The “Final Rays” of a Setting Sun: Lenka Reinerová and the Legacy of “Prague German Literature”

Abstract

Lenka Reinerová is considered a contemporary witness of both the 20th and 21st centuries and the last German writer in Prague. Indeed, she is the last known prose writer from Prague who wrote in German and boasts a long list of famous predecessors, such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, E. E. Kisch and others. Interestingly, Reinerová did not only earn a place among the Prague German literature writers because of her mother tongue. In her memoirs, she also engages with literary and academic discourse on the German-language literature coming from Prague. The following article aims to describe this continuity in more detail.

1. Introduction

Lenka Reinerová (1916–2008) is known as the last Prague German writer1 and a contemporary witness of the 20th century.2 She was born in the era of Austria-Hungary and was acquainted with some of the representatives of the German-language Prague literature (e.g., E. E. Kisch or F. C. Weiskopf). She lost her family in the Holocaust, spent some time in exile in France and Mexico during World War II, experienced Communism in post-war Czechoslovakia and also experienced the Velvet Revolution.

This article focuses on how Reinerová’s prose relates to the so-called “Prague German literature” and “the Prague Circle” and how her texts respond to the literary and theoretical discussion of the German literature in Prague that gradually emerged in the 1960s. Eduard Goldstücker (1913–2000), a Prague German Jewish Germanist, proposed the first scientific definition of the “Prague German literature” in his paper Die Prager deutsche Literatur als historisches Phänomen [Prague German literature as a historical phenomenon], which he presented at the second Liblice Conference Weltfreunde: Konferenz über die Prager deutsche Literatur [Weltfreunde: Conference on German Prague Literature] in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1965, which followed the first Liblice Conference on Franz Kafka with the title Franz Kafka aus Prager Sicht [Franz Kafka from a Prague Perspective] in 1963.3 The characteristics of the Prague German literature summarized by Eduard Goldstücker include, first and foremost, the thesis of the existence of the authors in cultural isolation, their humanistic attitude and, last but not least, their mediating role between Czech and German cultures (Goldstücker 1967).4

In 1966, Max Brod, a well-known German writer from Prague at that time, published a memoir titled Der Prager Kreis [The Prague Circle], which sought—as opposed to Goldstücker—to map German literature in Prague and its networks chronologically, with Kafka at its centre. While Goldstücker limits Prague literature to the period from the end of the 19th century (the publication of Rilke’s first collection of poems) to the 1930s, Brod tries to sketch a continuous picture from the first half of the 19th century. He speaks about the ancestral hall, or “Ahnensaal” (Brod 1979, p. 9), and rays that extend outward or “Austrahlungen” (Brod 1979, p. 169). By referring to circles in the plural, he suggests an open-ended temporal continuity. At the same time, he speaks of a larger number of circles existing in parallel and his model emphasizes that strong personal ties existed between some of the authors. Brod explicitly opposes Goldstücker’s claim that German authors lived in isolation in Prague and emphasizes their contacts with and connections to Czech culture, not the least of which was based on their translation and mediation activities (Brod 1979, p. 41).5

This paper is intended to illustrate that Lenka Reinerová’s later texts written from the 1990s onwards deliberately follow the tradition of German-language literature from Prague as defined by Goldstücker and Brod, while emphasizing some selected elements of the given definitions. Reinerová reminisces extensively about the Prague German writers she knew and she further outlines in her texts a theoretical discourse on Prague German literature and the Prague Circle, but her reasons for doing so were mainly of a commercial nature.6 Following the Velvet Revolution, she represented herself as the last writer of this tradition7 and—with the help of the media—used this claim as a label.8 Reinerová herself admits the following:

It is interesting that for a long time I was looked on as being a little bit odd—a German Jewish person from Prague, who lost her whole family in the Holocaust, and she continues to write her books in German. That was looked on as a little strange. All of a sudden it changed completely, and now one of my highest qualities is that I continue as the last one to write in German. (Vaughan 2007).

2. Reinerová’s Biography and Her Work9

Lenka Reinerová was born on 17 May 1916 in the Prague district of Karlín into an assimilated Jewish family, as the older daughter of a Czech ironmonger and a German-Bohemian. She spoke both German and Czech. At the age of sixteen, she had to drop out of school due to the precarious financial situation at home, as her parents were unable to support the post-secondary education of their children. In 1932, Reinerová became a member of the Komsomol (The Communist Youth Union) and joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1934. In 1935, she began working for the anti-fascist, left-wing magazine Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung under Communist journalist Franz Carl Weiskopf, first as a secretary and then as an editor. This moment marked the beginning of her career in journalism.

In 1939, she went into exile because of her Jewish origin and political views and in 1941, she managed to flee to Mexico—a popular destination for Communists and left-wing emigrants. In between, she faced a number of challenges. Initially, when she arrived in France, she lived in Versailles and in the House of Czechoslovakian Culture in Paris and worked for a left-wing French agency, managing Czechoslovakian correspondence. However, starting in September 1939, she spent six months in the Petite Roquette Prison in Paris and was later transferred to a women’s internment camp in Rieucros. She managed to escape from the camp in February 1941, before spending several months in Marseille, where she hoped to be granted a visa so as to emigrate to Mexico. She managed to obtain the visa thanks to the assistance of the “American League of Writers” and in particular because of her friend, Franz Carl Weiskopf. Reinerová soon fled via Africa, where she was interned again in today’s Morocco, then a French protectorate. She escaped from the internment camp and lived secretly in Casablanca. She finally completed her journey to Mexico, where her friends Egon Erwin Kisch and Anna Seghers, whom she had befriended earlier, were already in exile. In Mexico, she worked at the Czechoslovak-Mexican Association and, from the summer of 1942, as a secretary at the Czechoslovakian embassy. She also pursued her career as a journalist there by, for example, writing for the Freies Deutschland magazine and by co-founding the El Checoslovaco en México magazine.

