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

by Peter Demetz

  Later in the century a patriotic holograph could be seen on the walls of nearly any Czech village inn, showing Havlíek taking leave of his wife and daughter, stern gendarmes standing by; many largely maudlin stories were told about his confinement in the distant Austrian Alps. The historian Jií Morava, himself a dissident and far from his homeland, devoted nearly ten years of his own recent exile to historical research about Havlíek in the Tyrol, and his brave book, published in 1991 for the first time, tells, on the basis of authentic police documents, a mixed story of melancholy, a few happy moments, and an entire family killed by a vicious disease after their return to Bohemia.

  Havlíek did not resist his arrest (it was too late to use a forged passport for England which he had in his desk), and he was sent via southern Bohemia and Upper Austria to Salzburg, where his transport was checked by a police commissioner named Le Monnier (later police president of Brno and Vienna, gratefully employing the scholarly young T. G. Masaryk to educate his son). From Salzburg, the coach wended its way to lnnsbruck, then Brixen, a small town and residence of a bishop, proud of its cathedral, twelve churches, and five cloisters—just the place for a liberal to be confined. Havlíek was put up at the White Elephant, the region’s most fashionable hotel then and now, all expenses paid; later he moved to a small apartment, where two sisters cooked for him and did his laundry. In 1852, his family joined him, and they all lived together in a dépendance of the hotel. He did not know that police offices in Prague and Vienna fought over him, trying to define their policies, but the local Tyrolean authorities, respecting his calm and self-discipline, were rather friendly. He usually spent his day writing, with a picture of Jan Hus above his desk, going on long walks with Julie, who hoped to strengthen her “weak lungs,” and Zdenka. He also talked to a few new friends, among them a postal clerk who had been transferred to the provinces because he was considered a red republican of the Frankfurt variety, and a gentleman who happened to speak Czech and had retired to the Tyrol, telling everybody that his beautiful wife was Italian and wanted to be closer to home; actually he was afraid of his creditors. The Havlíeks employed a servant girl, Julie baked cakes for their friends, there were little trips to a nearby spa, and a good deal of correspondence, neatly registered and read by the police.

  In September 1854, his family chose to return home, Julie fearing that the winter would weaken her fragile health, Zdenka ready for school in Bohemia, and Havlíek was alone again, translating, writing sad poems and modern verse epics, and drinking beer in the evening with the Tyrolean peasants, who remained foreign to him. He was bitter and weary, and he tried to convince the authorities that he was ready to go home to Bohemia to settle on a little rented farm in the countryside. On April 15, 1855, the imperial authorities in Bohemia relented and he was allowed, renouncing all political activities, to return home.

  No holograph has ever shown the tragedy that followed as soon as Havlíek crossed the frontier from Austria to Moravia. He expected that his brother-in-law would be waiting for him at Jihlava (Iglau), but they missed each other and only met, by chance, on the road; Havlíek, speechless and confused, had to learn that his wife had died in Prague of her tuberculosis, which had been consuming her body for a long time. She had been buried some time ago, a few friends and the inevitable police informers attending. In Prague, he quickly discovered that his former friends and acquaintances were afraid to talk to him; one of the exceptions was Božena Nmcová, by now a prominent writer, who greeted him warmly in the street, saying she did not care what the government thought of her. The problem was that his plans to buy a shop or rent a little farm had been illusions, for his brother-in-law was unable to return the money which Havlíek had lent him to invest in his business. Without reserves or income, Havlíek had to place his daughter with friends, live with his mother in the country, and petition the police in vain for permission to settle in Prague, where he hoped to find “legal employment” (read: not one depending on his pen). Early in 1856, he felt tired, suffered from a severe cough, and two doctors, friendly patriots, told him that his lungs and glands were tubercular and gave him little hope. Friends sent him for a short while to a little spa, but he had to be brought back to Prague in agony, and he died in the apartment of his brother-in-law, opposite the railroad station, on July 29. Now that he was dead, the patriots made his funeral a national affair, but his poor daughter, Zdenka, was passed first to her father’s in-laws, who went bankrupt, then from family to family as a “daughter of the nation”; a lottery was arranged which brought her a considerable sum of money to be her future dowry. People did not like the idea of Havlíek’s daughter being wooed by an officer (an early suitor), but when the right Czech from the provinces came along, she died of her mother’s and father’s tuberculosis, in 1872, being twenty-four years old.

