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Milena Kafka's friend

of Margarete Buber-Neumann (Adelphi)


The day before yesterday has died in a sanatorium in Klosterneuburg near Kierling Vienna, Dr. Franz Kafka, a German writer lived in Prague. You knew him in a few, since he was a hermit, a wise man frightened by life. It was far-sighted, too wise to live and too weak to fight. He saw the world with such clarity and precision by not being able to endure, having to die, he will not he allowed loopholes, it was not saved as many other refugees in some intellectual confusion that was noble. He was a man and an artist with a conscience so scrupulous that remain vigilant, even where others, deaf felt safe .

is a flame, which I've never seen
( Franz Kafka to Milena )

The unique friendship between Margarete Buber-Neumann and Milena Jesenko began in 1940, the women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück, where Miles is imprisoned for his anti-Nazi activities, and Margarete, wife of the German Communist Heinz Neumann, was doubly persecuted by the Soviets and the Nazis. Theirs is not an easy situation, but the innate and spontaneous vivacity of Milena is able to deepen the friendly affection between the two. Clandestine night meetings, short walks between the barracks and barbed wire, small gifts and gestures of mutual solidarity transform their imprisonment in a unique, sincere and loyal friendship, Milena dreams that continue to see a future of freedom, for which plans to write a book with her friend to tell the infernal mechanism of the field.

daughter of a famous cosmetic surgeon, Milena attended the Women of Minerva Prague, beginning to create that identity as an intellectual maverick, emancipated and vaguely "feminist" that characterize his every action. After high school, becomes doctor as he would like his father but, attracted by German and Jewish writers and scholars, conducts a free and bohemian and falls in love Ernst Polack. To escape his father, that prohibits this report, the two marry and flee to Vienna, but the erotic and sexual promiscuity him, that was widespread in the intellectual, destroys the harmony of marriage, and leads to use of Milena drugs.

With a husband who does not want more, and a father who has divorced, she, among other works, he began to write articles, laying the foundation to his career as a journalist, and to translate from German translations and these will be meet them Franz Kafka.

Their love is intense, passionate but difficult, contrasted the difference of ages and personalities of the two but also by the disease he will meet a few times and will continue between letters and telegrams to full strength, sought and decided by Kafka , in which she recounts in the letters written to Max Brod. A love that never ends for Miles, although she has subsequently other men and a daughter, pursue a career in journalism and become the first active and militant communist, expelled from the party, they pledge themselves to oppose the most of the racial persecution of the Nazis .

Milena died in 1944 at age 48, his project of writing a book together with Margarete a book to witness the horror of the concentration camps will not come true, but ask her friend to tell her life.

and Margarita, after more than 30 years, this book will publish in 1977, rebuilding with historical accuracy and literary, but also with the enthusiasm of a friend, the dramatic life of Milena Jesenko, the woman we all know as the recipient love letters of Franz Kafka, among the finest that have been written in the twentieth century.