In Mexico, she married Yugoslav writer and doctor Theodor Balk (pseudonym for Dragutin Fodor), with whom she moved to Belgrade after the war in October 1945. There, she worked in the Czechoslovakian section of the Yugoslav Radio. Her daughter Anna was born in Belgrade in 1946.10 Starting in 1947, Reinerová was employed by the Cultural Society of Yugoslavia-Czechoslovakia in Belgrade. In 1948, the family returned to Prague, where Reinerová remained until her death. From 1949 to 1951, together with her husband, she was a leader of the anti-Tito Yugoslav Political Emigration Organisation, where she held various positions.11 She then worked for the Czechoslovakian Radio. Between 1952 and 1953, in connection with the Slánský trial12, Reinerová was incarcerated for fifteen months in Prague’s Ruzyně Prison on suspicion of being a Zionist and a spy and was subsequently expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. After her release from prison, she was forced to leave Prague and move to the town of Pardubice, where she worked as a salesperson in a glass shop. After a year and a half, she was allowed to return to Prague with her family.

In 1958, she began working for the magazine Im Herzen Europas [In Europe’s Heart], which promoted Czechoslovakia as a tourist destination mainly in Germany and Austria,13 and she rejoined the Communist Party. From the beginning of the 1960s, she also worked for the German-language Communist newspaper Aufbau und Frieden [Reconstruction and Peace]. Her credentials were rehabilitated in 1964. After the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, Reinerová definitively separated herself from the ideology of the Communist Party; in 1970, she was again expelled from the Party, and thus also had to leave the editorial board of the magazine Im Herzen Europas. Furthermore, she was banned from publishing in general and was only allowed to interpret and translate anonymously or under a pseudonym. She could only officially start using her own name as late as the mid-1980s.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, she became a well-known author, wrote a number of autobiographical books and received several awards: the Schiller Ring of the German Schiller Foundation (1999), the Czech Medal of Merit I. Rank (2001), an honorary citizenship of her hometown of Prague (2002), the Goethe Medal (2003) and the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2006). In 2004, she founded the Prague Literature House for German-language authors alongside Germanist Kurt Krolop and František Černý, the Ambassador of Czechoslovakia and later also of the Czech Republic in Berlin. This institution organises various events on German–Czech cultural themes and communicates the legacy of Prague German literature to the public.14 Reinerová died in Prague on 27 June 2008.

With a few exceptions, Reinerová’s publications after 1990 can best be described as memoir prose and are particularly well-known and well-received. In these texts, the Lejeunian autobiographical pact is generally observed—the reader equates the author with the female first-person narrator. Most of the texts were first published in German, with a later translation to Czech: Das Traumcafé einer Pragerin [Dream Café of a Prague Woman], 1996 (in Czech Kavárna nad Prahou, 2001), Mandelduft [Scent of Almonds], 1998 (Vůně mandlí, 2004); Zu Hause in Prag—manchmal auch anderswo [At Home in Prague—and Sometimes Elsewhere], 2000 (Bez adresy. Neskutečně skutečné příběhy, 2001), Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nacht [All the Colours of the Sun and the Night], 2003 (Všechny barvy slunce a noci, 2002; the original version was published as Barva slunce a noci [The Colour of the Sun and the Night] in 1969, but the copies were confiscated after publication), Närrisches Prag [Foolish Prague], 2005 (Praha bláznivá, 2005) and Das Geheimnis der nächsten Minuten [The Secret of the Next Minutes], 2007 (Čekárny mého života, 2007). Her last manuscript was published posthumously in Czech in 2012 under the title Adiós, Španělsko [Adios, Spain], which deals with the involvement of German and Czech anti-fascist combatants in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s.15

Reinerová’s older texts are largely unknown and hardly mentioned in interviews with her. Reinerová was already writing reportages and newspaper articles in the 1930s. In the 1940s, she began writing shorter fiction, for example, the allegorical fairy tale Freiheitli und Gewaltung [Freedom and Violence]16 (1940), which alludes to Hitler and National Socialism, and the fictional story Kotige Schuhe [Muddy Shoes] (1943), which was written as a reaction to the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich and the subsequent destruction of the Czech village of Lidice, and recounts the fate of a fictive girl whose parents were murdered in Lidice. In the 1950s and 1960s, Reinerová wrote texts that can be categorised as socialist realism. In 1956, the autobiographical novel Hranice uzavřeny [Closed Borders] was published (in German published as Grenze geschlossen [Closed Border] in 1958), describing the author’s six-year escape from National Socialism. The collection of stories Ein für allemal [Once and For All], published in 1962, consists of fictional stories set against the backdrop of real historical events that focus on the Czechoslovak anti-fascist struggle and the proliferation of Communist ideology. One exception among the older texts devoted to socialist realism is the aforementioned autobiographical text Barva slunce a noci, published in 1969, which represents a testimony made by the author concerning her imprisonment during the Stalinist purges of the 1950s.

While Reinerová was banned from publishing in Czechoslovakia, her short story collection Der Ausflug zum Schwanensee [The Trip to the Swan Lake], in which she, among other things, reminisces about her family members who died in concentration camps, was published by Aufbau-Verlag in the GDR in 1983. Two years later, the memoir Es begann in der Melantrichgasse. Erinnerungen an Weiskopf, Kisch, Uhse und die Seghers [It All Began in Melantrichgasse. Memories of Weiskopf, Kisch, Uhse and Seghers] (1985) and the autobiographical memoir Premiere. Erinnerungen an einen denkwürdigen Theaterabend und andere Begebenheiten [Premiere. Memories of a Memorable Evening at the Theatre and Other Incidents] (1989) were also published by this publisher.

