, most soldiers thought these vouchers were worthless and threw them away. But Haas, to be on the safe side, kept his. On his return, he went to see Milena and informed her of his good fortune. She was in urgent need of money and asked him to give her half. When he hesitated, she simply took the money away from him. For a few moments he was furious, but then he was ashamed. How could he have been so petty, how could he have hesitated for a second to do Milena a favor? He felt humiliated. Milena had taught him a lesson.
In his afterword to Kafka’s Letters to Milena, Haas wrote: “She sometimes gave the impression of a noblewoman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, a character such as Stendhal found in the old Italian chronicles and put into his novels, the Duchess of Sanseverina or Mathilde de la Mole, for example: passionate, bold, cold, and intelligent in her decisions, but reckless in her choice of means when her passion was involved— and in her younger days this was almost always the case. As a friend, she was inexhaustible, inexhaustible in kindness, inexhaustible in resources, the source of which often remained a mystery, but also inexhaustible in the demands she made on her friends, demands which she as well as her friends took for granted…. Out of place amid the erotic and intellectual promiscuity of Viennese cafe society during the wild years after 1918, she was very unhappy.”*
In those difficult years in Vienna, she was determined to make her own living. It was hard because she was untrained and had no profession. She gave Czech lessons, mostly to industrialists whose factories and property after the breakup of the Austrian Empire were situated in Czechoslovakia. One of these was the writer Hermann Broch. At first these lessons were her only source of income. Occasionally, when she was especially short of funds and Ernst Polak gave her no money for the household, she would go to one of the railroad stations and offer her services as a porter. She was willing to do work of any kind; if she suffered, it was from heartache. Her father had rejected her, and hardly a day passed without Ernst Polak humiliating her. Deeply wounded, she withdrew into herself. She felt the ground cut from under her feet. When Kafka wrote to her later: “You who really live your life down to such depths …” the depths are to be taken literally.
Milena was convinced that Polak had ceased to desire her because she was poorly dressed, unable to compete with his fashionable admirers. But how was she to buy good clothes when she couldn’t even afford to eat properly? A girlfriend with well-to-do parents learned of her trouble and thought up a dangerous way of helping her. She stole a valuable piece of jewelry from her parents, sold it, and gave Milena the proceeds. Milena used most of the money to pay the debts which Polak had shamelessly run up entertaining other women and which even more shamelessly he had asked Milena to pay. The rest she spent on herself. She was obsessed with this one idea: Now she would be able to put Polak to the test, now she would find out whether he really didn’t love her anymore or whether he had merely grown tired of her because she was always wearing the same old dress, She went from shop to shop, putting together an outfit such as she had not known for years: the finest shoes, the most stylish dress, the most intriguing hat. Thus attired, she ran to the Cafe Her-renhof; with beating heart she approached the table where Ernst Polak was sitting with friends of both sexes, as he did every day. Everything depended on his reaction. Would he notice her, or as usual overlook her? When she stepped up to the table, Polak looked around, gaped at her, and said admiringly, “Why, Milena, how chic you are today!” She responded with a resounding slap in the face. “You’ll be surprised,” she said, “when you find out where it ail comes from.”
It was only with great difficulty that the theft could be hushed up, and Milena was held responsible, as her friend had stolen for her. After that she was despised as well as isolated. There was no one who understood her, on whose shoulder she could weep. In her distress she resorted to drugs. One of her husband’s friends, the one who rolled up in the carpet to sleep, gave her cocaine.
The man’s name was Stein. On a visit to Prague, he went to see Kafka, who speaks of him in one of his letters to Milena. “I saw Stein again yesterday. He is one of those men toward whom everyone is unjust. I don’t know why people laugh at him. He knows everybody, knows all the intimate details, and yet he is modest, his judgments are careful, intelligently nu-anced, respectful; true, they are a little too obvious, too naively vain, but that only adds to his worth if one has had the experience of secret, criminal, lustful vanity. I started talking about Haas, tiptoed past Jarmila; after a while I came to your husband, and finally I got around to you—by the way, it’s not true that I enjoy hearing you talked about, not at all, I just like to hear your name over and over again, all day long. If I had asked him, he would have told me about you, but as I didn’t ask him he contented himself with observing that to his sincere regret you are barely alive these days, that you’ve been destroyed by cocaine (how thankful I was at the moment to hear that you’re still alive). And incidentally, cautious and modest as he is, he added that he hadn’t seen that with his own eyes but only heard about it.”*
It was not easy for a woman who lived as passionately as Milena did, who, as she herself said, was “a bundle of emotions,” to curb her wiid impulses and discipline herself. That she nevertheless succeeded bears witness to her strength of character. She threw herself into a line of work to which she was suited, translation from the Czech, and wrote her first articles. At first, no doubt, this was just one more attempt to relieve her financial straits. But then she became absorbed in her new work and thus, through creative effort, regained her balance. She sent her little articles to her friend Sataša in Prague, who in the meantime had become a contributor to the newspaper Tribuna. Milena waited with trepidation for the reply, as her first journalistic efforts struck her as incompetent and atrociously sentimental. However, they were accepted. She was proud to see herself in print and overjoyed at being able to contribute to the household expenses, though Polak took her contribution for granted. Once, in the midst of a quarrel, she made a big mistake. To impress her husband, she spoke of her journalistic success and showed him her articles. Polak read them and burst into loud laughter. She was wounded to the quick.