Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface
1 - LIBUSSA, OR VERSIONS OF ORIGIN
What the Schoolchildren Learn
What Archaeologists and Historians Believe: Hypotheses and Reconstructions
The Fortunes of Libussa
2 - OTAKAR’S PRAGUE, 880—1278
From Trading Post to Royal Residence
The Rise of a King
The Early Jewish Community and the Prague Tosafists
Czech Saints, Italian Rhetoricians, and German Poets
“ … My kingdom stands on brittle glass”
3 - THE CAROLINIAN MOMENT: CHARLES IV AND HIS AGE
Burghers, Markets, and Cobbled Streets
Prince václav or, Rather, Charles
King Charles, Father of His Motherland
The Founding of the New Town
Charles Establishes His University
The King’s Kitchen Cabinet and the Italian Connection: Cola di Rienzo and Francesco Petrarch
Charles Builds His Myth
New Writing in Carolinian Prague
Cracks in the Facade
The Carolinian Jewish Town and the Massacre of 1389
4 - THE HUSSITE REVOLUTION: 1415-22
The King and the Vicar-General
The Advance of the Religious Reformers
Jan Hus at Bethlehem
The Decree of Kutná Hora
Jan Hus at Constance
The Beginnings of Hussite Resistance
Prague Attracts the European Dissidents
The Revolt of the Prague Radicals
The Crusaders Arrive: The Battle on Žižka’s Hill
The battle for the Vyšehrad and the Death of Jan Želivský
Hussites and Jews, and a Coda
5 - RUDOLF II AND THE REVOLT OF 1618
Praga Mystica?
After the Polish Kings, the Hapsburgs Again
Rudolf in Ascendance
Scientists in Prague: Tadeáš Hájek, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and Jessenius
The Alchemists Come to Prague
The “Golden Age” of Prague’s Jewish Community: Rabbi Judah Loew and His Golem; Jewish Tradition and the New Sciences
Picaresque Prague and the Case of Baron Russwurm
The Last Years of Rudolf,
The Revolt of 1618 and the Battle of the White Mountain
The Prague Baroque
6 - MOZART IN PRAGUE
Gli Italiani a Praga
A Third-Rate Place: War and Peace in the Provinces
The Age of Reforms: Mother and Son
Mozart at the Bertramka
7 - 1848 AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
The Travelers, and What They Did Not See
Stormy Interlude: The Strikes of 1844
Revolution and Counterrevolution: 1848-49
Three Lives in the Shadow of the Revolution
8 - T. G. MASARYK’S PRAGUE
A Modernized City and a Literature of Ghosts
The Republic in Its Monday Best
Masaryk Returns to Prague
From the Coachman’s Cottage to Prague Castle: A Modern Fairy Tale
Turbulent, Republican Prague
The Cultured of Republican Prague
Prague, September 21, 1937
Author’s Note
Also by Peter Demetz
POSTCRIPT - A DIFFICULT RETURN TO PRAGUE
BIBLIOGRAPHY - INDEX
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Page
Preface
I love and hate my hometown, and my warring sentiments have not been assuaged by recurrent returns to Prague in the years since the takeover of 1989, sometimes poetically called the Velvet Revolution. My happy memories of long walks among the chestnut trees in May or diving into the Vltava River from the rafts under the National Theater were accompanied by other, more disturbing images. I recall the daily lists of Czech citizens, summarily executed after the Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich had been ambushed, on May 27, 1942, on his way to Hradany Castle by a commando of Czechoslovak parachutists flown in from London, and I recall an aging woman with sturdy shoes and a full rucksack (my mother) riding a shabby tramcar of the No. 7 line to the assembly hall from which Jews were transported to the camps, never to return; three years later, when Prague had been liberated, German women, children, and old men were taken from their apartments, herded into old cinema halls and sports stadia, and, ultimately, expelled from the city and Czechoslovakia. Many of my European colleagues who like to write about Bohemian affairs have an easier time, unburdened by memories that make the heart ache and the stomach turn; the many coffee-table books now offered in Prague bookshops to tourists do not do much harm, permitting the travelers to come and go, their preconceptions unchanged. In one of his rare lyrical poems, Franz Kafka speaks of walking across the Charles Bridge and softly resting his hands on the old stones, “die Hände auf alten Steinen.” I always believed that he tried in that gentle gesture to keep the blood of many brutal battles from oozing out.
