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

by Peter Demetz

  While the philologists and scholars had made preparations for the congress, riots and demonstrations had continued in the streets. On May 1 and 2, the Jewish neighborhoods were once again invaded by mobs on a rampage, but the national guard and army intervened only when the working people attacked the bakeries; demonstrations and strikes of the cotton printers and textile workers promptly followed. Reasonable people were appalled when they heard that Alfred Prince Windischgrätz, odious to so many after having ruthlessly smashed the workers’ demonstrations in 1844, was promoted to commander in chief of Bohemia’s armed forces, and when he arrived in Prague on May 20, he did not hesitate long to show his iron fist. He shifted troops from provincial Bohemian garrisons to Prague, held a grand parade in the suburb of Karlin (to provoke the proletariat), and had his soldiers patrol the streets day and night. The National Committee, by now entirely Czech, asked that Windischgrätz be replaced; public protest meetings were held, increasingly dominated by the radical Repeal Club people again, but Windischgrätz grimly refused to hear their delegates. On Sunday, June 11, a red poster appeared in the Old Town to protest the army presence, and on Whitsun Monday, instead of another public meeting, a festive mass was planned to be celebrated in the Horse Market (later Wenceslas Square) as a gesture of civic solidarity. It was organized by the students; in columns streaming through the center of Prague came young girls in white, matrons in national costumes, writers in dark suits, and people in their Sunday best. A priest of liberal sympathies was the celebrant, and by noon the people quietly marched down the square to salute Petr Faster at his Golden Goose. Then shouts were heard that people should march en masse to the army high command on Celetná Street.

  On the squares and streets close to the army headquarters, the situation was tense and confused. Two columns of demonstrators marched to Celetná Street, where a change of guard was just underway; when a company of grenadiers from the nearby barracks arrived, the demonstrators and soldiers moved off in almost an elaborate dance to avoid a showdown. Then, unfortunately, the crowds caught sight of Windischgrätz himself, who was accompanying a delegation of conservative Germans to the portal of the building, the mood turned ugly, and the grenadiers were ordered to load their guns. The first shots were fired near the headquarters, and fighting rapidly spread to the student-occupied Carolinum, to the Old Town Square, and to other places on the way from the center of Prague to the bridges. Barricades went up quickly, and though the army took the Carolinum, floor by floor, armed resistance was strong at the Perštýn and Bethlehem Square, where the people were commanded by the playwright Josef Kajetán Tyl. It was of initial advantage to the students that they arrested Governor Count Thun (recognized, in his elegant coat and shining black hat, as he was climbing over the barricades to reach the town hall), but Windischgrätz never lost the initiative. At 4 p.m. he assembled a few artillery pieces and grenadiers to shoot his way through the most important barricades. By 6 p.m. he had cleared the major route to the river; not to disperse his manpower, he left the barricades in the narrow medieval streets on either side untouched. Both his troops and the insurrectionists, who lacked a clear command structure, spent the night in the streets and at the barricades, bivouac fires burning.

  During the forty-eight hours that followed, both the army and the insurgents consolidated their positions and mobilized support from the Bohemian provinces. Army units from the northwest arrived without delay, but the students sent out emissaries to the country with little success: the peasants were indifferent to what was going on in Prague, and the provincial national guard was hesitant. Fighting went on sporadically, and the barricades were strengthened on the Old Town Square and elsewhere; reports said that patriotic schoolgirls provided classroom furniture, thrown out of school windows, and Franciscan friars helped too (though they later disclaimed all Franciscan support of the revolt). In the town hall, negotiations went on continuously; Palacký shrewdly convinced the students to let Count Thun go on the grounds that otherwise power would be totally in the hands of Windischgrätz, prisoners were exchanged, and a two-man commission was speedily sent from Vienna to prompt rigid Windischgrätz to pass on his command to another general. Windischgrätz had little sympathy for the Vienna constitutional government, and played his own cat-and-mouse game with the Viennese delegates, resigning in one moment and promptly resuming his function, telling the delegates that he did so at the wishes of his officers. In their enthusiasm, the insurgents, who held on to considerable parts of the Old and New Towns, did not grasp in time that Windischgrätz had isolated Prague by encircling it with troops (though the trains were running on time) or that the national guard on the left bank had decided to support the regular army and was occupying Malostranský Square together with the soldiers who dominated Hradany Castle and the nearby barracks. On the night of June 14, Windischgrätz continued his operations, and under cover of darkness quietly withdrew all his troops and his artillery from the right to the left bank. When the exhausted insurgents awoke, the soldiers were gone, and Windischgrätz had entrenched all his fieldpieces on the rising hills of the Minor Town.

