In the spring of 1924 Milena’s friend Wilma came to see her in Vienna. Milena was by nature reserved and seldom spoke of her private life. “One must learn to keep one’s distance,” she once wrote. “It is possible to see people day in, day out, without revealing one’s inner self. They may in the end get a glimpse of one’s private life, but there’s no need to help them. Too much familiarity exposes one to criticism, pity, and envy; it opens the door to misunderstandings and at that point all human relations become problematic.”
Vet despite Milena’s reserve Wilma could see at a glance that she had changed; she was in better health, calmer, and more poised. She told her visitor not without pride that she had recently started a kind of pension in her apartment. She let two rooms and provided her roomers with a midday meal; she had even hired a maid. She really seemed to have taken hold of herself. She had learned to cook and keep house, talents which were later in Prague to benefit any number of impoverished guests.
Wilma soon learned that Milena had at last summoned up the strength to break with Ernst Polak and put an end to a marriage which had long been in ruins, and that she had found happiness in a new love.
“May I introduce my lodger, Xaver Count Schaffgotsch?” said Milena rather hesitantly, as though apologizing for the title. A charming young man entered the room, and the somewhat stodgy Wilma observed with satisfaction that he had excellent manners. “He was a blessing,” she noted, “after all the intellectual louts who ordinarily surrounded Milena. At last someone who showed her the flattering attentions that every woman deserves. …”
Later on, Milena assured Wilma that Xaver was not a typical aristocrat, but rather, an aristocratic outsider. Schaffgotsch was a former Austrian officer who had been in Russia at the time of the revolution and become a Communist. Through him Milena came into contact with Communist circles. In 1925 she left Vienna for good; she and Xaver went to stay with Alice GerstI, an old friend of hers from Prague, and her husband Otto Rühle, at Buchholtz-Friedenwald near Dresden. The Rühles lived in an attractive house on a hill not far from the White Stag in Hellerau.
Rühle was more than twenty years older than his wife. Before the First World War he had belonged to the left wing of the German Social Democratic party and been a member of the Reichstag. In 1914, along with Karl Liebknecht, he had voted against the war credits. In 1916 he had helped to organize the Spartacus League and in 1918 had been a founder of the Communist party. But as an antiauthoritarian leftist, he found himself in opposition to the party only a year later and left it, never to return. Rühle and his fellow oppositionists already realized that “in the event of a victorious revolution the dictatorship of the proletariat would be replaced by a dictatorship of the party and its leadership.” Yet Rühle remained a Marxist as long as he lived. His last book, Living Thoughts of Marxism, was written in collaboration with Leon Trotsky in Mexico, where they were both living in exile. A teacher by profession, Rühle also published numerous works on education, seen from a Marxist standpoint, including The Proletarian Child, Association with Children, and The Neglected Child.
And in collaboration with his wife, Alice, who was a disciple of the psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, Rühle wrote a number of articles and a book on modern psychology.
In 1925, when Milena and Xaver came to Buchholtz, Rühle was the owner of Am andern Ufer (On the Other Bank), a publishing house in Dresden which had published several of his works. Alice, a cultivated woman of Milena’s generation, well versed in music, art, and literature, set the tone in the Rühle household. She guided her guests around Dresden, introducing them to its beautiful baroque buildings, and taking them to the theater and art shows. Milena, who was very close to Alice, felt at home in her house. She and Schaffgotsch stayed there for almost ten months.
At that time, in addition to her journalism, Milena was working on a Czech edition of Peter Pan, to be published at Christmas 1925 by the Akciova tiskarna Children’s Library. A young acquaintance of hers in Prague, Jirka Mala, was doing the translation. When she finished, Milena invited her to Buchholtz to discuss it. Jirka arrived full of eager anticipation and was met at the station by Milena and Schaffgotsch. She was a well-bred young lady, and from the start she was thoroughly bewildered by the behavior of her hosts. The aristocratic young man grabbed her bag, tossed it on a hand truck, and moved off like a professional porter. As she later confided, she felt that he was “overdoing the hospitality” and that his conduct was “too too proletarian.” She kept her thoughts to herself but was unable to conceal her embarrassment. Milena saved the situation by explaining that she and Xaver were expert porters, having learned the trade at the Franz Josef Station in Vienna. And she added, “Xaver is even more experienced than I am; during the famine in Russia, he even used to unload sacks from ships in Odessa.”
The unsuspecting Jirka was to have further grounds for amazement at Milena’s new surroundings and the change that had come over her. Marxist debates were the order of the day in the Riihle household, and Milena, who up until then had been quite unpolitical, not only seemed to enjoy them but revealed a knowledge of matters which to the young visitor were a complete mystery. She sat silent, feeling hopelessly inferior and convinced that Milena must be dreadfully disappointed by her ignorance.