I am not foolish enough to believe that I can offer a Prague history as it really happened, but I hope to counter some of the traditional narratives with other stories that do not hide my polemical intentions. I wish to sketch a few selected chapters of a paradoxical history in which the golden hues of proud power and creative glory, of emperors, artists and scholars, and restive people, are not untouched with the black of suffering and the victims’ silence. I have learned a good deal from Czech historiography over the last forty years, but my joys of exploration have been diminished by memories of Charles University in the spring of 1948, when I was a student and could not help watching, immediately after the Communist putsch, some of my most admired teachers instantly revise their ideas rather than risk an honorable place among the hapless opposition. Each of the many learned books published under the party regime has its own story to tell—of eager servitude, of compromise, of self-humiliation, and sometimes of rare resistance.
Multiethnicity, or a livable society made of many different societies, has become a fundamental commitment in political life and in academic studies, at least in the United States. It is sad to see that in the Old World many places of multiethnic traditions have, in the past generation or so, turned to the more solid enjoyments of a single national culture characterized by policies of exclusion and a dash of xenophobia. In this particular moment it may not be useless to explore the history of a European city built over many centuries by Czechs, Germans, Jews, and Italians—though many of the national historians would like to diminish the contributions of one or the other group and often agree only in their efforts to ignore the people of the Jewish Town. Prague has a long history of mass murder, whether triggered by street mobs or organized by bureaucrats, and religious and ethnic “cleansings” that invariably dirtied the hands that “cleansed.” Prague had the pogrom of 1389, in which three thousand Jews were killed, Maria Theresa’s expulsion of the Jews from their ancient town in 1744, and the Shoah of 1940—45, the transports to Theresienstadt (Terezin) and to the killing camps; Prague historians know the story of the forced expatriation of all Evangelicals, Czech and German, after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and the expulsion of nearly all Germans, whether culpable or not, after May 1945.
Yet there were many moments when Prague societies lived with each other, or at least next to each other, and the names of those who attempted to guide different people to tolerance and sympathy with each other deserve new respect today, whether they are famous or known only to the happy few. I am thi
nking of the philosopher Bernard Bolzano, of President T. G. Masaryk, his disciple Emanuel Rádl, and the German ministers who served Masaryk’s republic loyally in the shared government of 1926-38. I also think of Franz Kafka’s onetime friend Milena Jesenská, who at the time of Munich described, in a series of compassionate essays addressed to her Czech compatriots, the personal and political tragedy of the German Socialists and liberals in the Sudetenland, or the philosopher Jan Patoka, whose lectures I attended before I left Prague and succeeded in crossing the border in the thick of the Bohemian forest. Prague can be proud of these thoughtful citizens.