  Precisely at 8 a.m. on June 15, his artillery opened fire across the river, and the bombardment, lasting four hours, immediately deepened the rift between the radicals, who finally held a staff meeting at the Clementinum, and the liberals, who wanted to end the bloodshed immediately. The beginning of the end came on the evening of Friday, June 16. The town council resolved to clean up the barricades, many willing workingmen were paid to do this tough job, and the radicals at the Clementinum, resisting Bakunin’s abstract suggestion to proclaim a revolutionary city government with dictatorial powers, made another brave attempt to send out emissaries to appeal for help from the countryside. By 9 p.m. Windischgrätz, reasserting his authority, gave the order to bombard the Old Town again; he concentrated the artillery fire on the Old Town water tower and the right bank. Large flour and wheat magazines burned through the night while the bombardment continued, illuminating the sky over Prague and striking the burghers with fear and feelings of utter helplessness.

  On Saturday, June 17, the mayor hastened to Hradany Castle to announce the municipality’s unconditional surrender. The isolated radicals dispersed, army columns marched across the bridges to occupy the Old and the New Towns, and Windischgrätz immediately imposed military rule and, not much later, established a commission to investigate who was responsible for the insurrection (he believed, of course, that it was a vast conspiracy). Twenty thousand Praguers left in a panic to escape the military courts. One train, crammed full of students, members of the Slav Congress, and provincial guards who had come to Prague on a belated and useless excursion, was stopped at Bchovice train station, the first out of Prague, by nervous army units, who killed and brutalized in cold blood: ten people were shot and more than fifty wounded. Still, there were rare pockets of resistance in the New Town, and the proud fishermen of Podolí, close to the river, under the Vyšehrad, were the last to put down their arms. Later historians believed that Windischgrätz’s army of more than 10,000 had been opposed by 1,200 barricade fighters, two-thirds of them students, supported by artisans and workingmen, and 500 nátional guardsmen; when everything was over, forty-six had died in the Prague streets, ten at Bchovice station, and hundreds were wounded, among them three servant girls and a young boy caught in the cross fire. Among the victims was Windischgrätz’s wife, Eleonore, who was killed by a ricocheting bullet while she was standing near a window at the high command. In the Vienna insurrection of October 1848, the third of the revolutionary year, Windischgrätz’s army units had to fight from house to house, and Vienna’s lovers of wine, women, and song fought as fiercely as the Social Democrats of Floridsdorf were to do in February 1934; 5,000 revolutionaries and 1,000 soldiers died in the streets.

  Yet the young Prague radicals, at least, wanted to continue their fight, and it was almost inevitable that they threw in their lot with Mikhail Bakunin, a noble revolutionary by profession, who in December announc
ed to his friends the attractive idea of a federation of Slavic republics with Prague as its capital. In Leipzig and Dresden, he talked about Czech conditions with Adolf Vilém Straka, a former theologian (later to be sentenced to death), established contact with Josef Václav Fri and Emanuel Arnold (later to emigrate to the United States), who had been prominent among the June insurgents, and even went to Prague secretly, in March 1849, to inspect the scene; he did not seem to notice that the Prague mood was certainly less than revolutionary. In Saxony, great plans for an uprising in Dresden and Prague were made, to be prepared by anciens combatants, and Prague German students organized in Moldavia and Hilaria fraternities. Fri and his group were to occupy Smichov and others the Old Town hall; a number of hostages were to be taken immediately, among them former Emperor Ferdinand, who was slightly retarded and had recently been pensioned off at Hradany; he liked to go on long walks without a bodyguard, smiling beatifically. This revolution was scheduled for May 12, but the Dresden conspirators, the young composer Richard Wagner among them, started out too early, on May 3; in Prague the efficient police had long infiltrated their groups and during the night of May 9 arrested nearly everybody. Military rule was imposed and regular army units occupied Prague.