To her relief, the subject was changed and they started going over her translation together. Now she was on firm ground. She was enormously impressed by Milena’s feeling for language. Though she knew no English, she had a remarkable gift for finding the mot juste in Czech. Stimulated by their work, the three women recalled beloved Czech poems and took turns in reciting. Schaffgotsch joined in with an ample repertory of German poetry. On this occasion, the visitor learned that Schaffgotsch not only wrote fairy tales but was working on a play that was later published by Malik Verlag. Jirka noted with relief that they had other interests beside Marxism and communism. For her, the high point of the evening was still to come. They played music together. Jirka played the fiddle, while Alice and Milena took turns in accompanying her at the piano. In the ensuing discussion Schaffgotsch proved to be something of a musicologist.
Milena had contributed for years to the Czech daily Tribuna, making a name for herself as the Vienna fashion correspondent. Then, shortly before she and Xaver Schaffgotsch left for Dresden, she was temporarily reconciled with her father, and he recommended her to his party newspaper, the national conservative Národní Listy. Her father and Aunt Ruzena were both filled with pride at the general recognition of Milena’s journalistic talents, and her promotion to the Národní Listy was to her a real triumph. She owed her success, not to her father’s influence, but to her own ability and hard work, though she herself did not think much of herself as a writer. “The only thing I can really write,” she judged, “is love letters, and when you come right down to it, my articles are just that.”
Over the years she developed both as a human being and as a writer. The direction of her development is suggested by the title she gave to a collection of her articles which appeared in 1926: The Way to Simplicity. The book was a sort of letter to her father, and indeed she dedicated it “To my dear Father,” with whom she longed to be permanently reconciled. She brought it to him with the plea that he should try to understand her in spite of everything, and that he would not, like Kafka’s father, leave it unread “on his bedside table.”
Milena’s return to Prague in 1925 was an unexpected triumph. When she left in 1918, she had been under a cloud. “Good” Czech society had found it hard to swallow her friendship with Sataša, the Veleslavin incident, her way of dressing, sometimes in flowing robes and sometimes in rumpled skirt and blouse, and to top it all, her marriage to a “German Jew.” The Milena who returned was a different woman. In the flower of her beauty, a well-known reporter, courted by dressmakers, herself smartly dressed, though with the simplicity that was her hallmark, and above all, on the staff of the Národnt Listy, the leading national-conservative newspaper of Prague. Invitations poured in from all sides. But Milena declined most of them; she preferred the company of the artists and intellectuals she had frequented before going away. With them, with members of the Czech, German, and Jewish intelligentsia, she spent happy hours at the Metro Café, the Národní Kavárna, the Slavia, and occasionally the Unionka. She enjoyed her work and was glad to be alive. Her exuberance becomes understandable when we consider that she had come from run-down, impoverished Vienna to a city striving with youthful vitality to make up for three hundred years as a neglected provincial backwater. The Prague art world was bustling with life. This was the time of the first jazz, which Milena, an enthusiastic dancer, loved dearly. Friends met in cafés during the day, in the evening at bars or private parties. Compared with Vienna, Prague was a small town, everyone knew everyone else. Milena had many friends, though she also had her enemies.
It was her fate to be adored or hated; no one was indifferent to her. While some admirers went so far as to liken her to Atjka, the heroine of Romain Rutland’s novel L’Ame enchantée, others spread malicious gossip about her past.
Even after the hard years in Vienna, during which she had learned to work regularly and submit to discipline, Milena was not exactly a well-balanced character. With her ideas about honor and chivalry she was a kind of feminine Don Quixote. She made high moral demands on herself and others and was unwilling to compromise. Living in constant conflict, she was vulnerable and often impatient. With her violent temper, her sharp tongue, and her ever-readiness to step in where she suspected an injustice, she was bound to make enemies.
The Czech Communist poet Nezval, who disliked Milena as much as she disliked him, once when he had had too much to drink at a party became obstreperous and was thrown out. He lay in the street, and no one lifted a finger to help him until Milena appeared. Indignant, she defended him against the pas-sersby who had gathered around. She stayed with him until an ambulance arrived. Such behavior came naturally to Milena. It had nothing to do with tikes or dislikes.
