Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  When Frederick of Prussia—“the monster,” she called him—had taken away her Silesia, she was ready to change her half-paralyzed Baroque monarchy into an efficient state rather than to forgive the personal insult. In politics, she was a gifted pragmatic with an eye on the future of her state, and it was fortunate that few people in Prague could have known that, in correspondence, she called the sacred crown of Wenceslas, in one of her more sprightly moods, a Narrenhäubl (a clown’s cap) before taking that precious piece of jewelry back with her to Vienna.

  Maria Theresa was particularly intelligent in selecting her advisers, among them Frederick Wilhelm Count von Haugwitz, who had arrived in Vienna as a refugee from Silesia, for matters of internal administration; and Wenzel Anton Count Kaunitz, efficient and inventive, for international affairs; her new mercantile policies, trying to increase commerce and for the first time industrial production from above, began to invigorate Prague’s economic life. In 1754, the city had still only 40,000 inhabitants, but by 1784, when her son came to power, there were 78,000, and Prague was the second most populous city of the Hapsburg monarchy, shorn of political power but of considerable intellectual and artistic importance.

  In 1753 a commission for commerce and manufacture was established, and Prague entered, slowly and by a combination of private initiative and government support, its earliest years of industrialization. There were a few establishments for spinning and weaving cotton (among them the town prisons, where labor was especially cheap), printing calico, and producing fustian and gloves; after guild restrictions were lifted, a number of paper mills in and around the city developed quickly. It is interesting to know that as early as 1771, young František Ringhoffer, just after his guild examination, opened a copper workshop in the Old Town; in modern times, the Ringhoffer metal works became one of the most important of the monarchy and the Czechoslovak Republic.

  Yet Maria Theresa undercut the early success of her economic reforms by her visceral dislike of Jews, and she used the rumors, spread by the conservative Prague guilds, that Prague’s Jews had collaborated with the Prussian armies to justify her edict of December 18, 1744, that the entire community must be removed from its ancient town, almost stante pede. A commission to investigate treasonous collaboration with the Prussian enemy sentenced ten Jews to death (though not a single Bohemian baron was ever convicted for having paid homage to Bavaria’s prince), but she suspended the sentences, wanting, in her impeccable anti-Prussian rage, to punish all Jews, without evidence or exception. So Prague’s Jews, 10,000 in number, one-quarter of the city’s inhabitants, had to leave for the countryside, at least a two-hour distance from the town line. The first exiles holed up in the villages of Holešovice, Libe, and Karlín, now Prague suburbs, and in other nearby towns, where they were ordered to wind up their affairs, private and economic, before leaving Bohemia altogether.

  Maria Theresa had no idea of the economic consequences of her edict, and she underrated the vocal opposition to her policies of ethnic “cleansing.” Opposition brought together an unlikely group of institutions and people: the Bohemian chancellery in Vienna; the Bohemian Estates (for once); the army, wanting well-organized deliveries; the pope and the sultan; the embassies of England and Denmark; and her own economic advisers, who began to grasp the interlocking problems of credit and capital, badly needed at a time of slow reconstruction. In September 1748, Maria Theresa, always the practical administrator, finally reversed herself and allowed the Jews to return to Prague at the price of nearly 300,000 gold pieces (camouflaged as a “toleration” tax). The dangers to the Jewish community had not ended yet; a terrible fire, probably caused by arson, devastated much of the Jewish quarter on a Sabbath night in May 1754, destroyed hundreds of dwellings, and left many families homeless. But the new mercantilism had its distinct virtues too: the Jewish community appealed for credit to a powerful Viennese bank, and twelve years later its town hall, synagogues, hospital, and many private buildings had been restored. Czech historians believe, however, that interest payments to the Vienna bank were so burdensome that they slowed the economic progress of the community for decades.