3. Lenka Reinerová’s Texts as a Response to the Academic Discourse on German Literature in the Prague of the 1960s

Lenka Reinerová attended the aforementioned first conference in Liblice as an audience member,17 and she had a volume from the second conference in her library.18 She was personally acquainted with Eduard Goldstücker and read his texts. In describing the composition of her library, Reinerová explicitly mentions Goldstücker’s books as an important component:

Mit deutschen Büchern bei mir hat es eine besondere Bewandtnis. Da stehen Kisch, Kafka, Weiskopf, Rudolf Fuchs, Max Brod bis hin zu meinem langjährigen Freund und Zeitgenossen Eduard Goldstücker und anderen lieben Pragern neben- und übereinander.

(Reinerová 2001, p. 95)

(I have a special connection with German books. Kisch, Kafka, Weiskopf, Rudolf Fuchs, Max Brod and my long-time friend and contemporary Eduard Goldstücker and other dear Praguers stand next to and on top of each other.)

As evidenced by the above-mentioned quote, Reinerová apparently also read Max Brod. In 1988, she spoke about her memories of the members of the so-called Prague Circle at the colloquium Berlin and the “Prague Circle”, which took place at the Technical University in Berlin.19 Therefore, she was undoubtedly familiar with the discourse of the 1960s concerning German literature from Prague. In some respects, she follows Goldstücker’s concept of the “Prague German literature”20 in her literary texts. Overall, however, she is more inclined to the conception of Max Brod’s “Prague circles”, which were also familiar to her.

3.1. The Intertwining of Three Cultures

The combination of German, Czech and Jewish culture is considered fundamental to the peculiar character of Prague German literature. This interpretative approach dates back to the first decades of the 20th century (Wiener 1919, pp. 6–7) and it was made particularly prominent by publicist and translator Pavel Eisner (1889–1958), who understood the Germans in Prague as being separated from the Czech population by a triple ghetto wall: there was a language barrier (German speakers among Czechs), a religious barrier (most were Jewish) and a social barrier (the Germans tended to occupy the middle to upper social classes) (Eisner 1948). Eisner strongly emphasised the separating factors and barriers of different cultural identities in Prague. Citing Eisner, Eduard Goldstücker later did the same:

Die bisherigen Bemühungen, die spezifischen Charakterzüge der Prager deutschen Literatur zu erfassen, haben die überzeugendsten Ergebnisse in den Arbeiten Paul Eisners (1889–1958) gezeitigt. Seine Ansicht, die Prager deutsche Literatur sei in den letzten Jahrzehnten der österreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie in einem unnatürlichen, insularen, von einem gesunden Volksganzen abgeschlossenen Milieu entstanden und ihre Schöpfer hätten auf diesem Deutschprager Inselchen gelebt wie in einem dreifachen Getto—einem deutschen, einem deutschjüdischen und einem bürgerlichen—, ist richtig.

(Goldstücker 1967, pp. 26–27)

Previous endeavours to grasp the specific characteristics of Prague German literature have yielded the most convincing results in the works of Paul Eisner (1889–1958). His view that Prague German literature emerged in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in an unnatural, insular milieu, isolated from a healthy national whole, and that its representatives lived on this German–Prague islet as if in a triple ghetto—a German, a German–Jewish and a bourgeois one—is correct.

Max Brod, on the other hand, opposes this thesis and points instead to lively communication and contacts between German and Czech intellectuals. He explicitly rejects Eisner’s thesis of the triple ghetto:

Ich lehne jene Theorie ganz entschieden ab (die namentlich Paul Eisner entwickelt hat), die den Prager Kreis als unnatürlich isoliert, als von einer „dreifachen Ghettomauer“ gegen die Welt hin abgesperrt darstellt. Diese Theorie ist durchaus unfundiert (und sachlich unrichtig, ja irreführend); sie mag auf das überskeptische Prag der deutschen Juden passen, wie es in den Romanen Auguste Hauschners geschildert ist (hiervon bald mehr!), das Prag zwischen 1870 und 1890, jedoch keinesfalls auf die viel freiere, hoffende und wenn auch nicht geradezu naive, so doch kindhafte Stimmung des „Prager Kreises“ (etwa 1904 bis 1939).

(Brod 1979, p. 41)

(I firmly reject the theory (developed by Paul Eisner in particular) that portrays the Prague Circle as unnaturally isolated, closed off from the world by a “triple ghetto wall”. This theory is completely unfounded (and factually incorrect, even misleading); it may fit the over-sceptical Prague of the German Jews, as described in Auguste Hauschner’s novels (more of this soon!), the Prague between 1870 and 1890, but certainly not the much freer, hopeful and, if not downright naive, at least childlike mood of the “Prague Circle” (around 1904 to 1939).)

Like Goldstücker and Brod, Reinerová draws attention to the fact that there was a special melting pot of the three cultures in Prague.

Ich saß an einem Tisch, eine Person von vielen, allerdings eine gebürtige Pragerin, und empfand in dieser in keinerlei Weise besonderen Stunde wieder einmal, in den drei Kulturen verstrickt und vernetzt zu sein, die in dieser Stadt gleich mir ein Heimatrecht und in diesem Café gleichsam ein angestammtes Gastrecht haben.

