by Peter Demetz
Many German romantics came to Bohemia and Prague, but local German writing was, for a considerable time, rather provincial and conservative. Varnhagen von Ense, from his Berlin point of view, rightly felt that Prague German writers were really quite Bohemian (recht eigentlich böhmisch) by inclination and by their constantly going back to what was “ancient and national” in the Slavic manner; they were territorial patriots in the supranational eighteenth-century sense. The most prominent among these was Karl Egon Ebert, who was born in 1801 and died in 1884, the year after Franz Kafka was born; polished and learned, he was, to his contemporaries, well known for his popular ballads and patriotic verse epics celebrating Czech mythical heroines, such as Wlasta (1829), about ancient Amazons. Goethe made a few approving noises about his nature descriptions but failed to see Ebert’s formal paradox of telling Czech sagas in the German Nibelungen stanza (four long lines, rhymed in pairs, with a sophisticated use of accents and alliterations), a courageous and desperate effort to bind together Czech myth and German art. (Needless to say, neither German nor Czech scholars have touched on Ebert’s efforts since 1900.)
Admired by all Prague writers, Goethe came to Bohemia seventeen times between 1785 and 1827 to take the waters in the company of Europe’s most fashionable society, and he kept many Prague correspondents on tenterhooks, always promising a little excursion to “majestic” Prague but hesitating at the last minute; he never came. Among Goethe’s Prague correspondents was Karl Ludwig von Woltmann, a professor of history, who had removed himself from Napoleonic Germany to Prague, and his wife, Caroline, author of many novels and editor of a literary periodical as well as a remarkable collection of Bohemian folktales, unfortunately long forgotten today. Prague writers and readers competed in writing to Goethe; Leopoldine Grustner von Grussdorf, seventeen years old, initiated a poste restante correspondence behind the back of her grandfather, sent Goethe her sketches, and prompted him to tell her to concentrate on “the moving, active, strong, and consequential” in art; art should first grasp a “strong reality” (eine kräftige Wirklichkeit), Goethe wrote to her, before ascending to the ideational realm (das Ideelle) and religion. Alas, when Leopoldine suggested that she wanted to come to Weimar to work under his very eyes, seventy-seven-year-old Goethe answered that an excursion to a Bohemian spa would be more appropriate and then ceased to write. She was the only Prague woman to exchange letters with Goethe; as Johannes Urzidil has ascertained, she later switched from drawing to ballad writing and died in utter poverty.
The most independent mind to write in German was Bernard Bolzano, an ordained priest, mathematician, theorist of science, and social philosopher; he was to pay dearly for his quiet courage and intrepid thought. His father was an Italian art dealer from the Como region, his mother a Prague German, but he called himself a “Bohemian of the German tongue” (ein Böhme deutscher Zunge); though he did not know much Czech himself, Bolzano always encouraged Bohemians of the Slavic tongue to do their best to develop their own culture and individuality. His superior gifts as scientist, lecturer, and philosopher were evident early; as soon as he had submitted his dissertation on a mathematical problem and had been ordained, he was appointed in 1805 to teach philosophy of religion, which he defined, a true disciple of the eighteenth century, as “the quintessence of such truths as lead to our virtue and happiness.” Almost immediately he was denounced as a freethinker, and he had constantly to defend himself against investigative commissions, secular, legal, and even papal, until, in 1819, he was accused of heterodoxy and of being a danger to the state, was publicly rebuked and deprived of his teaching post. Fortunately, a middle-class benefactor invited him to an estate in southern Bohemia where he had a chance to go on with his scientific studies; he spent the last years of his life under the protection of Count Thun, who took great care to provide him with all the books needed for his work.
Bolzano was, at heart, a Catholic radical who believed in the equality of all people; his own territorial patriotism, differing from that of the Bohemian nobility, who mainly fought Hapsburg centralism by allusions to their independent past, insisted on a present and future fatherland, with the people engaged both in cultivating their own aspirations and in learning to see why they should look beyond their egotistic concerns. In his sermons, regularly attended by German and Czech students, Bolzano turned against romantic visions imported from Germany, where people, he said, had ceased to think. He suggested that people should first of all try to acquire more knowledge about their own language and culture, in order to understand more of other communities’ languages and cultures; self-definition was only productive when looking at what was not the self.