Milena edited the woman’s page of the Národní Listy and also wrote about interior decoration and fashions. The Topiü publishing house brought out a pamphlet of hers entitled People Make Clothes. Her articles on fashions were most unusual. Kafka made fun of them in one of his letters. “In reading [such an article],” he wrote, “I feet like a giant who holds out his arms to protect you from the public (he has a hard time of it, because he wants to keep the public away but at the same time not to miss a word or to lose sight of you for a second), that probably demented, abysmally stupid, and to make matters worse, feminine public, who are probably shouting, ‘Where is fashion? Will fashion ever get here? So far we haven’t seen anything but Milena.’ “*
On her return to Prague, Milena had rented a comfortable furnished room on Grosspriorplatz in the Mala Strama. She loved the Mala Strama, for it recalled many memories, especially of her grandmother whom she had been very fond of as a child. She describes her in “Maminká,” one of her last articles: “My grandmother looked exactly like Bozena Némcova’s Ba~ bicka…, She wore a silk headscarf and raised azaleas on her window ledge. She had eight children. When she baked yeast cakes, she could never make enough of them, because the children ate them straight out of the pan. … It took her almost half a day to knead and roll the dough for dumplings. If one of the children came down with a contagious disease, the other seven would be sure to catch it. And Grandmother, a small woman, anxious and loving, would go tripping from one little bed to another. But she herself never got sick; she had no time for it. The circle of light on the table under the lampshade, admirable economy of words coupled with admirable kindness, immense vitality and deep-rooted love of her country—all that was my grandmother. During the First World War, when ‘summer time’ was introduced and the day began an hour earlier, my grandmother despised it as an ‘Austrian invention,’ In defiance of all regulations, her clocks continued to observe reliable old sun time, When the clock in the steeple struck twelve, she, ordinarily so soft-spoken, raised her voice to announce in the tone of a queen making a solemn proclamation: ‘It is now eleven o’clock’; and in her house it was eleven o’clock.”
Milena had been abroad for seven years. In that time Prague had expanded considerably; the once leisurely provincial town had become a bustling metropolis. The streets swarmed with people, and not only on weekdays; on Sunday, organized groups would leave town for the mountains and other excursion sites. Frightened and horrified, Milena watched the crowds pouring into the stations on Sunday mornings. “There is something crushing about these crowds. They are too big, too massive,
“I love life, magical life in all its manifestations, ail its forms, everyday life and holiday life, its surface as well as its depths….”*
One day in Ravensbrück Milena talked to me about a work by the Czech writer Karel Capek, The War with the Newts, a gruesome fable about an ancient mariner who somewhere in the Pacific discovers a colony of highly intelligent newts (or salamanders), who show an astonishing resemblance to humans. Realizing that they can perform simple human tasks, international capitalists round them up and exploit their labor power. But the salamanders become more and more interested in the sophisticated technology of the human workers and in an astonishingly short time acquire a high degree of technical proficiency. The explanation lies in the underdeveloped brain of the salamanders. Since they have no thoughts to distract them from work, they learn in no time to imitate human civilization. As they reproduce more quickly than human beings, they soon run short of living space. They declare war on mankind.
A primitive young Russian woman who worked at the Ravensbrück button-sewing machine in the SS tailor shop had a phenomenal ability to make her two hands do two different things at the same time. She was able to exceed the norm set by the SS by a hundred percent. “Good Lord,” cried Milena, “that must be one of Capek’s salamanders, God help us if they send us millions of them.”
In Buchholtz, where Milena and Schaffgotsch stayed for almost a year, they had lived as on an island. They belonged to the inner circle of the Ruble family, and Mitena’s friends adopted Schaffgotsch as a matter of course, Milena and Xaver had the same interests and Schaffgotsch helped her with her journalism. Together, they lived a full and happy life.
When they came to Prague together, all this changed. To Milena, Prague was home, a place where she had her habits and friends; to Schaffgotsch it was a strange city, where he knew no one. He had neither the energy nor the ability to make his way in this strange environment. He became totally dependent on Milena and followed her about like a shadow. As he kept turning up in cafes, always looking for Milena, he came to be nicknamed “Where’s Milena?”
Milena tried through her connections to find him work, but in vain. The more she tried to help him, the more he blamed her for his failure. They began to get on each other’s nerves and Schaffgotsch turned away from her. Once in Ravensbrück, when we were talking about men, Milena said: “I seem to have been fated to love weak men. None of them really took care of me and protected me. It’s not good for a woman to be too independent. Men don’t like it for very long, and that even goes for weak men. After a while, they find themselves another woman, a delicate little thing, who sits on the sofa with her hands in her lap and looks up at them admiringly. Most of my successors were like that. And many’s the time I saw my impractical, helpless, oh so intellectual man miraculously transformed. I’d see him running upstairs and down for his new woman, finding apartments, going to the tax office, applying for passports, and so on. Some of them even started making money.”