Lenka Reinerová: A Café With Many Tables
Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008) is often described as Prague’s last writer in German, continuing the tradition of Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel and Egon Erwin Kisch, the last of whom she knew well. Jewish by birth, she survived the war by escaping from France to Morocco, and in the 1950s she was jailed for over a year by Czechoslovakia’s communist authorities. She was the driving force behind the Prager Literaturhaus, set up in 2004 to promote Prague’s German-language literary legacy.
I interviewed Lenka Reinerová on several occasions, and when she died in 2008, I made a programme for Radio Prague, A Café With Many Tables, celebrating her life and work. Here it is:
„What I am writing is Prague German – I am not trying to write German German.“
In August 2004 I went to see Lenka in her small flat in Plzeňská Street in Prague 5. We talked about her writing. Here is our conversation, which takes us from Mexico to Casablanca, but always returns to her beloved home city of Prague.
A memory of a prison heard but not seen:
And here she is in 2002, remembering an extraordinary moment. It was only many decades later that she first saw the prison in which she was incarcerated in 1952.
“One day I was sitting in this same room and was looking at my TV. And it was showing scenes of prison. All of a sudden, I realised I’d been in this same prison. A part of the regime then was that I never was allowed to leave my cell without being blindfolded. They always put a wet rag over my eyes. And now, sitting at home on my couch, I saw for the first time how it looked in this prison. For the first time I saw the corridor, I saw the doors, which I always heard, but never saw. And the strange thing is that I was surprised, because I somehow didn’t realise when I was there – and I was there for a long time – that it was a prison like the ones I know from American films – different floors and with the guards going around. I knew that the guards were going around, but I couldn’t imagine them. I was in this classic very bad prison. I saw it for the first time at home on TV.”