Anticipating the assumptions of modern linguistics, Bolzano told his audiences that words and their meanings were arbitrary, originating in social agreements rather than in romantic nature, and declared that in Bohemia any involvement with only one language would “obfuscate” (verdunkeln) the fundamental equality of all citizens, whatever language they spoke. Differences of languages were “the most insubstantial of all” (die allerunwesentlichsten), distrust in the equality of all people was high treason to humanity, and what was needed was a communal spirit reaching out beyond nationality to other and higher values; national consciousness was but a means of acquiring something that went beyond all nationalisms. Unfortunately, the revolution of 1848 swept away Bolzano’s urgent appeal to communal and transnational obligations; and while in earlier times many Prague citizens (except in the Jewish Town) would have called themselves “Bohemians,” now they wanted to identify with a language nation forthwith. Bolzano’s efforts to reconcile nations were as quickly forgotten as his astonishingly modern social engagement—he developed detailed plans for inexpensive housing developments and urged that an organization be instituted to take care of the two thousand waifs living in Prague’s streets. But he was later rediscovered as a philosopher of science by Edmund Husserl, and again, somewhat later, by the Czech philosopher Jan Patoka, who in 1969 suggested that the Bohemian nations should have gone Bolzano’s way rather than that of his romantic adversaries.
Bolzano may have been the first social philosopher of a multiethnic European community to come, and his noble idea of a “Bohemian community” inspirited by shared social tasks may have found sympathy among the nobles, the older Czech generation of enlightened intellectuals, and the Prague German patriciate. But younger Czechs of romantic inclination held different views. In their minds, shaped by the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars from which so many national aspirations had emerged, and by study of Herder’s philosophy of individual nations with their inalienable languages, questions of nationality and idiom were far more important than the abstract dictates of an unloved polyglot state; to this new generation, mostly of the modest bourgeoisie and still firmly bound to their fathers and mothers in Bohemian villages, speaking and writing Czech was a fundamental commitment that defined all others.
It was the philologist Josef Jungmann who, in a new Czech periodical first appearing in 1806, published two seminal essays about the Czech language. He excluded the Bohemian nobility from the nation, for they usually did not speak Czech fluently (never mind what they had done in support of the first generation of learned Czech patriots), and went on to create the figures of Protiva (the “fiend,” representing many of Bolzano’s ideas) and Slavomil (the etymology suggests love of the Slavs), who condemns all those who publish in languages other than Czech and do not believe in the splendid future of their own nation competing with all the other nations of Europe. Jungmann himself turned into a magnificent Slavomil in his literary and scholarly publications; he demonstrated the importance of being Czech by showing the unusual riches of the language, past and present. Distrusting the all too civilized and orderly idiom of the European Enlightenment, he looked to the opulence of the seventeenth century, and in order to display the full potentialities of Czech translated John Milton’s Paradise Lost (he also translated Dryden, Goethe, and excerpts from Hamlet). His most magnif
icent achievement was his Czech-German dictionary, published with the help of a supporting team in five volumes in 1834—39; when he died, his dictionary was carried in front of the funeral procession in which thousands demonstratively marched. The question of what Bolzano would have said about Jungmann’s idea of the supreme value of national language has but a symbolic answer. In the 1840s, Bolzano, ravaged by a respiratory disease, was able to communicate only by signs and gestures rather than by articulate words, and he died a year after Jungmann, in the year of revolution (1848). It must have been a quiet funeral.