  There was not anybody in Prague, baron or beggar, Christian or Jew, untouched by the policies of Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II, the most enlightened despot on the Hapsburg throne, who wanted to change the state radically within ten years (1780-90) to achieve “the general good of the greatest number”; and yet, when he died and the ceilings of the monarchy were caving in, he felt bitterly offended that he had worked so hard day and night only to make so few people happy and so many ungrateful. For fifteen years, he had been his mother’s co-regent, and when he came to power alone he was middle-aged, plagued by eye trouble and loss of hair, woefully impatient, obsessed with the first principles of good government, inspired by Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s Della pubblica felicità oggetto de’ buoni principi (1748) and his own admiration of Frederick of Prussia, and incapable of true compassion. In the course of his rule, he issued more than 2,600 edicts, some of which anticipated the most essential civic achievements of the liberal revolution of 1848, but he was also an amateur administrator who hated to delegate responsibilities. He constantly interfered with the work of his bureaucrats, whom he distrusted, and endlessly wrote little notes to the appropriate officials exhorting them to arrive punctually at committee meetings, to do away with the female fashion of tight bodices, unhealthy and therefore harmful to the state, or to prevent too much masturbation, which weakened the flesh, in the military schools.

  Joseph was a terribly honest man and a deeply unhappy human being. His first wife, the young and highly talented Infanta Maria Isabella of Parma, whom he passionately adored, barely tolerated him; she was carried away by a strong affair with his sister Mimi (their ardent love letters have been preserved). He brutally ignored his second wife, the Bavarian princess Josepha Maria, whom he had married only because his mother had wished him to; he did not even attend her funeral. His brother, the future Emperor Leopold, chided him for chasing the servant girls at Schönbrunn Castle, and though he later demurely flirted with the Princess Eleonore of Liechtenstein, he mostly relied on his manservant to bring to his bed prostitutes from the Vienna streets (their services, as those of the court artists, had to be inexpensive). He wanted a rational and abstract efficiency, and he inevitably ran afoul of the growing opposition defending regional particularity and the older principle of the many national and territorial interests within the monarchy.

  Maria Theresa had been a Baroque Catholic at heart, and she would have continued her intermittent policy of religious “cleansings” had her filial co-regent not interfered. Evangelicals in Austria and Bohemia were arrested in the 1770s, and she renewed an old edict against heretics, but when confronted by the rage of her son, she once again artfully reversed herself, and the Protestants were given the possibility of nonpublic worship. Joseph’s own “patents of tolerance,” a series of legal documents differing from land to land but all based on his handwritten billet of October 13, 1781, were announced in Prague a week later: they granted Lutherans, Calvinists, and Greek Orthodox equality before the law, admission to educational institutions and town functions, and the right to own houses and other property; Roman Catholicism was still to be “the dominant religion,” but wherever one hundred Evangelical families lived in proximity they could build their own house of worship (it could not have either a tower or a direct entrance from the street), choose their own pastor, and establish a school. After long persecution and illegality, people were not easily willing to leave their Protestant closets. In the entire monarchy, only 2 percent of the population declared to be of Protestant faiths, and in Prague, once a Hussite bastion, and in the nearby country a meager one hundred and six families had the courage openly to claim worship in the Protestant way. Dissident groups were not covered by the new rules; when the authorities discovered a group of Bohemian Deists who did not believe in Christ or the sacraments, they mercilessly punished them; children, to receive a Cat
holic education, were separated from their parents, who were shipped in chain gangs to do forced labor at the Turkish frontier, where they perished. Only later did Joseph stop the deportations, though he ordered at least twenty-eight lashes applied to any Deist because they did not know what to believe. He was not beyond enlightening poor people by the whip.