There is yet another favored narrative that blocks the view of the fullness of Prague history. It has its rather recent origins in the idea that Prague harbors more secrets of the magic, or mystical, kind than any other city in Europe; the new travel industry lovingly cherishes the mystical aura for market reasons. International tourists arrive with images in their minds of the golem, of Franz Kafka (rather simplified), and of alchemists, but they hear little and know less about the mathematicians at the court of Rudolf II, the pedagogical reforms of the stern moralist Rabbi Loew, or the sober philosophy of T. G. Masaryk, and they are led by their guides through the ancient quarters of the city and never set foot in the old proletarian suburbs of Karln or Smichov. It is difficult to discover any sustained traces of Prague’s alleged mystical ideas in historical documents (though a few may be found by the searching scholar), and it is only fair to assume that stories about “magic Prague” must be ascribed to an early wave of international travelers, mostly from the Protestant countries, who came to Prague and Bohemia in the early and mid-nineteenth century and were struck by its many ancient churches and by the old Jewish quarter. I hope to show, at least briefly, that the images of mystical Prague, created by English, German, and American travelers only a few decades before the Prague city government began in 1895/96 to raze the timeworn Jewish Town and the adjacent Baroque corners, were eagerly developed by Prague Czech and German “decadents” of the fin de siècle (among them young René Rilke, as he was called in his youth) and, after the first German golem movie (1914), were amply used by eclectic German writers of varying talents and inclinations, in World War I and later, not by Czechs. Gustav Meyrink’s Golem (1915), an international best-seller, was not the first to shift the old gothic novel to Prague, but Meyrink combined its conventions with those of early whodunits in a highly effective but kitschy melodrama.
Strangely enough, “magic Prague” and its conventions were brought to new life in the early 1960s when challenging questions of social and cultural importance were asked again in Prague. The idea of “magic Prague” was seized upon by the dissident left, both in Prague and elsewhere, in its protest against the decaying prescriptions of socialist realism, and in an intricate ideological process linked the late-nineteenth-century idea with the revolutionary pleasures of French surrealists, great friends of alchemy. These combinations were codified in the Italian scholar Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Praga Magica (1973), which aimed to resuscitate the city as an eerie place of mystics and specters, madmen and alchemists, poets maudits and soothsayers of occult powers—all in legitimate protest against the boring world of state planning and against the wooden and mercurial apparatchiks who feared change and spontaneity. The new left myth of magic Prague was more productive within the neo-Stalinist regime than after its demise. Before 1989 it helped to undermine an official construction of life and literature, but in the new parliamentary democracy it runs the danger of prolonging yesterday’s protest (long turned into a tourist commodity) into a kind of romantic anticapitalism. It is not much of a surprise that Ripellino’s Praga Magica has been translated into many languages while Karel Krejí’s Praha legend a skutenost (Prague: Legend and Reality, 1967) has not found many readers beyond the family of his Czech contemporaries. Krej, of course, tries to circumscribe the amplitude of Prague’s royal, imperial, bourgeois, and plebeian past, and carefully avoids imaginative simplifications. In my own views I find myself closer to Krej than to Ripellino, but I have to confess that I have felt most encouraged if not inspired by Ilsa Barea’s Vienna (1966), which I have often assigned in my undergraduate courses. Ilsa Barea (née Pollak, from Vienna, later married to a general of the Spanish Republican Army) shows with greater precision and yet closer sympathy than anybody else what the traditional versions the history of Vienna hide and obfuscate, and I only hope that I was at least partly able to follow her admirable example.
I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to many people and institutions, and I would like to thank all of them here for patience and encouragement. In the Café Slavia, now dormant, the famous Mánes, the new Savoy, and the little place at the National Library, I enjoyed talking, on post—1989 occasions, to old and new Prague colleagues and friends, who at times prevented me from rushing in with émigré arguments. I am thinking of instructive conversations with Dr. Anna Siebenscheinová, my old friend Dr. Ladislav Nezdafil, and helpful colleagues from Charles University of Prague, including Professor Dr. Kurt Krolop and Professor Dr. Ji Stromšík, as well as Professor Dr. Josef Kroutvor of the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Kafka scholar Dr. Josef ermák, and the learned archaeologist Dr. Ladislav Hrdlika of the Czech Academy. Veronika Pokorná, M.A., and Johanka Muchková, M.A., spent much time in Prague providing me with copies of rare articles and newspaper clippings, and, in New Haven, Ms. Jale Okay was untiring in her support of my research. When I began to write the present book, I was afraid that Yale University’s Sterling Library, my second home, would not have many of the fundamental monographs I needed, but I soon discovered that the Yale libraries were particularly strong in Slavica and Judaica; and I have to thank here also the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences, where I was able to present a few lectures from my gathering of materials.
