… it will be a foreiaste of hell, of having to live my life over again but with the eyes of knowledge, and the worst will be awareness not of my obvious misdeeds but of those deeds that I formerly believed to be good….
—KAFKA, BRIEFE AN MILENA
It took Milena a long time to recover her equilibrium. Her first attempt to repair her broken life led her into a blind alley. She became a Communist. In Ravensbrück she tried explaining to me how this had come about. She had been a superficial person up until then, taking only a marginal interest in social and political problems, and she claimed her illness had made her think. She believed that a crisis of this sort occurred in the life of every responsible individual. In the twenties and thirties any number of artists and intellectuals toyed with communism. But Milena would not have been Milena if she had not thrown herself body and soul into any cause she believed in. Still, the human values involved always meant far more to her than any political program.
Even before joining the party, she had stopped working for the bourgeois Národní Listy and taken over the woman’s page of the liberal Lidove Noviny, published by Capek and Ferdinand Peroutka. But her writing had tost much of its quality.
She was fighting desperately against her morphine addiction. Twice she entered a sanatorium of her own free will and underwent a detoxification cure. As her articles were almost entirely autobiographical, she wrote about her experience in the sanatorium. The second time she did this, her editor flew into a rage and bellowed, “My dear lady, this kind of thing must stop!” And stop it did in 1931, when Milena joined the Communist party.
At first she took her duties as a Communist very seriously. She participated in demonstrations and mass meetings, and felt that she was fighting for a better world. Her friend Josef Kodiiek wrote at the time: “Anyone familiar with her radical temperament could guess that she would succumb sooner or later to the Communist fad…. But she soon recognized the lifeless, mechanical, inhuman character of Communism and in 1936 she was expelled from the party.”
In the meantime she worked for the Communist newspaper Tvorba. Now in Ravensbrück she admitted to me that during her Communist period she had almost entirely lost her ability to write. After trying for a while to convince herself that the party held a monopoly on the truth, she soon wearied of rehashing the same old party slogans. She once went so far as to suggest—in jest or in earnest, it is hard to say—that Tvorba publish a humorous issue, standing the party line on its head, calling the Social Democrats brothers rather than enemies, and so on in the same vein. Comrade Julius FuCik, the editor in chief, almost had a stroke. Still, Milena’s unorthodox ideas were tolerated for quite some time. One reason for this may have been the special character of the Czech party, which preserved a certain bohemianism that had long been banished from other Communist parties. Not so long ago it had even found room for Jaroslav Hasek—author of The Good Soldier Schweik, an anarchist, a joker, a man incapable of toeing any political line, who made fun of everything and everybody. And another reason for treating Milena with indulgence was that the party leadership may have hoped through her to gain access to the group of intellectuals surrounding her.
Milena’s home life became more and more unhappy. Krejcar’s infidelities gave rise to constant scenes. Neither he nor Milena was a very good manager. Surrounded as they were by a host of friends and hangers-on, money slipped through their fingers and they lived beyond their means, especially when Milena began to write exclusively for the Communist press, which brought in a maximum of eight hundred crowns a month. Added to all that was her drug addiction, which consumed enormous sums. Once, after a cure, she went straight from the sanatorium to the offices of the Social Democratic newspaper Prdvo Lidu, and asked to see Mr. Vanek. Milos Vanek, the editor of Prdvo Lidu was an old friend of hers. No, she could not give her name. She was still a member of the Communist party and did not want her party comrades to hear that she had been consorting with Social Democrats. After some discussion the porter let her in.
Milos Vanek was horrified at her appearance. She looked sick and unkempt, she was wearing a shabby man’s overcoat and seemed deeply dejected. “I’ve just come from a detoxification cure,” she announced. And then without transition: “Milos, would you let me write for you? Could you take …}’“ Then, changing the subject in midsentence: “Dear Milos, please could you buy me a cup of coffee?” Of course he could. A moment later they were out in the street. Milena whisked Vanek away from the big cafes and hurried him to a little restaurant in a gloomy side street. Clearly she wanted to avoid being seen. The coffee hadn’t been ordered yet when Milena changed her mind. Could she have a pair of hot sausages? Of course she could. The sausages came and Milena wolfed them down. The poor girl must have been starving, Vanek thought, and hastened to order four more pairs of sausages. Evidently MiJena had not heard him give the order, for when the sausages were set before her, she flew into a rage and screamed at Milos: “Are you trying to insult me? Have you forgotten that I’m a lady?” MitoS was only able to appease her by assuring her that he had ordered the sausages for himself.
From that time on Milena wrote for Prdvo Lidu under five different pseudonyms. As she didn’t want to be seen at the paper’s office, her articles were delivered to Van£k by little Honza, her daughter. These articles caused him a good deal of trouble. Indignant at seeing their efforts rejected, various socialist iadies with literary ambitions demanded that Van£k reveal the identity of these five mysterious contributors. But he held his tongue and continued to print Milena’s articles, which were a lot livelier and better written than those of his party comrades.
One day in 1934 Peroutka, the editor of Přítomnost, asked Milos Vanek: “What would you think of a couple who claimed that they couldn’t stay in Prague but absolutely had to move to the Soviet Union, because their child would soon be of school age, and the Prague schools were too bourgeois and corrupt?” This couple was Krejcar and Milena. Yes, they were actually planning to go to Moscow. Undoubtedly, the situation in Europe, the threat of National Socialist Germany, had something to do with it. Many intellectuals believed at the time that only the Soviet Union had the will and the power to withstand the rising tide of fascism. In their eagerness to “build socialism,” quite a few of the architect friends of Taromir and Milena had already gone to the Soviet Union, confident that they would find satisfying work. They dreamed of commissions to build housing developments, if not whole cities, and believed in the unlimited possibilities of the socialist state. Le Corbusier, Gropius, Hannes Meyer, May, and others had already gone. Krejcar received an invitation from Moscow and went there alone. At the last minute, Milena decided to stay in Prague with Honza.