The intellectual shift from territorial patriotism to a revolutionary Czech consciousness was rapidly accompanied by a transformation of older institutions and the establishment of new ones, designed to emancipate a Czech civic society proud of its own culture. The old Bohemian nobility had been politically and financially prominent in the established scholarly and scientific groups—such as the Royal Bohemian Society of Science of 1774—but when a distinguished group of scientists and scholars, among them the botanist Caspar Count Sternberg and his cousin, an expert in numismatics, founded a Bohemian Museum in 1818 to serve all the inhabitants of the land, the young historian František Palacký, who had just come to Prague, shrewdly initiated a more modern national orientation at the museum by suggesting that it publish separate journals in German and Czech (1827); it turned out that the German publication, much favored by Goethe but few other readers, ceased publication within four years, while the asopis eského Musea (Journal of the Bohemian Museum) in scholarly and literary matters flourished throughout the century and beyond. A similar and perhaps even more efficient method was used to change the Society for the Promotion of Industry in Bohemia, established in 1833 by the nobility: in 1843 the original charter was modified to allow middle-class membership, Czechs (all future politicians of note) virtually took over the section for economics and research, and the demand for founding a Czech industrial school appeared high on the list of its new plans. Redirection of older institutions proceeded in synchrony with the foundation of these new bourgeois and distinctly Czech organizations. In 1831 the untiring Palacký initiated the Matice eská (Czech Foundation) to support the development of Czech culture by subventions for the publication of important books; in the first year, the foundation had 35 members, and 2,329 by 1847. Czech was “going public”; the first Czech ball was held on February 5, 1840, and after some difficulties with the authorities the Mšt’anská Beseda (the Citizens’ Club) was established five years later, to gather the new Czech middle-class elite for polite conversation, dances, concerts, literary discussions, and scholarly lectures. Prague Czech culture had found an alluring home.
Czech patriots of the 1830s, especially among the teachers, did not know exactly what to think about Karel Hynek Mácha, a student, amateur actor, and writer of romantic verse, but later generations came to believe that he was the first creator of modern Czech poetry, suddenly and inexplicably surging from his lyrical “novella” Máj (May), written in 1836. Mácha was born and bred in Prague, which he described as a silent city of the dead: “everything is desolate and barren / doors ajar to every silent dwelling, / and the rooms stand open and unguarded.” His father worked for a miller, his talented mother was the daughter of a musician, and the family had to move, in search of ever cheaper lodgings, from the Minor Town to the district of St. Peter and later, when the father acquired a small shop, to the Cattle Market (now Charles Square), where the student lived in a shabby little room, attending prescribed courses of philosophy and, finally, law school. He was freely involved in the student life of his time, going on long walks with his many friends, singing Czech folk songs (proscribed by the police) in the open fields, and showing his histrionic talents by playing heroic roles in Czech performances at the Theater of the Estates, scheduled only on Sundays from 4 to 6 p.m., and with other amateur groups in the Minor Town. Yet people also noticed his sudden bursts of cold despair, a certain theatricality that extended beyond the stage, and an inclination to play the Byronic dandy, which patriots disfavored. Tall, handsome, and sad, he liked to walk around in a light greatcoat with a conspicuous red lining and made people stare. A military guard once presented arms to him, assuming that he was a visiting Hapsburg prince. He restlessly marched through Bohemia from castle to castle, making precise lists of all the ruins he visited, and with a friend walked the entire way from Prague to Venice, Trieste, Ljubljana, and then Vienna, occasionally rolling in the hay with Austrian peasant girls. Yet he was also energetic enough to conclude his legal studies and to take a job with a Litomice (Leitmeritz) lawyer—doing so largely because he planned to marry his Lori, a Prague girl, pregnant with his child. In 1836, twenty-six years of age, three days before he was to go to the altar he died of an infectious disease, listed in the parish register as cholera, and he was buried at the local cemetery. His bodily remains were disinterred in 1938, shortly before the Wehrmacht occupied Litomice (now in the Sudentenland); his bones were put in a small coffin and buried at the Prague Vyšehrad, pantheon for the great sons and daughters of the Czech nation.
