From the other side

BY J.P. PULKKINEN

Steve Sem-Sandberg
Ravensbrück
Albert Bonniers Förlag. S

To many people, Milena Jesenská was just a footnote in the life of Franz Kafka. Steve Sem-Sandberg's novel Ravensbrück changes all that, leaving the reader with much the same feeling as a tourist who has lost his guide and unexpectedly discovers an entirely different city within a historic city that seems familiar. Admittedly it is not the city which plays the main part in Ravensbrück, but a woman and her time. She is an uncompromising, unruly, modern and fiery individual, who experiences a tumultuous period in European history first hand during her lifetime (1896-1944).

Who was Milena Jesenská? She was a close friend of Kafka's, she had a strict, old-fashioned father, she was married twice and had a 20-year career as a journalist. In his book, Sem-Sandberg portrays a person who fought for her own independence all her life, who actively experienced and captured the spirit of her time and its historical events and who campaigned for political and social justice.

Young women who wished to become emancipated did not have an easy time of it in the early 1900s. Milena's father had her committed to a mental hospital but could not prevent her from marrying Ernst Polak. Among the intellectuals in Vienna's café society at the time, Milena Polaková was too spontaneous and too loud. She suffered from kleptomania and attempted to commit suicide, she had a relationship with the relentlessly self-critical Franz Kafka and returned to Prague. Milena entered her second marriage with architect Jaromír Krejcar, sustained an incurable leg injury, gave birth to a daughter, became addicted to morphine, was sacked from her job at the paper Národní listy due to the increasingly severe political climate, and as a consequence of all this she moved further left in her own beliefs.

"Habt keine Angst. Wir kommen um euch zu befreien." In 1938, that fateful year for Czechoslovakia, Milena Jesenská was 42 years old and in 1940, she became political prisoner no. 4714 in Ravensbrück, the concentration camp for women. The title that Sem-Sandberg has chosen for his book is like a black hole which sucks into it all the lives and worlds in the book. "Have you ever seen the face of a prisoner behind bars?" Milena wrote in Národní listy as early as 1921. "Freedom lies on the other side of the window. Heaven lies on the other side of the window. On the other side of the door there is only reality."

Ravensbrück is a novel based on actual events, which places it loosely speaking in the same genre as two other Nordic novels from last year, The Bookseller from Kabul by Åsne Seierstad from Norway and Helene, a book about Helene Schjerfbeck by Rakel Liehu from Finland. This genre -- if genre it is -- has two obvious pitfalls, which are not necessarily characteristic of the two novels mentioned above. The writer may either hold his or her own freedom of expression sacred and exploit the more sensational aspects of the subject matter, abandoning all other sensibilities, or wallow in the deep and delicate sentiments of the subject and produce an expansive emotional outpouring. Sem-Sandberg avoids both these pitfalls. Ravensbrück is proof of the flexibility of the novel as a genre, as it grows far beyond its well-known basic elements: Kafka's friend and the concentration camp. Sem-Sandberg never gets bogged down in the mire that could have resulted from an attempt to describe the emotional life and social relationships of an emancipated, crippled drug addict.

Sem-Sandberg has given Ravensbrück a form which is familiar from his earlier instalments in this loosely defined trilogy, Theres (1996) and Allt förgängligt är bara en bild (All passing things are but an image; 1999): documentary sections are integrated with the literary narrative. The chapters have recurring headings such as Biography, Anti-biography, The face of history, Portrait and Walls; there are excerpts from letters and from Milena Jesenská's articles, and an index of persons with short biographies. This could have resulted in quite a mixed bag, but it is in fact a clearly structured and balanced work. The different elements of the book interact and mesh together to build up the logic which causes a human being to take action against evil at the risk of her own life and wellbeing.

One of the paradoxes in Ravensbrück is that Milena Jesenská, who has herself saved many lives, does not die haphazardly, as it were, amid the infernal reality of the concentration camp, but that the camp gets a doctor called Percival Karl Treite in its last years. In contrast to his monstrous predecessors, Treite has an interest in his work in a conventional medical sense. He claims to know Milena's father, diagnoses her with nephritis, removes the infected kidney and arranges for several blood transfusions without, however, ultimately succeeding in saving Milena's life. The figure of Treite is one small example of the unexpected way in which Ravensbrück opens up new worlds, even when the direction of the narrative deceptively appears to be proceeding in a different direction.

J.P. Pulkkinen is a cultural journalist at Yleisradio, Helsinki

Translated by The English Centre/Monica Sonck and Nicholas Mayow