Milena Jesenská

A prominent journalist between the two world wars, Milena Jesenská (1896–1944) is best remembered for her romance with Franz Kafka. This seems unfortunate, as their relationship was brief and inconclusive. She was, more important, a woman of her time, involved with all of the critical European movements, trends, and philosophies of the early twentieth century. Jesenská married Enrst Pollack in 1918 and moved to Vienna, where she spent World War I. In Vienna, Jesenská began her journalistic work. She began her correspondence with Kafka with a request to translate one of his stories. They exchanged letters on almost a daily basis from 1919 until Kafka’s death in 1924 (Kafka’s letters have been collected into the book Letters to Milena; Jesenská’s letters have been lost). She divorced Ernst in 1925, returned to Prague, took up, then later let go of, communism, and continued her journalistic career. Her journalism focused on the political happenings in war-torn Europe and the plight of refugees. In 1939, Jesenská was arrested and sent to Ravensburck concentration camp, where she lived and worked until 1944, when she died of a kidney infection without being reunited with her family.