Milena Jesenská: Prague, the Morning of 15 March 1939

Milena JesenskáMilena Jesenská (10 August 1896 – 17 May 1944) was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. She is popularly remembered as one of Franz Kafka’s great loves, and Jesenská’s translation of The Stoker was the first translation of Kafka’s writings into any foreign language.

After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the German army, Jesenská joined an underground resistance movement and helped many Jewish and political refugees to emigrate. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.

It is estimated that Jesenská wrote well over 1,000 articles but only a handful have been translated into English. In The Journalism Of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe, her own writings provide a new perspective on her personality, as well as the changes in Central Europe between the two world wars as these were perceived by a woman of letters. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including her perceptions of Kafka, her understanding of social and cultural changes during this period, the threat of Nazism, and the plight of the Jews in the 1930s.

On 15 March 1939, the German Wehrmacht moved into Prague, and the occupation would not end until the surrender of Germany following World War II. Below is an excerpt from the book The Journalism Of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.


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Celebrate Women with Aspasia!

Today, September 4th, is the anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where over 4,750 delegates from several countries were in attendance. Issues discussed at the conference included poverty, education, health, economic rights, and more.

From UNWomen.org: “The United Nations has organized four world conferences on women. These took place in Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995. The last was followed by a series of five-year reviews. The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing marked a significant turning point for the global agenda for gender equality. The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for Action, adopted unanimously by 189 countries, is an agenda for women’s empowerment and considered the key global policy document on gender equality.”


To celebrate the anniversary of this historic conference and its benefit to women worldwide, we’d like to invite you to glance a free sample issue of Aspasiaor sign up for a 60-day free trial by clicking here.




About Aspasia

Aspasia is the international peer-reviewed annual of women’s and gender history of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (CESEE). It aims to transform European women’s and gender history by expanding comparative research on women and gender to all parts of Europe, creating a European history of women and gender that encompasses more than the traditional Western European perspective. Aspasia particularly emphasizes research that examines the ways in which gender intersects with other categories of social organization and advances work that explores transnational aspects of women’s and gender histories within, to, and from CESEE. The journal also provides an important outlet for the publication of articles by scholars working in CESEE itself. Its contributions cover a rich variety of topics and historical eras, as well as a wide range of methodologies and approaches to the history of women and gender.

Read the founding statement from the first issue of Aspasia here.