Mácha had to pay for the printing of Máj himself (600 copies, of which he sold nearly 350), and contemporary patriots were disturbed by the poem—arranged in four cantos and two intermezzi—one, though acknowledging his talents, declared it was “un-Czech.” It was certainly difficult to grasp the text, especially if read literally; whether Mácha was making use of the many Gothic novels which he read voraciously or was recording a Bohemian event of distant times, he suggested in his poem the story of a young man early abandoned by his family who becomes “terrible lord of the forests” and chief of a robber gang. In a fit of fatal jealousy (not foreign to the author) he kills the man who has seduced the girl he loves; the man was, pace Oedipus, his own father. The murderer is thrown into prison, accused of patricide, and, in a public execution, broken on the wheel; before he dies, he thinks of his guiltless guilt and—this was particularly shocking to the patriots, and one hundred years before existentialism—of the metaphysical void (nic) that he is about to enter, “an endless silence: not a voice / an endless space: night and time.”
Mácha himself wrote in a commentary, perhaps addressed to the censor, that he wanted to celebrate the jubilant life force of spring as contrasted to the wild, impassionate, and restless love of human beings. But it may be more useful to explicate the poem—if music has meaning at all—from the penultimate canto, in which a young traveler passing the hill of the execution wonders about his own life, turning the entire poem, in which even clouds, spirits, and a skull sing their own songs, into an objective correlative of dire feelings about childhood loss and innocence gone:
Far as the dying thoughts of those who have long been dead,
Far as their names, far as the ancient battle’s ring,
The bygone northern lights, the glow they once had shed,
The tones of battered harp, the sound of broken string,
The deeds of a vanished age, the dying star’s last glow …
(trans. by William E. Harkins)
Czech scholars and critics have analyzed Máj more closely than any other text, and the ongoing discussion has been complicated by the publication of Mácha’s fragmentary Diary of 1835, long decoded but withheld by puritan editors from Mácha’s audience; it is certainly painful to many who honor Mácha as the supreme singer of love that he describes his relationship with Lori in such a matter-of-fact way, registering when and how he fucked her (his Czech street terms are far more vulgar), as if he wanted to punish her for not living up to his vision of the sublime woman, and she submitted to his despotic whims without much protest. The diary also reveals that his and Lori’s pillow talk, if it can be called that, was in German because she was more used to it than Czech. Fortunately, the Czech surrealists, experienced in defending antibourgeois sentiments, long ago warned against using Mácha in the service of national or political interests and suggested, even without knowing about the diary, that he should be accep
ted as the guardian genius of Czech poetry that he was. It is sound and memorable advice.
Neither Germans, whether they came as tourists or lived in Prague, nor Czechs knew much about the intellectual and linguistic developments in the city’s Jewish community. There were at least three groups that argued against each other: first were the older Jewish traditionalists, then the mystical believers in the messianic promises of Josef Frank (who died in Offenbach in 1791), and third the younger readers of Moses Mendelssohn, the Berlin philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment and Lessing’s friend.
Frankists believed that the soul of God had lived on in Shabbetai Zevi and in the messianic Josef Frank, who had announced that within the traditional Torah a more spiritual revelation was yet to be found; Frankists in Poland and elsewhere had challenged and enraged the traditionalists by converting to Christianity and by seeking the protection of Catholic bishops and kings. In the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth, the Prague Frankists, most prominent among them the distinguished Wehle family, were as ardent in their commitment as their brothers in Poland and Moravia; though they all carried “the burden of silence” and denied, in public, that they were mystical dissidents, most of them did not feel bound anymore by Jewish law.
The Prague elders were disturbed by the stubborn survival of Frankist ideas in their community, and when Rabbi Eleazar Fleckeles preached a sermon against them in 1799 and the traditionalists could not understand why the Frankists continued in their utopian beliefs (since the promises of their erratic leader had remained unfulfilled), unrest swept through the Jewish Town. In the fall of 1800 suspected Frankists were insulted in schools and at funerals, and the warring factions even denounced each other to the Austrian authorities; Chief Rabbi Fleckeles was under arrest for a few days. Twenty years later, Frankism had faded away, and the last sympathizers may have joined the first Prague Reform Temple, established in 1833. Few friends of “magic” or “mystical” Prague have ever studied these events closely.