I should like to express my gratitude to Ms. Luba Rašínová-Ortoleva, who provided the illustrations, as well as to Böhlau Publishers (Vienna), who permitted me to reprint a sketch of Prague’s social topography of 1930 from Elisabeth Lichtenberger’s study Metropolenforschung: Wien/Prag (1993). I am grateful to Professor Harry Zohn of Brandeis University, who translated my postscript (originally published in German by the magazine of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and later reprinted in a collection of my essays gathered by Verlag Franz Deuticke, Vienna) into English for publication in Cross-Currents (unfortunately defunct) and gave me his permission to use his version here (I could not have done better). I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Bill Goodman, who attentively followed my progress and encouraged me when I felt disheartened, and to Ms. Suzanne G. Kelley, actually my first American reader, who brought order to my misplaced commas and to the early version of my manuscript. I was particularly happy in my editor, Elisabeth Sifton, who spent more time on my text than it ever deserved, gently tolerated my idiosyncrasies, and taught me, with an unerring eye, the architecture of effective argument. Una corona d’alloro goes to Paola, who for a long time tolerated at her side a writer constantly lost in the dark alleys of Prague (fictional) and yet never ceased to enjoy our walks and a native goulash (real) at the inn “U radnice” (at the Town Hall), not far from where Kafka was born.
New Haven, April 1996
1
LIBUSSA, OR VERSIONS OF ORIGIN
What the Schoolchildren Learn
In February 1893, the Czech writer Alois Jirásek, patriot, industrious historian, and late ally of Walter Scott, was preparing a little book for young readers and, in a letter to a friend, expressed his hope that it would make its way without “big band and loud advertising.” Jirásek’s Old Czech Legends first appeared in 1894, and his hopes, and those of his publisher, Josef Richard Vilfmek, were fulfilled far beyond their expectations. Old Czech Legends has been published and republished for a hundred years now, to be read in and outside school, and every educated Czech remembers at least some scenes and sayings from the book—though perhaps, among the more recent, skeptical generation, not so vividly as those from Jaroslav Ha�
�ek’s Good Soldier Švejk. Making eclectic use of old chronicles, Jirásek described the wandering of the Czechs, their arrival in Bohemia, where they settled after a perilous migration, and the wise Libussa, who, after she married the peasant lad Pemysl (father of future Czech kings), in one of her trances guided the people to a place in the forest where the castle and the city of Prague, of never-ending fame and glory, were founded.
Jirásek’s Old Czech Legends appeared thirteen years after the premiere of Smetana’s patriotic opera Libuše (1881), and Jirásek’s admiration for Smetana (as a Prague student he liked to go to the old Café Slavia because he could see the composer sitting there) clearly shows. The tales are grand opera, too, highly serious, intentionally archaic in vocabulary and syntax, and written without the slightest trace of irony. The movement of unnamed masses (the chorus) in proper old Czech costumes alternates with ceremonious speeches (or, rather, arias) of the rulers, heroines, and heroes; and the space in which events occur is decorously arranged with a fine sense of symmetry and hierarchical proportions, lighting effects included. In Jirásek’s tale of origin a tribe from the east, later named after its leader and patriarch, Czech, moves westward and crosses three rivers, the Oder, the Elbe, and the Vltava, and the people think of the far country which they have left behind and begin to grumble about the perils and the fatigue; “there is no lasting rest for us anywhere.” Ur-father Czech, their Moses, ascends a mountain rising from the land, and when he arrives at the top: “Lo and behold! The broad landscape unfolded into the endless distance up to the bluish mountain ranges, easily and freely, forests and thickets, glens and meadows, and through the wild green the rivers shone like silver spilled.” The land is empty of other people, “and the rivers well stocked with fish, and the soil fertile,” and after three days of meditation, Ur-father Czech tells his people that the “land long promised” was right there and that their wanderings were over for good.