Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
MILENA JESENSKÁ
The most famous
“Minervan”
was
Milena Jesenská
, born in 1896 into a Czech family
whose ancestry stretched back to the sixteenth century. Shortly after leaving school, she
was confined to a mental asylum by her father when he discovered that she was having
an affair with a Jew. On her release, she married the Jewish intellectual
Ernst Pollak
, and
moved to Vienna, where she took a job as a railway porter to support the two of them.
While living in Vienna, she sent her Czech translation of one of
FranzKafka
's short stor-
ies to his publisher; Kafka wrote back himself, and so began their intense, mostly epis-
tolary, relationship. Kafka described her later as “the only woman who ever understood
me”, and with his encouragement she took up writing professionally. Tragically, by the
timeMilenahadextricatedherselffromwhatturnedouttobeadisastrousmarriage,Kafka,
still smarting from three failed engagements with other women, had decided never to com-
mit himself to anyone else; his letters alone survived as a moving testament to their love.
Milena returned to Prague in 1925, and moved on from writing fashion articles to cri-
tiques of avant-garde architecture, becoming one of the city's leading journalists. She mar-
riedagain,thistimetheprominentfunctionalistarchitect
JaromírKrejcar
,butlater,adif-
ficult pregnancy and childbirth left her addicted to morphine. She overcame her dependen-
cy only after joining the Communist Party, but was to quit after the first of Stalin's show
trials in 1936. She continued to work as a journalist in the late 1930s, and wrote a series of
articles condemning the rise of Fascism in the Sudetenland.
When the Nazis rolled into Prague in 1939, Milena's Vinohrady flat had already become
acentreforresistance.Forawhile,shemanagedtohangontoherjob,butherindependent
intellectual stance and provocative gestures - for instance, wearing a yellow star as a mark
ofsolidaritywithherJewishfriends-soonattractedtheattentionsoftheGestapoand,after
a brief spell in the notorious Pankrác prison, she was sent to
Ravensbrück
, the women's
concentration camp near Berlin, where she died of kidney failure in May 1944.
Diamant
Spalená 4 • Tram #3,# 6, #9, #18, #22 or #24 to Lazarská
As Vodičkova curves left towards Karlovo náměstí,
Lazarská
, meeting point of the city's
night trams, leads off to the right. At the bottom of this street is
Diamant
, completed in 1912
by Emil Králíček, and so called because its prismatic Cubist style is reminiscent of a dia-
mond.Thegeometricsculpturalreliefsonthefacade,themainportalandtheframeenclosing
a Baroque statue of St John of Nepomuk on Spálená are worth viewing.
