The Prague Post
November 23rd, 2008
Endowment Fund     Business Listings ONLINE      Reservations      Classifieds    Subscriptions
Hotel Prague Centre

Home » Archives » Tempo

Dispatches from the Dream Café

An era ended with the loss of beloved Czech writer Lenka Reinerová

July 30th, 2008 issue

By Lucie Rozmánková

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST
Reinerová considered herself more of a narrator than a novelist.
Staff Writer
The death of writer Lenka Reinerová last month at the age of 92 attracted international attention, an appropriate honor for a significant passing. Reinerová was the last witness to a vanished culture — and the last Czech author writing in German.
Prior to World War II, Prague was a vibrant international city with a mix of Czech, German and Jewish cultures. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, the city became a haven for opponents of Hitler. What these new German, often Jewish, expats discovered was a German-speaking community that included several literary geniuses in its ranks. Arrivals such as Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Ernst Bloch and John Heartfield immediately felt at home in the world of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Egon Erwin Kisch and František Langer. With the exception of Kafka, who died when she was 8 years old, Reinerová came to know all these men.
The story of her life could have been a Victor Hugo novel. Born in 1916 to Czech and German Jewish parents, she grew up during the Depression, and had to quit her studies at the grammar school on Štěpánská (the same school that the famous German writer Paul Leppin attended) to work. This experience gave her sympathy for communism.
She was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust, by virtue of being out of the country prior to the Munich Treaty. Her sister gave her a warning call not to come back. She went to France, but was arrested after the Nazi invasion and transferred to a refugee camp in Morocco. Escaping the squalid conditions there, she made her way to Mexico, where she spent the rest of the war working for the Czechoslovak Embassy.
In Mexico, Reinerová met and married a Yugoslav doctor named Theodor Ballek. After the war, they returned to Europe. When Tito came to power in Yugoslavia, she and her ailing husband decided to stay in Czechoslovakia.
In 1952, Reinerová was arrested again, this time by the communists, whom she had once supported. She was jailed for 15 months, forced to leave her little daughter at home. As to her “crimes,” it was enough for the communist officials that she was a prewar communist, an emigrant, a Jew and married to a Yugoslav. After her release, she eventually became the editor-in-chief of the Im Herzen Europas magazine. She was a contributor to the first Kafka conference in 1963 and even gave a speech during the famous Prague Spring meeting of Czechoslovak writers. After the Warsaw Pact invasion she was prohibited to work for the newspaper, and had to earn her living as an interpreter. In 1983, her books began to be published in Germany, finally appearing in her own country after the 1989 revolution.
In good company
Reinerová’s most popular book is a lovely intersection of memories, dreams and reality called The Dream Café of a Prague Woman (2001). In the book she wanders through the city remembering friends who have passed away, and imagining what they would think seeing all the changes to their beloved city:
When I wander around Prague, I often wonder where all those cafés have gone — where once you could discuss things or make your plans for half of the day, or even throughout the whole, and drink a cup of black coffee (that so-called Turkish coffee, fortunately, wasn’t available yet). One could learn different things, watch interesting people, sometimes get to know them and make friends, perhaps even meet one’s true love. But since these lovely shelters of past days exist no longer, I, nowadays, like to spin my own Prague dream.
Somewhere there in a mysterious blue-gray mist, above copper-rusted domes and austere church spires, there is, as I picture it in my dreams, a café with many tables, with a view of our city below, and the habitués looking down, almost all of them had lived there once. I used to know them all.
Reinerová referred to herself as a narrator rather than a novelist, drawing inspiration mostly from her memories. Her candid observation of life made her books best-sellers in Germany, where she was awarded the Goethe Medal and the Schiller Ring. The Czech Republic also came to acknowledge the work of this great woman, with former President Václav Havel honoring her with a state medal.
“She was a very beautiful, attractive woman,” says Olga Walló, a longtime translator of her books. “I recognized it clearly from the way she impressed men, even though she was over 80 when I met her. She was clever, vivid and humble — she was normal. That is something totally uncommon.”
Reinerová bridged the world of prewar Czechoslovakia with ours, passing on the value and wisdom of simple humanity. Though she lost her entire family in the death camps, she kept writing in German, saying that “Language is an instrument, and it depends on what you do with it.” Her philosophy was that, by accenting the positive, one is bound to meet good company.
Lucie Rozmánková can be reached at lrozmankova@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (30/07/2008):

Browse the Current Issue

If you enjoyed this article, why don't you subscribe to the print version!
We accept secure online transactions provided by PayPal and Moneybookers

Be the first to add a comment!


Full Name: *
City: *
E-mail: **
This comment can be published in the print version of The Prague Post
Enter the text on the right:
 visual captcha
Comment: *
* Required field. In order to be approved for display, comments must have a first and last name and a city.
** E-mails are required and will only be used for internal purposes.

Most visited in Business Listings

Hotel booking
The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
To subscribe to the print paper, click here.
Unauthorized reproduction is strictly prohibited.