  The trial of the conspirators, half of them Czech, half German, and none older than twenty-six, lasted for four years; twenty-eight were sentenced to death (all the death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment), fifty-one received long sentences, (474 years in all) and the rest were forced to join the army. Fri, a talented and elegant member of the incipient jeunesse dorée, was sentenced to eighteen years in jail; amnestied in 1854, he was arrested again, and sent into exile. He lived in London and Paris, but when Prussians occupied Prague in 1866 he returned, then left for Berlin and Zagreb. He ceaselessly wrote plays about political heroes and indefatigably tried to explain Czech affairs to the European public; he was allowed to return in 1879. Bakunin was caught in Saxony, and the Prussians and Austrians handed him over to the tsarist police, who sent him to Siberia. From there, he made a spectacular escape to New York and London, only to be ostracized in the international workers’ movement by Karl Marx. He died in 1876, a bitter and disappointed man, in Switzerland.

  Three Lives in the Shadow of the Revolution

  Karel Havlíek was the first Czech intellectual in the modern sense, bridging the gap between literature and political activism, and in his own way he anticipated the realist T. G. Masaryk, professor of philosophy and founder of the Czechoslovak Republic. (Masaryk, of course, wrote a lively volume about his predecessor.) Patriots of earlier generations had devoted their energies to the study of Slavic archaeology and history, but Havlíek lived in the present, as satirist, literary critic, newspaper editor, and member of committees and the Austrian parliament; one of his recent biographers has raised the legitimate question whether Havlíek suffered more in exile, controlled by the Austrian police, or when he returned home six years after the revolution and found only silence, indifference, and very few friends.

  Havlíek’s father was a village merchant from the hills on the Czech-Moravian border, and Karel, one of seven children, was the ugly duckling, stubborn, wild, and unruly, and yet a gifted student in the provinces and in Prague, where he attended the archbishop’s seminary—though only for one year because he changed his mind about his vocation, and his superiors did not like his epigrams or his Pan-Slavic ideas. He spent much of his time at the university library, and its director recommended him for a position as tutor to the conservative Russian historian Mikhail Pogodin, who passed him on to his learned colleague Stpan Petrovich Shevyrov, professor of Russian literature at Moscow University and head of a Slavophile group of poets and scholars who were committed to the ancient virtues of Orthodox Mother Russia. At first, the twenty-two-year-old Havlíek felt in an all-Slav heaven, tutoring Shevyrov’s son Boris for five hours a day and spending the rest of his time in Shevyrov’s rich library or exploring Moscow’s street life, admiring the wonderful Russian folk. Unfortunately, the family took him in late May 1843 to its vast country estate, and his Russian illusions were abruptly shattered when he saw the poverty of the villages, the way in which the estate owners dealt with their “souls,” dead or alive, and the unemployment that prompted hundreds of thousands of village lads to seek work in the cities, leaving behind their poor sisters and wives, or rather, as he put it, “fifty thousand whores.” He learned a lesson about the realities of Slav life, left his employers more or less in a huff, and announced to his friends that he was going home to write in a different style. He did not know yet that he was closely watched by the Austrian police, who believed that he was a Pan-Slav radical, pro-Russian, and dangerous to the state.

  Arriving in Prague, Havlíek wasted no time in establishing himself as a new kind of literary critic of political interests, showing little patience with sentimentality and patriotic oratory. In an essay in the widely read eská Vela (Czech Bee) he deplored the “irritating truth” that in his homeland every writer was also a praiseworthy patriot, making it difficult to criticize anyone because immediately the nation itself felt offended; frank literary criticism was simply impossible. Havlíek did not have an easy time defining his personal position; he clearly did not like literature without a message because he believed that people living in an important moment of history could not and should not enjoy timeless beauty closed upon itself, and he insisted that poetry with a message (he used the Young German term Tendenzpoesie) was simply better than poetry without one—the assumption being, of course, that it was real poetry, and Havlíek was willing to speak on that occasion of a meaning or direction of literature rather than mere tendentiousness.