  When Emperor Joseph II declared that Catholicism would be predominant in the monarchy, he had a religion of his own on his Jansenist mind—not linked to Rome, useful to the state, and possibly closer to the tradition of the early Hussites than he ever knew. He did not start his church reforms from scratch, but radicalized those of his mother: Maria Theresa, prompted by her scientific and legal advisers (including the Dutch physician van Swieten and the lawyer Joseph von Sonnenfels, whose grandfather had been a Moravian rabbi) and supported by a reform movement within the church, had made a few reluctant if essential steps to secularize education and, with an eye to economic development, to limit the excessive number of church holidays and the founding of new cloisters. Joseph II continued her reforms with doctrinal zeal—closing churches, dissolving orders and monasteries, abolishing church fairs and pilgrimages, dear to many peasants, and interfering with the rites of the church (the dead had to be buried in linen sacks, in order to save timber). In the entire monarchy four hundred monasteries and cloisters received liquidation orders; in Prague, the “Rome of the North,” of one hundred thirty-one churches and chapels in 1770 only fifty-seven remained open after his edicts, and of forty monasteries and seminaries only fourteen were left after his commissions had delivered the notifications; in many cases, the numbers of monks and nuns were radically reduced (no novices could be accepted). Theoretically, his intentions were simple: only monastic orders serving the sick and the poor or contributing to the education of the people were to be tolerated, but in practice it was difficult to make the necessary distinctions. The emperor was particularly insensitive to institutions long important in Bohemian history, and though their assets were carefully transferred to a religious trust fund to be used for educational purposes or to pay lump sums for modest pensions to departing monks or nuns, he worked with a heavy hand and challenged many, not only friends of Czech ecclesiastical antiquities.

  The Jesuits left in 1773—by papal rule, reversed only in 1814—and others, by edict of the emperor, followed in the early and mid-1770s: the silent and mystical Carmelites, both shod and barefoot, the learned Augustinians of all branches, the Poor Clares for whom St. Anežka had fought so hard, the venerable Benedictines, the Ursulines, in spite of their devotion to good teaching, the Cyriaks (long forgotten), the Irish Hibernians, the ascetic Capuchins, the Trinitarians, the Servites, the Barnabites … and on March 20, 1782, a court edict was read to the thirty-seven Benedictine sisters resident at St. George, near Hradany Castle, the most ancient of all Bohemian cloisters, established by the Prmyslid princess Mlada in 973. The nuns received a gift of money and went home (the last of them, Maria Fiedler, died in northern Bohemia in 1841), and their invaluable manuscripts and books were transferred to the university library; in decades to follow, the buildings served as army barracks, as a home for old priests, and, after the revolution of 1848, as a prison for hapless liberals and radicals sentenced by military tribunal. On November 11, 1785, it was the turn of the Karlov Augustinians, whom Charles IV had originally invited from France in 1350 in memory of Emperor Charlemagne. A last mass was celebrated, attended by many people of the New Town, and the last abbot found refuge first in the Old Town and later with his Bohemian family. The trust fund did not know at first what to do with the splendid buildings; the bells were sold at public auction, the army used the empty spaces to store supplies and provisions, but it was ultimately decided four years later that in the old monastery a hospice for the incurably ill and mentally disturbed should be established (ironically, the church to serve the hospice had to be reconsecrated). Prague topography changed: churches and chapels were torn down, among them the Chapel of the Body and Blood of Christ, established in 1382 in the New Town, the Bethlehem chapel—on the emptied space, building materials were stored—and St. Martin in the Wall, established in 1187; refectories and halls were handed over to military schools, state offices, occasional tenants, factories, stables, theaters, printing presses (for storing paper reserves, as happened at St. Michael in the Old Town, where conservative and radical Hussites had fought again and again). A statistical document of 1884 notes that in that year, Prague had seventy-one churches and chapels again, as well as twenty-six residences or houses of older and new religious orders. We do not yet have a historical report on the changes brought about by the Stalinist years.

  Joseph’s edicts concerning the Jews were part of his general reforms of 1781, signaled by his patents of tolerance and the abolition of ancient serfdom. They reflect both his filial opposition to his mother’s anti-Semitism and his surprising willingness to accept the late Baroque familial law of 1726, which limited the Jewish presence in Bohemia to 8,541 families (Prussia had 1,245) and that of Prague to 2,335 family “spots”; in each family, only the oldest son was allowed to marry and to vote in the community. (Conservatively estimated, Prague still had a Jewish population of 10,000, compared with 2,000 in Frankfurt and 3,000 in Vienna.) Joseph’s Jewish legislation commenced on October 19, 1781, and continued almost to the end of his life; though it has been argued that his reforms were of great advantage to the rich but not to the many poor Jews, it is also true that, ultimately, in all economic and social matters, the future of the entire community was involved for better or worse. Joseph’s order abolished all badges, signs, and special kinds of clothing earlier worn by Jews, male or female, allowed Jews to leave their houses on Sunday morning (when masses were celebrated), eat in taverns, and attend the theater and other public entertainments. He also did away with demeaning special taxes and made it possible for Jews to be trained in all trades and crafts (so far, a little more than half of Prague’s Jews had been active in commerce, and only 27.5 percent were artisans, who worked mostly but not exclusively for Jewish customers). Jews were encouraged to establish factories, to rent land from the domains (not from peasants), and to work the soil if they employed Jewish help; those who could afford it were encouraged to attend institutions of higher learning, although not the faculties of theology. Joseph II certainly did not want to create a new generation of intellectuals—he closed five universities during his monarchy as useless—but he wanted army doctors and civil servants, and these hopes were fulfilled beyond expectation.