The Soviet authorities commissioned Krejcar to build a convalescent home for workers and party functionaries in Kislovodsk in the Caucasus. He submitted plans. Much to his irritation he was asked to spend weeks and months discussing them with officials who knew nothing about architecture, but who kept raising two objections: Krejcar’s style was too modern and his plans did not meet the requirements of life in a socialist state. In the end they were rejected out of hand.
Krejcar soon grew disgusted with Soviet communism and wrote disillusioned letters to his friends in Prague. No one but Milena answered. All his Communist colleagues dismissed his reports as vicious lies which did not deserve an answer.
As usual in Soviet Russia, an interpreter had been assigned to Krejcar; she proved to be a beautiful young Jewish Latvian named Riva, who had experienced the dark side of the Soviet dictatorship and spent time in prison. Krejcar and Riva fell in love. Inevitably they told each other what they really thought of conditions in the workers’ fatherland.
After two years in the Soviet Union, Krejcar had not been able to carry out a single one of his architectural projects. All he wanted was to leave the country. He divorced Milena and married Riva, who actually succeeded in obtaining exit visas for them both, an achievement bordering on the miraculous in 1936, the year of the big Stalin purge.
Back in Prague, Jaromir Krejcar put up an impressive modern building on Palackeho Vinohrady, in which, although he and Milena were divorced, he set aside a beautiful top-floor apartment for her and Honza. A balcony ran all around it, which she decorated lavishly with flowers. The apartment soon became known as “Milena’s hanging gardens.” At first the place was appallingly bare; as there was no money for furniture, they had to make do with a mattress, a few chairs, and some crates. But little by little, the “hanging gardens” became a model modern apartment.
Soon after Krejcar went to Moscow, the Communist party gave Milena a special assignment—to minister to a party member who had come down with tuberculosis. The party’s motives were not purely humanitarian; the sick man was suspected of Trotskyism, and it was hoped that Milena would win him back to the party line. She found him lying helpless and emaciated in a dark basement room. She instantly forgot all about the party’s instructions and resolved to do everything in her power to help him get well. And then something totally unexpected happened. Her patient fell in love with her. Milena could hardly believe it; how, she thought, could anyone fall in love with an ugly, crippled woman? This love, which she soon reciprocated, restored her lost sense of womanhood and gave her the strength to surmount the deep depression from which she had suffered since her illness. She heaped her lover with attentions, her devotion knew no bounds. Thanks to her loving care, he recovered his health and found a satisfactory job.
Mitena’s Communist episode was relatively brief. It was only in a state of confusion and weakness that she needed the support of a secular religion, and wishful thinking could not blunt her critical sense for long. Fortunately, something, perhaps her work as a free-lance journalist, had saved her from degenerating into a professional revolutionary. Still, she found it hard to break with the party and hesitated a long time before taking the final step. What finally decided her was the news of Stalin’s first show trial that ended with the execution of Zinoviev and Kamenev. That was in the summer of 1936.
Unlike many other Communists, Milena was not crushed by her break with the party. She did not grieve for a lost god. Quite on the contrary, she was relieved to be free from party discipline. She soon recovered her creative talent and, thanks to the political experience acquired in the last five years, became a respected political journalist.
Several of her friends who left the party at the same time were less fortunate. Especially those whose whole life had been the party felt that the ground had been removed from under their feet. It was next to impossible for them to find their way back to normal life. Unable to live without political activity, many took refuge in left- (or right-) wing sectarianism.
One dismal, rainy spring day Milena was sitting with her friend Fredy Mayer in a dark wine bar in the heart of Prague. She spoke sadly of her past, of all the men who had played a part in her life. “It’s been wonderful, it’s been interesting, it’s been exciting, but now I realize that it wasn’t what I really wanted. I never really met the right man…. They talked too much, they were too neurotic, too impractical. … So many were afraid of life, and it was up to me to bolster them up. It should have been the other way around. I often dreamed of having a lot of children, of milking cows and minding geese, and having a husband who’d thrash me now and then. I’m really a Czech peasant woman at heart. The so-called intellectual strain in me is just an unfortunate accident.” Fredy Mayer tried to protest: “Really, Milena, how can you … ?” She laughed aloud. “Yes, yes,” she said, “I know that’s not the whole story. But sometimes I can’t help feeling that it is.” And she went on in the same vein. In the end Fredy suggested that her whole experience could be summed up in the refrain of a song that the Prague cabaret performers Voskovec and Werich had sung. It is the plaint of an unmarried mother about the man who has deserted her after getting her with child. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Men ain’t human.”
When she got home late that night, Milena found a bunch of flowers waiting on the doorstep with a card saying, “Men ain’t human.”
For more than three years Hitler had been in power in Germany. In Czechoslovakia all those who were politically aware were observing developments with increasing alarm. In an article about plain people and their Sunday pleasures, Milena wrote: “One has the impression that even recreation is regimented, that people are no longer allowed to roam through the woods, tossing pine cones at tree trunks, making fires, pulling up poisonous mushrooms for the hell of it. In Germany the whole population marches out to the country on Sunday morning for their ration of fresh air and comes marching back in the evening, thoroughly out of breath. The little man from Slavland, dreamy, a vagabond at heart, humorous and disorganized, would creep into a ditch by the roadside and give way to fear like a child….”*
* Milena Jesenskä, “People in Movement.’