(Reinerová 2005, p. 155)

(I was sitting at a table, one person among many, though a native of Prague, and in this in no way special hour I felt once again that I was entangled and networked in the three cultures that, like me, have a right of home in this city and an ancestral right of hospitality in this café.)

In this passage, Reinerová emphasises the fact that the three cultures shaping Prague’s German literature blend within her person. Also, the mysterious figure21 in Närrisches Prag, the ghost of Prague, which appears only to the narrator, sits at three tables at the same time as a symbol of the three cultures. Nevertheless, the distribution of the cultures across the three tables, i.e., across three independent, distinct objects, also clearly indicates the existence of certain dividing lines that are inherent in this complex cultural mixture. However inaccurate it may be to affix cultural identity based on language (Czech, German) and on religion (Jewish), the adoption of this model testifies to Reinerová’s reception of academic texts by Eisner, Goldstücker and Brod.

Regarding her own religious background, Lenka Reinerová came from an assimilated Jewish family and did not frequent a synagogue; her family did not observe Jewish customs. She became aware of her Jewish origins only after the Holocaust—after the death of her entire family in concentration camps. Of course, she could only speak about the Jewish question and join the Jewish community after the fall of Communism.22 When addressing the issue of the Holocaust, an ethical motivation based on the duty to remember deceased family members as the sole survivor takes centre stage. Additionally, the conviction that it is morally necessary to draw attention to the horrors of the Holocaust so that something similar never happens again also plays a role (Schlicht 2003, pp. 223–34).23 In this context, she also educates the reader about Jewish history, their customs and traditions (Reinerová 2005, pp. 56–65). In her monograph, Salmhofer (2009) goes even further and discovers a development of the author’s concepts of identity in Reinerová’s texts: in the beginning, political identity is in the foreground, followed by an identity crisis caused by the disappointment with the Communist regime, after which her personal and Jewish identity gains importance. The turn to Judaism thus also corresponds psychologically with the author’s search for a new, stable identity. Last but not least, the connection to Prague’s German literature and the three cultures mentioned above represent another reason for her emphasis on Jewish identity.

Reinerová’s published work and statements in the media portray a peaceful, fruitful symbiosis between the Czech and German-speaking Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Prague until 1933. There are only occasional subtle tensions,24 but the positive, conflict-free image of a problem-free coexistence prevails.25 Reinerová (1996, p. 17) speaks fondly of the “gemischte Runde“ (“mixed circle”) of Czech and German intellectuals who met regularly at Café Arco (Kafka is also mentioned) or Metro (cf. Na plovárně 2006) and pays tribute to them in her dream café, where Czechs and Germans also sit together without any tension. She also frequently emphasises the peacefulness of the treatment of Jews in her childhood:

Zu meiner Zeit gab es am Stephansgymnasium etwa gleich viele jüdische und deutschnationale Schüler, für die Lehrer galt dasselbe Verhältnis. Rückblickend finde ich es ziemlich bemerkenswert, dass es nie, aber wirklich nie, Reibungen gegeben hat, weder zwischen den Schülern noch unter den Lehrern.

(Doerry and Stoldt 2002)

(In my days, there were roughly equal numbers of Jewish- and German-speaking nationally-minded pupils at St. Stephen’s Grammar School, and the same ratio applied to the teachers. Looking back, I find it quite remarkable that there was never, but really never, any friction, neither between the pupils nor among the teachers.)

By emphasizing the ongoing communication between Czechs and Germans and the friendly environment towards Jews until 1933, she clearly follows Max Brod rather than Eisner or Goldstücker, who emphasized the tensions between these three cultures in the first decades of the 20th century.

3.2. Friendship with Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Carl Weiskopf

In his memoir about the Prague circles, Max Brod pointedly opines that the friendly contacts between the authors who supported each other in their activities, read their texts to each other and consulted about them with one another, were essential for the emergence of Prague German literature. Similarly, Brod emphasizes that their German-writing predecessors from the Czech lands and Prague were also important to his contemporaries, who drew inspiration from them.

As a female author from another generation, Reinerová posits that these two factors were important for her literary work, too. In her texts, she mentions older authors whom she did not personally know (Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, etc.), and she writes especially about the role of friendship and mentorship by some senior German colleagues. Based on the information reflected in Reinerová’s memoir prose, it is clear that she was acquainted with some of the older German-writing Prague authors. These include, first of all, Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Carl Weiskopf. While left-wing author Franz Carl Weiskopf fell into disfavour, Kisch became famous as a “roving reporter”, and his name is still known today. Presumably, this is why memories of Kisch are so abundant in Reinerová’s texts and why she calls him by the diminutive Egonek, to reassure the reader of how strong and intimate their friendship was. By presenting both Kisch and Weiskopf as her mentors in terms of journalistic and literary activities, she places herself firmly in the tradition of the so-called Prague German literature and presents herself as an extension of the Prague Circle.

In her repeated accounts of how she wrote her first reportage with him in the editorial office of the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, Reinerová emerges as Franz Carl Weiskopf’s student learning the virtue of concision. Otherwise, she learns, the produced text can be “kitsch”. The description of Weiskopf’s reaction to this reportage is noteworthy:

Ich saß in seinem Mini-Arbeitsraum dicht neben ihm, anders war das dort gar nicht möglich, und verfolgte gespannt, wie seine Augen von Zeile zu Zeile glitten. Auf einmal hakten sie sich fest. Er war an die Stelle gelangt, an der ich eine winterliche Wiese schilderte, auf die aus blauem Himmel eine schwarze Krähe herabstieß, der Schnee unter ihr glitzerte in der Sonne grünlich, golden, violett…

“Bist du sicher, daß er nicht auch orange und rosarot funkelte?“ fragte mich FC sachlich, aber in seinen Augen blitzte es ziemlich gefährlich. “Ich meine nur wegen der Vollkommenheit des Spektrums, verstehst du.“

Solch eine Lektion merkt man sich. Es war übrigens bei weitem nicht die einzige, die er mir erteilt hat.