  Other demands in Joseph’s Jewish legislation were far less easy to accept, because they threatened the community’s traditional cohesion and autonomy. Maria Theresa had suggested that a Normalinstitut be established, offering instruction in German for Jewish children, but the Prague community elders refused to do this, claiming religious reasons; Joseph’s insistence split the community—the friends of Moses Mendelssohn’s enlightened views on Joseph’s side, the traditionalists on the other. Yet Ezekiel Landau, Prague’s revered chief rabbi, to everyone’s great surprise and in close cooperation with Ferdinand Kindermann, then Bohemia′s most outstanding pedagogue, opened a “normal” preparatory school with a secular curriculum taught in German on May 2, 1782 (fireworks in the evening); a corresponding girls’ school, with extra hours in home economics of course, was established three years later. The problem was that these schools lacked pupils for decades because well-to-do Jews, distrusting secular education, had their children educated by private tutors as they had before. Technical knowledge of German was to be of importance soon, however: in 1784, Joseph II issued an order that all legal and commercial documents and correspondence of the Jewish community were to be written in “the language of the land”—that is, German—and three years later required that all Jews accept German names (even the occasional Czech first name had to disappear). Given the historical context, these measures cast a long shadow; when, in the revolution of 1848, the question was asked whether Jews were on the Czech
or the German side, the results of Josephine legislation created heavy burdens. Czech patriots and later nationalists believed that Jews, who they believed had originally spoken Czech, had switched allegiance under Joseph’s rule and sided collectively with Vienna to Germanize Prague. In the shuffle, the question of how the Prague Jews lost their ancient Yiddish was not asked.

  For a long time Bohemian grandmothers told stories about the good emperor who made the life of the peasant more humane, who in disguise rode through the provinces (“you shall never know my name—I am the Emperor Joseph”) and certainly twice took a plow from the hands of a Moravian peasant to till the soil himself, at least briefly. In later Czech historical consciousness, Joseph II survives as a Germanizing ruler, whatever else he may have done, and in the modern Prague memory, his language decrees are recalled more than what he did to eliminate church censorship and return a measure of dignity to the Czech peasants (whose sons and daughters, after all, created a modern, educated Czech nation).

  Joseph’s mother, as was her habit, had wavered a good deal in the matter of national languages; in her earlier years, she had carefully recommended that Czech be taught in the schools, being the language of the Bohemian majority, but later, when Joseph was co-regent, she endorsed a school reform that, if fully realized, would have granted little space to Czech. Joseph II was concerned with the modernization of the state and, thinking of France and England, decided in the mid-1780s that the administrative language of written communications in the empire (with the exception of the Netherlands, the Italian regions, and Galicia) was to be German; when the Magyars, though not the Czechs, violently protested, he responded, totally oblivious to historical circumstance, that one language would create “a sense of fraternity.” He was, personally, far from being a rabid German Kulturträger; his spoken idiom was the Viennese dialect, he corresponded even with members of his own family in French, and he liked to speak Italian. But he wanted an efficient means of communication “zur Führung der Geschäfte” (to conduct business), and if Esperanto could have been used, he would have used it. He disregarded history and yet could not escape it; Joseph II’s famous equality before the law was rather fragmentary when the law spoke German and the defendant had to rely on Czech or other translations.