BEST SOCIETIES
- Milena Oda´s Young Prose
Sylke Kirschnick
Milena Oda would outline a cultural map of its course, it would be not only substantial also hear-worth. The Czech new generation authoress was born in the year 1975 in Jièín. Like Karl Kraus, which inspired during a colloquium of a professor in Bayreuth at the University with, where she completed a part of her german study, and also emphasized the felow student from the Czech Republic expressly. It amuses today still obviously. Litomyšl, where she visited the middle school in the late 80's, was the place of birth of the composer Bedøich Smetana. In Olmütz (Moravia) Milena Oda began her study and became enthusiastic for the German expressionists. As Gasthörerin - visiting student at the Mozarteum she stopped off in Salzburg.
In the meantime lives the young authoress and translator in Berlin.
During of her stay in Bayreuth lived Milena Oda in the Jean Paul road. Not of approximate the name of the author in Odas Prosatext step and footstep emerges from the year 2002. There Jean Paul calls the parlierende literature professor, who sketches a mathematical-psychological step system, his secretary. As assistant and research object Jean Paul continual brings his bread giver from the mental equilibrium, needs he for the distances which can be put back ever more step than after the computations of the professor necessary nevertheless is.
The storytellers in Milena Odas Prosa are exhausted in their presumed obsessions, whether it concerns counting and examining human steps as in step and footstep, over collecting and arranging sukkulents as in from the diary of a Kakteenjägers (2004) or around perfecting the obedience as in the text I be called servant (2005). There is nameless function carriers, which produce themselves in their monolied and expose in their size illusion. They circle in their passions such as hamsters in the impeller. And they do, on which they are fixed, without consideration for loss. The Kakteenjäger/cactus hunter strangles its wife, because she stands to its ambition as collecting tank in the way, and the servant gets rid of „of the load of “its „free even “.
Odas narrations types, roles and perspectives vary untiringly. Mirror-operated repeats myself into I hot servants the constellation of gentleman and farmhand from step and footstep.
Milena Oda writes on German. Because this language and culture were once present in the Czech Rep. and become this gradually also again, as it notices casually. It has the time before the national socialism in the view, the cultural axle Berlin, Prague and Vienna. The bad experiences of their grandparents as forced laborers during the protectorate did not coin/shape its conceptions of Germany. That were rather the vacation sojourns at the Baltic Sea, with their parents as a child. Because Böhmen/Bohemia is a Paradies, is however not because of the sea. Crucial finally was the art: „I lived always in the literature and have I then the world, I Germany in such a way noticed “, brings Milena Oda for her naturally the giving on the point. With the help of a text book she learns the language first auto-didactically. In addition journeys come to Austria and into Switzerland, where relatives at the beginning of the normalization to striking down by force of the Prager of spring in the year 1968 was emigriert. With the end of the 60's Milena Oda connects above all the birth of its brother. Politics hardly are in their living and writing from importance. Good it has however the samtene revolution in mind of 1989. On the market place of Litomyšl at that time fourteen-year old with its schoolmates in the choir called: „Václav Havel “and „Masaryk on the hundred “. Who that was, she knew at that time just as little as their school colleagues. Over Masaryk, integration figure and president of the first republic it read only later. Gradually it with the books one trusted to Havels, Bohumil Hrabals or Pavel Kohouts. From the unofficial history of the CSSR it received the son of the oppositional of dramatist Josef Topol by a good friend. Differently than Oda the thirteen years older
In the unpublished Prosatext of the letter writers, from which Milena Oda read in the meantime several times publicly, the spirit of Europe paradieren: „I go at 22.30 o'clock to bed such as Lessing. I rise at 5.30 o'clock on the early morning like Dante. (Like Kant are enough also to me 7 hours sleep.) I have breakfast eggs, bacon with bread such as Bismarck. … I daydream as Kafka. I speak as slowly as Dostojewskij. … I am sarkastisch like Bernhard. I am as critical as Voltaire. And as seriously as Joyce. …. I am ugly like Helmholtz… I describe all genius just as well as me. … I am surrounded by the society, which could be I also. “Its profile wins this I as collage of strange habits and characteristics and in the correspondence with authors transverse patch by the European times and space. The every now and then direct quotations are in selfhaven-guess/advise the letter writer, that is high problematic like all figures Odas, then in-installed, as if they are addressed to it. Its attempt to communicate with the dead ones the letter writer in the changing historical costumes of its addressees celebrates. At this ambiguous, fantasyful Mummenschanz is remarkable Odas ironical handling with literature and culture-historical material. This opens it in a completely fresh and new way. Self-confidently it moves in the traditions modern Europe with their various cultural purchases.
Because is for Milena Oda Europe an undivided area. The separation in ‚east' and ‚west' considers it dispensable. Those has every now and then a geringschätzigen Accord, so, as if Karel Èapek and Jaroslav Hašek did not belong to the western culture. With ‚Central Europe' it behaves differently. But it is in the meantime so domestic here as if it changed only the rooms of a dwelling, if it hurries from a reading to the other one. In the last year the Austrian literature house Krems invited the authoress to a guest scholarship. In Berlin she has readings today already regularly. She will attend see the sea shortly in the moravian Brünn/Brno of a scene reading of her play. One wishes oneself that this productive exchange of Central European authors becomes still more everyday in the future, than it is it so far.
And one hopes that the young Prosa Milena Odas finds a publisher, who makes her more easily accessible for her readers.
©Sylke Kirschnick