(Reinerová 1985, p. 29)

(I sat close to him in his mini-workroom—there was no other way of doing so—and watched intently as his eyes slid from line to line. Suddenly, they became fixed. He had reached the point where I was describing a wintry meadow with a black crow swooping down out of the blue sky, the snow beneath it glistening greenish, golden, purple in the sun...

“Are you sure it wasn’t also sparkling orange and pink?” FC [Franz Carl Weiskopf; M. B.] asked me matter-of-factly, but there was a rather dangerous gleam in his eye. “I only mean it because of the perfection of the spectrum, you see.”

You remember a lesson like that. It was by no means the only one he taught me, by the way.)

Reinerová tells this story in her text FCW’s Höllenbeamter mit dem auswechselbaren Kopf [FCW’s Hellish Official with the Interchangeable Head], which was published in 1985, and in a number of interviews well into the 21st century.26

As far as Kisch is concerned, Reinerová saw herself as his successor in the sense that she writes factually about what truly happened and shows no need to fantasize:

Es ist vielleicht kein Zufall, ich denke mir doch eigentlich kaum etwas aus. Ich schreibe einfach nieder, was ich erlebt habe, was auf mich zugekommen ist. Ich wüsste nicht, wie ich mich selbst bezeichnen soll. Bin ich eine Reporterin? Nein! Ich fahre ja nicht irgendwo hin, um ein Ereignis oder eine Person aufzuzeichnen. Aber ich glaube, diese Freude an der Niederschreibung der Wirklichkeit, das habe ich vielleicht von dem Kisch gelernt oder geerbt. Je älter ich werde, desto mehr bin ich mir dessen bewusst.

(Närrisch an das Leben Glauben 2008, pp. 34–35)

(Maybe it’s no coincidence, I hardly ever think of anything. I just write down what I‘ve experienced, what has happened to me. I wouldn’t know what to call myself. Am I a reporter? No! I‘m not travelling somewhere to document an event or a person. But I think I may have learnt or inherited this joy in documenting reality from Kisch. The older I get, the more I realise this.)

Although it is obvious that Reinerová writes in a different style than Kisch,27 their close relationship cannot be called into question. This is also true of their journalistic and literary work. Their discussions of literature, culture and politics undoubtedly influenced Reinerová texts. In this regard, she can certainly be considered the last or one of the last members of the wider Prague Circle. Especially through Kisch who, according to Brod, belongs to the wider circle, there was a clear connection with the Prague Circle, despite the fact that Brod (1979, pp. 220–21) does not consider Kisch’s literary work valuable because of its entertaining qualities.

Brod considers only five authors—himself, Kafka, Weltsch, Baum and Winder—to be members of the Prague Inner Circle. Even though he names in his book mainly the authors from the Wider Circle whom he knew personally, to him the contours of the Wider Circle remain unclear, both locally and temporally.28 In his monograph, he speaks of the ancestral hall of the Prague Circle, and he does not consider the circles to have disappeared even after the end of the Second World War. The circles are not necessarily confined to Prague only, they also extend to authors in exile (a category to which Brod himself later belonged), who are believed to represent them, too.29

3.3. The Mythic and Kafkaesque Prague

On the one hand, Reinerová recalls authors that she knew and tells anecdotal stories about them in her texts. On the other hand, she relates to those—especially the famous ones—that she did not know, in a different way. At times, she presents Prague as a magical city akin to Gustav Meyrink’s portrayal in his famous novel Der Golem from 1915. In this way, Reinerová clearly places her texts in the existing literary tradition of describing Prague as magical, which is typical of German texts written in Prague at the beginning of the 20th century. As Schmitz notes, “spätestens Meyrinks Erfolg macht‚ Prag als Stoff‘ zur literarischen Mode“ (“At the latest Meyrink’s success [success with the occultist novel The Golem; M. B.] makes “Prague as a literary material” a literary fashion.”) (Schmitz 2001, p. 181):

Sie [die Generation Jung-Prags; M.B.] prägten mit ihren Werken das dichterische Bild der Stadt und schufen regelrecht ein Modell Prags, ein Paradigma, einen “Mythos Prag”, der über Jahrzehnte bindend blieb. Die Bestandteile dieses Mythos, die da sind: zarte Melancholie, in Nebel und zwielichtige Dämmerung gehüllte Traum-, Märchenhaftigkeit und Unwirklichkeit—so in den frühen Gedichten Rilkes, etwa in der Sammlung “Larenopfer”, und in den Versen Hoffmanns und Faktors, offene Trauer über das Verschwinden des alten (deutschen) Prags, etwa in den Texten Oskar Wieners—das sich in Leppins Romanen zu einer Romantik des Morbiden, zum Totenkult steigert, das Dämonische, Gruselige, Phantastische, Phantasmagorische, mit welchem vor allem Gustav Meyrink das Prag-Paradigma bereichert hat, das Ambivalente der Beziehung der deutschen Dichter zu ihrer Heimatstadt, das mit dem Terminus Haßliebe bezeichnet wurde usw.