  In practice, Havlíek selected two victims to demonstrate what he had in mind, the popular playwright and novelist Josef Kajetán Tyl and the young Jewish student Siegfried Kapper, who had dared to write poetry in Czech (Havlíek’s anti-Jewish arguments showed the limits of his liberalism). Tyl had just published Poslední ech (The Last Czech, 1845), a novel of sentimental twists and highfalutin political oratory; Havlíek challenged most of the Prague Czech literati, saying that “it was high time that our patriotic talk moved from our mouth to our head and to our body,” for, constantly talking about patriotism, people “forgot the education of the nation.” It was certainly easier, he added, and “more sweet to die for the nation than to read all these kitschy books about being patriotic.” Opening the way for a down-to-earth literature rather than mere sentimentalism even before the revolution, Havlíek had high praise for his compatriot Mrs. Božena Nmcová, who had written “true pristine poetry,” and he encouraged her to continue in her admirable way.

  Havlíek’s brash criticism offended many of the older generation but not the more thoughtful conservatives and liberals, among them the historian Palacký, who quickly recognized the critic’s unusual gifts. With their recommendation, twenty-four-year-old Havlíek, to his own surprise, was appointed editor in chief of the government-sponsored Pražské Noviny (Prague News) and its literary supplement, where he continued to startle his audience with provocative articles; even his friends spoke of his “somersaults.” One piece, “Slovan a Cech” (“A Slav and a Czech,” 1846), created a political sensation. He disliked Poland, he declared, and his Russian experience had extinguished in him the last spark of all-Slav enthusiasm; when he returned to Prague he came no longer as a dreaming Slav but as an adamant Czech who believed that Czechs were living in a powerful realm (mocnáství) which, in time of need, would defend Czech interests. His Austro-Czech sentiment may have pleased Palacký and the more liberal statesmen in Vienna, but the Austrian authorities were less pleased by Havlíek’s articles about Ireland and Daniel O’Connell’s opposition to London centralism (an allegory of Czech problems which had provided the Prague radicals with their Repeal slogan).

  During the spring and summer of 1848, Havlíek was among the reformists; he disliked armed revolutions, preferring “revolutions of the head and the heart,” and he joined P
alacký, who was defending legality, on the St. Wenceslas Committee and as a member of the imperial Austrian parliament, bitterly opposing the elections to the Frankfurt Assembly. In April he decided to establish an opposition newspaper, Národní Noviny (National News), and in his declaration of his program demanded “the real equality of the nations, the union of the Bohemian crown lands, the abolition of feudal privileges, … a general national parliament, and an incisive reform of all schools and state offices.” He was appalled by the June insurrection and the Bakunin conspiracy, accusing them of “playing a lottery game with the future of the nation”—though in his articles he himself became more radical in defining the civil and constitutional liberties that the counterrevolution diminished. He quickly ran into difficulties with the government; the Vienna and the Prague authorities wanted to silence his voice and accused him of defaming the constitution, but two juries declared him not guilty, and when a military court sentenced him to prison, he walked away free, since five Bohemian regions had elected him to represent them in the imperial parliament. The new absolutism, emerging from the defeat of the revolution, used other means. On December 13, 1851, young Emperor Franz Josef I signed a cabinet order to exile Havlíek, and in the early morning of December 16, the police agent Franz Dedera, accompanied by constables and local officials, knocked at Havlíek’s door at Nmecký Brod (Deutsch Brod, later called Havlíkv Brod), where he had taken refuge with his wife, Julie, and their daughter, Zdenka. He was formally charged and taken in a special coach, which the police had brought from Prague to Nmecký Brod by railway, on a long trip to picturesque Brixen, in the Tyrol, selected as his place of confinement.