Letters were essential for Krumbachová, through which she maintained long friendships, including with her former partners, her brother, and her friends; she also wrote to her cats. Krumbachová’s letters are a literary genre, communication, and also therapy. They have a mix of stories, memories, thoughts, works, the problems of life. They’re funny, joyful, sad, plaintive, and sometimes also critical. Their author’s voice comes into the foreground, speaks, and despite taking the form of a monologue, they invite the reader to a dialogue (albeit not a real one).

Ester Krumbachová took fairy tales that were standard for whole generations and radically rewrote and updated them into so-called “black fairy tales”. By alternating between unusually frequent magic and prosaic situations, she disrupted the distinction between the real and the magical. In the quick jump from fairy tale to reality, everyday life ends up seeming more magical than magic itself. In Krumbachová’s fairy tales, everything seems possible; they are commanded by a pervasive transformative force; stories play out so quickly that they are close to collapsing right from the start; and characters fluidly step into different identities and step out of them once more. Everything takes place in a world that is also metamorphic. The idea of changing identities even resonated in Ester Krumbachová’s clothing. Her style was quite eccentric for her time and place, and she was open to wild combinations that left their mark on both her texts and her costume designs for film and theater.

Krumbachová was musically talented and was able to recommend music for a film or write lyrics for a song herself and work it into the events of the film such that it was no longer just a mood-setting accompaniment.

In the file titled “My poems (nighttime and daytime) also short prose” there are several poems about animals that might have been written for both adults and children, which attest to Ester Krumbachová’s interest in simplicity of form and condensation. Krumbachová turned towards naïveté just as she did towards correction and self-correction: it helped her fight against nihilism and egotism.

Ester Krumbachová was interested in food as an opportunity for sharing, social interaction, and involving additional senses in communication. Dinners at Ester Krumbachová’s meant coming together in a different form than the unofficial apartment seminars; they were not organized in the format of intellectual exchange. In films, Krumbachová also showed that food is not just trust and care, but also plays a political role; that banquets are also spaces for political representation and manipulation. Cooking also has yet another, entirely different dimension, as she herself confirmed: “I like cooking, there’s a bit of eroticism in it, what are you going to do, gentlemen, you don’t understand it in the slightest.”