(Fiala-Fürst 1996, pp. 90–91)

(They [the so-called Jung-Prag generation; M.B.] shaped the poetic image of the city with their works, and literally created a model of Prague, a paradigm, a “myth of Prague” that remained binding for decades. The components of this myth are gentle melancholy, dreaminess, fairytale-esque nature, and unreality covered in mist and twilight—as in Rilke’s early poems exemplified by the collection “Larenopfer”, and in the verses of Hoffmann and Faktor. Furthermore, there is open mourning over the disappearance of the old (German) Prague as evinced by the texts of Oskar Wiener—which in Leppin’s novels escalates into a romance of the morbid, a cult of the dead, the demonic, the horrifying, the fantastic, the phantasmagorical, with which Gustav Meyrink in particular enriched the Prague paradigm, and the ambivalent relationship of German poets to their home town, which was characterised by the term love–hate relationship, and so on.)

The strongest reference to Meyrink is in the story Närrisches Prag, where a mysterious figure, the imaginary magical spirit of Prague (possibly also a Golem variant), appears as a leitmotif. This figure is sitting at three tables at once at the famous Prague café Slavia and is “eine leicht verschwommene Figur, ungreifbar, bewegungslos, eher ein Schatten, aber mit glühenden Augen” (Reinerová 2005, p. 5) (“a slightly blurred figure, intangible, motionless, more like a shadow, but with glowing eyes”). Perhaps it is “ein Geist von Prag, ein Zauberer, der Magier dieser Stadt, dem viele nachspüren, den aber nur wenige begreifen können?” (Reinerová 2005, p. 5) (“a ghost of Prague, the wizard, the magician of this city, whom many follow but few can comprehend?”).

In both Reinerová’s and Meyrink’s texts, the past is present, above all, in Prague’s Jewish Town, which is explicitly described as a “Welt von Gestern und Vorgestern” (Reinerová 2001, p. 16) (“the world of yesterday and the day before yesterday”). The first-person narrator of the text Zu Hause in Prag, manchmal auch anderswo, which contains many references to places important in Reinerová’s life, mentions the following in connection with her former flat in the street Melantrichgasse in Prague’s Old Town:

Wenn ich jedoch aus der kleinen Haustür [in der Melantrichgasse in der Prager Altstadt; M. B.] trat und nach wenigen Schritten vor dem Altstädter Rathaus stand, tauchte ich manchmal, wie von unsichtbarer Hand gelenkt, in der Welt von Gestern und Vorgestern unter, in der Prager Judenstadt. Hier vermeinte ich geradezu das Rascheln langer Gewänder, auch das eilige Trippeln ständig um ihre Leben besorgter, ausnahmslos mit einer Kopfbedeckung ausgestatteter Familienmütter zu hören […]. Auch das unverständliche Raunen betender Männer aus den verschiedenen Synagogen schien hier auf mich einzudringen, all das Schwerverständliche, mit Mystik und Legenden, auch Verständnislosigkeit und bösen Verleumdungen behaftete, nur zum Teil enträtselte Geheimnisvolle, das in diesen engen Straßen in der Luft hing, als ob inzwischen nicht Jahrhunderte vergangen wären.

(Reinerová 2001, p. 16)

(But when I stepped out of the small front door [in Melantrichgasse in Prague’s Old Town; M. B.] and after a few steps stood in front of the Old Town Hall, I sometimes found myself immersed, as if guided by an invisible hand, in the world of yesterday and the day before yesterday, in Prague’s Jewish Town. Here I could almost hear the rustling of long robes and the hurried patter of family mothers, all of them wearing headgear and constantly worried about their lives [...]. The incomprehensible murmur of praying men from various synagogues also seemed to penetrate me here, all the mysterious things that were difficult to understand, tainted with mysticism and legends, even incomprehension and evil slander, only partially unravelled, that hung in the air in these narrow streets as if centuries had not passed in the meantime.)30

In several texts, Reinerová the narrator has absurd experiences that evoke Kafkaesque situations. In Das Geheimnis der nächsten Minuten, she describes a visit to a Communist office in the era of Communism, when she is asked to provide evidence of her resistance activities against National Socialism. She describes the deserted corridor with many doors on both sides, her perplexity as to which ones she should enter, and the not exactly accommodating reaction of the officials. The following goes through the narrator’s mind:

Man hatte mich eingeladen (vorgeladen?), und ich war gekommen. Also was!

Aber die vielen Türen links und rechts, vor und hinter mir. Könnte es nicht geschehen, daß sich eine plötzlich öffnet und mich verschluckt? Da fiel mir auf einmal ein: Hier könnte sich eine Erzählung Franz Kafkas abspielen.

(Reinerová 2009, p. 94)

(I had been invited (summoned?) and I had come. So what!

But all those doors to the left and right, in front of and behind me. Couldn’t it happen that one of them would suddenly open and swallow me up? Then it suddenly occurred to me: A story by Franz Kafka could take place here.)

The invitation (or summoning) to the office building during the Communist regime is a clear reference to Kafka’s novel Der Prozeß (Kafka 1976, pp. 259–260), while the description of the office could be a reference to Kafka’s novel Das Schloß (Kafka 1976, p. 709), where all the doors are the same and the surveyor K. is helplessly searching for the right one. Finally the narrator even explicitly points out that the situation just described would be suitable for a Kafka text, so that this allusion does not go unnoticed by the reader.

