Reinerová

Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008)

Like Franz Kafka, Lenka Reinerová was a German-speaking Prague writer of Jewish descent who wrote in German. She was born in Prague and lived almost her whole life there, except for a decade away between 1939 and 1948. When the Nazis occupied Prague, she escaped to France and spent the rest of the war in Mexico; she also lived from 1945-1948 in Belgrade before returning to Prague. Her parents and her two sisters were murdered in the Holocaust.

In the 1930s Lenka Reinerová worked for Franz Carl Weiskopf and Hermann Leupold, the editors of the communist periodical Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ). Weiskopf became her literary mentor and introduced her to other leading anti-fascist writers of the time including Egon Erwin Kisch, Anna Seghers and Bodo Uhse. These friendships are recalled in her memoir Es begann in der Melantrichgasse. Erinnerungen an Weiskopf, Kisch, Uhse und die Seghers (1985) [It Began in the Melantrichgasse: Memories of Weiskopf, Kisch, Uhse and Seghers].

In France in 1939 she was interned twice, first in the Paris women’s prison La Petite Roquette, and then after the outbreak of World War 2 she was interned in the Camp de Rieucros in the Vichy zone in the south of France. She then escaped via Casablanca to Mexico.

Back in Prague in 1952, she was caught up in the Stalinist political purges around the Slánský trials. She was imprisoned for fifteen months, and was then released and forcibly rehoused with her family in Pardubice for almost two years, where she worked for a glass and porcelain wholesaler (see Mandelduft (1998), p. 81). She was only rehabilitated in 1964, after which she became the editor of the journal Im Herzen Europas (In the Heart of Europe). After the Prague Spring in 1968 she was expelled from the Czechoslovak communist party (KSČ). After this she worked as a simultaneous interpreter for over two decades. From 1985 onwards she published a series of memoirs and autofictions, including Mandelduft (1998, see below).

Reinerová’s first marriage was to Karl Rotter, a Czech communist, in 1935, this ended in divorce. Then in 1943 she married Theodor Balk/Dragutin Fodor (1900-1974), a Serbian Jewish doctor and writer. In 1946 their daughter Anna Fodorová was born; she is a writer and psychotherapist who lives in London. In 2022 she published a memoir of her mother – it appeared first in Czech, and then in German translation as Anna Fodorová, Lenka Reinerová: Abschied von meiner Mutter, translated into German by Christina Frankenberg.

In 2004, together with František Černý and Kurt Krolop, she founded the Prague Literary House of Germanophone Authors (Prager Literaturhaus deutschsprachiger Autoren).

Mandelduft (1998) [The Smell of Almonds]

[Czech translation 2004: Vůně mandlí]

Although subtitled ‘Erzählungen’ (short stories), the three texts in this book are autofictions, i.e. autobiographical reminiscences narrated in a literary mode. The three texts are:

‘Kein Mensch auf der Straße’ [Nobody on the Street]

While working as an interpreter in the early 1990s, Reinerová attends a conference in the Czech town of Terezín. This fortress town was the location of the Theresienstadt Ghetto during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, where 88,000 people were held before being deported to the extermination camps, including her own mother. En route to the town, Reinerová sees a kiosk selling mass-produced Germanic garden gnomes; close to the German border, there are also sex workers standing by the roadside. On arrival in Terezín, Reinerová sees a madman sitting on a bench near the town hall, drawing circles in the air with his hands. She learns that the town now houses a centre for the mentally ill. This story has been analysed by Florian Gassner (see reading list below).

‘Tragischer Irrtum und richtige Diagnose’ [Tragic Error and Correct Diagnosis]

This autobiographical text contrasts different crisis points in Lenka Reinerová’s life – her time as a political prisoner (in France and Czechoslovakia), her return to Prague in 1948 as the only surviving member of her family, and her periods in hospital for cancer treatment. The phrase ‘Tragischer Irrtum’ [tragic error] in the title is the term that was later used by officials to describe her imprisonment for fifteen months during the Stalinist purges in Czechoslovakia in 1952-53. This contrasts with her ‘correct diagnosis’: in 1948 the doctors discovered that she had cancer. She was given radiotherapy and the cancer went into remission. She recalls her painful time as a political prisoner, but on a more positive note she also expresses her gratitude to the doctors and nurses who saved her life from cancer many times over. Whenever she was on the brink, it was other human beings who helped to restore her and rebuild a connection with the simple pleasures of everyday life.

‘Mandelduft, Piratentuch und grüne Ringe’ [Almond Scent, Pirate Headscarf and Green Rings]

This story describes a series of encounters while the narrator is on holiday in Piešťany, a spa town in western Slovakia. The events take place in the 1970s. The narrator admits that although she has lived in France and Mexico during her years of exile, she knows little about Slovakia. She meets an old woman who lives alone with just a cat and a goat for company, who has been assaulted by a thirteen year old boy who lives in the neighborhood. She meets an ornithologist who wears a red headscarf, who spends each day walking around the Sĺňava water reservoir. Her holidays ends, and, on the train back to Prague, she meets a woman with a Bible, a rosary and a goose called Eliška, who is travelling onward to visit her daughter who lives in Budweis (České Budějovice). The woman tells her ‘everyone should read the Old Testament so that they can tell the difference between Cain and Abel, and between David and Goliath, and recognise a Judas when they see one’ (p. 141). The story ends with the train’s arrival in Prague.