The account of the visit to Ruzyně Prison in Prague in Närrisches Prag, where Reinerová was imprisoned in 1952–1953 as part of the Slánský trials, also ties in with the reception of Kafka, perceiving the oppressive living conditions of Kafka’s protagonists as comparable to Communism. The imprisonment in the 1950s is commented on by a colleague of the first-person narrator, an interpreter, as follows:31 ”War auch eine ziemlich kuriose Situation. Aber Mädchen, wir sind doch in Prag! Hast du Kafka nicht gelesen?“ (“It was also a rather curious situation [the imprisonment; M. B.]. But girl, we’re in Prague! Haven’t you read Kafka (Reinerová 2005, p. 100)?” Decades after her arrest, or at least sometime after the fall of Communism, the first-person narrator finally has the opportunity to see the inside of the prison again. It evokes a strange feeling:

Denn es war unheimlich, frei durch ein Gefängnis zu wandern, in dem ich so unfrei gewesen bin wie niemals sonst in meinem Leben. In Franz Kafkas Roman “Der Prozeß“ las ich vor Jahren, wie “ein Mann vom Lande um Eintritt in das Gesetz bittet“. War es etwa ein ähnliches Verlangen, das mich veranlaßt hat, diesen sonderbaren Besuch zu unternehmen?

(Reinerová 2005, p. 105f.)

(Because it was scary to wander freely through a prison where I had been most unfree in my life. In Franz Kafka’s novel “Der Prozeß” I read years ago how “a man from the country asks to enter the law”. Was it a similar desire that prompted me to make this strange visit?)

Here, the connection with the world-famous Kafka is established on two levels, both of which are well-known. On the one hand, through the allusion to Kafka, the narrator links the feeling of alienation inherent in the Communist regime to the similarly alienating worlds described in Kafka’s texts.32 On the other hand, even without a reference to a specific political regime, the waiting and helpless wandering in offices and hospitals, etc., are generally referred to as Kafkaesque.33

In addition to this type of reference, Reinerová conjures up Franz Kafka’s presence as a character in her “dream café” up above Prague. In complete accordance with dominant stereotypes, Kafka is silent, shy and introverted, appearing pale with large dark eyes (Reinerová 1996, pp. 17–19). As Prague’s most famous German author34, Kafka must appear in this dream café; however, as a literary figure, he is merely a reflection of the stereotypes surrounding his personality.

3.4. The Mediation Activities

For both Goldstücker and Brod, Prague German Jewish authors serve as mediators between Czech and German culture. Goldstücker draws attention to the authors’ mediation activities at the end of his study:

Meine—leider allzu flüchtige—Skizze der historischen Stellung der Prager deutschen Literatur kann ich nicht abschließen, ohne noch eine ihrer wahrhaft historischen Funktionen zu erwähnen. Ich meine damit die kulturelle Vermittlerrolle zwischen Tschechen und Deutschen, zwischen Tschechen, Slawen auf der einen und den übrigen, besonders der westlichen Welt auf der anderen Seite vermittels der deutschen Sprache. […] Das Übersetzungswerk von Otto Pick, Rudolf Fuchs, Franz Werfel, Paul Eisner, F.C. Weiskopf, Louis Fürnberg und weiteren ist schon rein quantitativ beträchtlich, […].

(Goldstücker 1967, pp. 40–41)

(I cannot conclude my—unfortunately all too cursory—sketch of the historical position of Prague German literature without mentioning one of its truly historical functions. By this I mean the cultural mediating role between Czechs and Germans, between Czechs and Slavs on the one hand and the rest of the world, especially the Western world, on the other, by means of the German language. [...] The translation work of Otto Pick, Rudolf Fuchs, Franz Werfel, Paul Eisner, F.C. Weiskopf, Louis Fürnberg and others is considerable in terms of quantity alone, [...])

Max Brod comments on the strong reception of Czech poets by the Prague Germans:

Mit den Tschechen hielten wir eine gute Nachbarschaft und die tschechischen Dichter liebten wir; da gab es überhaupt nichts, was wie Grenze oder Absonderung abgesperrt hätte. Wir alle beherrschten die tschechische Sprache vollständig, die uns nicht weniger als die deutsche sagte.

(Brod 1979, p. 207)

(We were good neighbours with the Czechs and we loved the Czech poets; there was nothing at all like a border or separation. We all had a complete command of the Czech language, which meant no less to us than German.)

He then also refers to the translation activities of the German writers and himself. (Brod 1979, pp. 208–13)

In addition to the fact that both Brod and Goldstücker emphasize the importance of translation from Czech to German, Goldstücker strictly distinguishes between the Prague writers as humanists, and the Sudeten German writers, whom he characterises as militant and nationalistic:

Die Prager deutsche Literatur in unserem Sinne unterscheidet sich von dieser sogenannten sudetendeutschen Literatur dadurch, daß kein einziger ihrer Verfasser, obwohl sie sich als Angehörige des deutschen Volkes fühlten, den militanten nationalistischen Standpunkt gegenüber den Tschechen einnahm und selbstverständlich keiner von ihnen unter dem Einfluß des Antisemitismus stand.

(Goldstücker 1967, p. 25)

(Prague German literature as we understand it differs from this so-called Sudeten German literature in that none of its authors, although they felt themselves to be members of the German nation, took a militant nationalist stand against the Czechs and, of course, none of them were under the influence of anti-semitism.)

Although some recent scholars question the assumption that a humanistic impulse underscored the translation activities of a number of German Jews in Prague (Weinberg 2017a, p. 26; Spector 2000, pp. 195–96), the idea remains entrenched. Indeed, some even label the attitude of the Prague German authors towards their homeland as neo-Bohemianism.35 Reinerová can also be included in this tradition: in her dream café there is enough room for Czechs (e.g., the famous Czech writers Karel Čapek and Jaroslav Hašek) as well as German-speaking artists and intellectuals (Franz Kafka, Max Brod, F. C. Weiskopf, etc.).

Perhaps due to her Prague German heritage and her willingness to build bridges between cultures, Reinerová’s texts often encourage readers to do the same in didactic and pacifistic ways. Reinerová finds the borders between individual states and barriers between cultures unnatural; she speaks of “unvernünftige künstliche Grenzen” (“unreasonable artificial boundaries”) (Reinerová 1996, p. 8) that should be overcome.

Her opposition to violence and war are evidenced, for example, by the following passage from Das Traumcafé einer Pragerin about an imaginary news exchange in the café up above Prague:

Vorrang müßten ferner Mitteilungen über positive Taten haben, über menschen- und überhaupt lebensfreundliche Erfindungen. Etwa über eine Pille gegen Gewalttätigkeitsdrang, ein Spülwasser, das mit dauernder Wirkung schmutzige Gedanken, vielleicht selbst schmutzige Hände reinigt, ein Pulver, das diktatorische Gelüste lähmt. Mit solchen Nachrichten müßten an eurer Börse die höchsten Kurse erzielt werden. Eintauschen könnte man sie gegen die Werte, die in einer anderen Ecke, an anderen Tischchen gehandelt werden. Dort könnte man z.B. erfahren, welche Meere wieder sauber, welche Erdfrüchte erneut verläßlich gesund sind und wo man ohne überflüssige Aufregungen und sinnlos provozierte Gefahren ruhig leben und sogar friedlich sterben kann.

(Reinerová 1996, pp. 43–44)

(Priority should also be given to reports on positive deeds, on inventions that benefit people and life in general. For example, a pill against violent urges, a rinsing water that cleans dirty thoughts, perhaps even dirty hands, with lasting effect, a powder that paralyses dictatorial desires. With such news, the highest prices should be achieved on your stock exchange. They could be exchanged for values that are traded in another corner, at other tables. There you could find out, for example, which seas are clean again, which fruits of the earth are reliably healthy again and where you can live peacefully without superfluous excitement and senselessly provoked dangers and even die peacefully.)

Das Traumcafé einer Pragerin ends with a vision, which conjures up the possibility of a peaceful coexistence between different cultures, religions and philosophical views:

Es wäre ganz ohne Zweifel zweckentsprechend und vor allem gut, fuhr ich fort, wenn sich in den großen Spiegeln des Traumcafés […] die vier Weltseiten und alle fünf Kontinente reflektieren würden. […] Man sieht die Sonne über Afrika aufgehen oder den Mond über Amerika, man sieht Weiden in Australien, Hochgebirge in Asien und Sonne, Mond und die Sterne über unserem Europa. Auch Menschen kann man dort sehen und alle Tiere. Noah verkostet soeben zum ersten Mal einen Schluck Kaffee, und Neptun, sein zeitweiliger Gastwirt, sieht ihm dabei wohlwollend zu. Franz Kafka plant gemeinsam mit Jaroslav Hašek eine Radtour durch den Himalaja, die Seghers bittet Konfuzius um ein Gespräch unter vier Augen, mein Mann Theodor Balk versucht Doctor Faustus, der ja auch in die Medizin pfuschte und mitunter in Prag weilte, zu einer gemeinsamen Reportage über diese Stadt zu überreden, Egon Erwin Kisch schreibt mit Max Brod eine kritische Überlegung über das geistige Leben konfessionsloser Gespenster … Warum sollte Unmögliches hier nicht möglich sein?

(Reinerová 1996, pp. 44–45)

(It would undoubtedly be appropriate and above all good, I continued, if the four sides of the world and all five continents were reflected in the large mirrors of the dream café [...]. [...] You can see the sun rising over Africa or the moon over America, you can see pastures in Australia, high mountains in Asia and the sun, moon and stars over our Europe. You can also see people and all the animals. Noah has just tasted a sip of coffee for the first time, and Neptune, his temporary landlord, looks on benevolently. Franz Kafka is planning a cycle tour through the Himalayas with Jaroslav Hašek, Seghers asks Confucius for a conversation under four eyes, my husband Theodor Balk tries to persuade Doctor Faustus, who also tampered with medicine and sometimes stayed in Prague, to write a joint report on this city, Egon Erwin Kisch writes a critical reflection with Max Brod on the spiritual life of non-denominational ghosts ... Why shouldn’t the impossible be possible here?)

Although Reinerová did not translate literary texts from Czech into German or vice versa36 (which both Goldstücker and Brod consider the main activity of the humanistic and mediating function of Prague German literature), her prose, which introduces Czech culture to German readers and puts Czech artists on a par with German artists, clearly takes on a mediating role between the cultures.

4. Conclusions

As has been shown, Reinerová’s texts are more than a mere memoir reflecting the history of the 20th century via the example of her own experience(s) and memories related to well-known personalities of the Prague German literary scene, whom Reinerová knew. The texts also represent a conscious reference to the tradition of the so-called Prague German literature. Moreover, in her texts, Reinerová clearly refers to the older literary discourse on the Prague German literature and Prague circles37 in order to consciously align herself with this phenomenon. In accordance with this discourse, she talks about the intermingling of three cultures (Czech, German and Jewish) in Prague. The fact that she highlights the symbiosis of these three cultures prior to World War II correlates with Brod’s position rather than Goldstücker’s. Her pacifism corresponds to the humanism of Prague German literature, which Goldstücker postulates. Her inclusion of both Czech and German cultural figures reflects the famous mediating role of Prague’s German literature. In Reinerová’s texts we find passages affirming the mystical charm of Prague’s Old Town and Jewish Town in the style of Meyrink, as well as alienating sequences referring to Kafka. In this sense, one can see in Reinerová’s texts the final rays of this literature. She purposefully turns to the tradition of Prague German literature and reflects the established literary and scholarly discourse surrounding this phenomenon—and not only in her prose but also in her media appearances. Her self-stylization in the media and in literary texts corresponds with how the media present her—as the last German writer in Prague.