  In 1843, a group of students from Prague studying in Vienna, Czechs and German-speaking Jews, believed that the time had come to bring Slavs and Jews closer together. The young Czech poet who first advanced this idea was Václav Bolemír Nebeský (who had just left Božena Nmcová’s embrace), a melancholy Byronist and also ardent defender of liberty and emancipation, only later a stuffed shirt in the service of the Prague Museum. Among his colleagues were David Kuh, from a famous Prague Jewish clan (later a German nationalist much hated by the Czechs), and the medical student Siegfried Kapper, son of a Jewish glazier from Smfchov and a particularly gifted translator of Czech poetry into the German tongue. The friends regularly met at the Slavic café at the corner of Währingerstrasse and Berggasse, not far from Sigmund Freud’s later home; Nebeský and Kuh wrote articles and essays in support of a Slavic-Jewish rapprochement which were published in Czech and German periodicals in Prague and Germany; and Kapper’s contribution to the cause was a slim volume entitled eské Listy (Czech Pages, 1846). This is the first book of Czech poems written by a Prague Jew; and later critics discussed it from different political perspectives but rarely was it read as a lyrical confession of a young man who did not know where he belonged. Kapper’s ambivalence clearly emerges from his allegiance to his Czech, not Bohemian, homeland (eská vlast), where the romantic outsider, as Jew, seeks intimacy and consolation among the carefully trimmed Slavic linden trees; in Czech nature, he finds the “Zion of his desire, the Canaan of his thought,” while the Czech foliage whispers and the Czech rivers gently flow. Yet he knows himself that his praise of the Czech landscape does not articulate all his feelings; in many poems he pushes aside the props of third-rate national poetry and longs for the biblical land of his ancient origins, with its fierce sun, roses of Sharon, and mysterious cedar trees in the mountains. One set of motifs clashes with the other and, ultimately, young Kapper honestly accepts the pain of his divided self: “I am the son of Jews! I love my country, and yet I am a foreigner.”

  A few reviews were friendly, yet, unfortunately, it was Karel Havlíek himself, the most intelligent of the liberals, who in a longish article turned against Kapper’s poetry and, more essentially, against any Jewish writer claiming allegiance to the Czech nation. It was not, he wrote, a matter of religion but of “origins and nationality,” of belonging to a particular “tribe.” Jews are of “Semitic origin,” and Germans, Englishmen, or Spanish could become Czechs more easily than Jews, who, coming from a totally different tribe, “only accidentally live among Czechs” and “occasionally understand and speak Czech.” Havlíek’s argument comes close to being racist; if a Jew wants to become a Czech, he has to “cease to be a Jew” (Havlíek does not explain how to do that, in view of the immutable tribal origins), and he cynically suggests that Jews wishing to give up their nationality and language should join the Germans and write in their language, as they do elsewhere. Literary questions are subordinate; Havlíek admits that Kapper has succeeded in writing a few interesting stanzas, but he cannot stand what he calls his “screaming style,” with its overdone images so disproportionate to the banal thoughts. The realist Havlíek was never willing to tolerate big political phrases inst
ead of the far more necessary patient social action of the moment, and if the sentimental and loquacious patriot is but a Prague Jew, tant pis. It is a pity that Havlíek did not write about Kapper again, when he returned, two years after the revolution, to the Jewish question, a much wiser and perhaps more isolated man among his compatriots, and welcomed the legal emancipation of Jews as an integral event in the emancipation of all nations of mankind. Perhaps he had come to see that Jews cannot be denied those civic privileges that Czechs were so urgently claiming for themselves.

  It was impossible to argue against Havlíek’s authority. Kapper continued his medical studies and received his Vienna doctorate in 1847. He settled as a young physician in a small town of Croatia, traveled a good deal in Serbia and Bosnia, and quickly returned to revolutionary Vienna in the spring of 1848. He joined the Academic Legion, treated wounded students in the courtyard of the university, published bad German poetry saying that political action, not empty verse, was the order of the day, and wrote regular reports for important German newspapers. In 1853 he moved to Dobíš, a small town not far from Prague, married the daughter of the exiled radical Moritz Hartmann (earning himself the close attention of the Austrian secret police), edited a German yearbook of literature, and became so bored that, in 1859, he joined the Austrian army in Italy as a volunteer and worked in a field hospital in Verona. A year later he tried to settle in Bohemia again, this time in Mladá Boleslav (Jungbunzlau), and within a short time he succeeded in provoking most people there, the Germans because he supported Czech candidates in any election, and the Jewish traditionalists because he was never seen in the synagogue.

  In 1867, Kapper finally returned to Prague, opened a physician’s office at the corner of Wenceslas Square and Vodikova Street, announcing that he was welcoming patients with “secret diseases”; every day he worked five hours in his office and devoted the rest of his time to writing. He may have been a rather restless and irritable character, as attested by his contemporaries, but he was not easily deflected from his literary interests. Early in his life, he had begun to study South Slav literature, or rather ancient Serb heroic poetry, and encouraged by the philologist and poet Stefan Vuk Karadži, he translated many old epic songs into German and Czech, or imitated them in his own way. His German stories and novels are forgettable, but he was a first-rate travel writer, in his admiration of the Serbs often anticipating Rebecca West’s classic account of a century later, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; his reports of the brutal Hungarian-Slav battles of 1849 deserve to be reread, and not only by historians. It is interesting that he always considered himself a Czech when traveling (never mind Havlíek), and when, one evening, in a cosmopolitan group in Belgrade, everyone was asked to sing a song close to his heart, he intoned the old Hussite battle hymn “Kdož sú Boží bojovnici” (“Those who are soldiers of God …”).

  In his Prague years, Kapper loyally participated in the cultural life of the Czech middle class; he did not entirely cease to publish in German, but he mostly contributed to important Czech periodicals, joined the Mšt’anská Beseda, where he met Jan Neruda, the most important Czech author of the later nineteenth century. Kapper continued to translate Serb heroic poetry, mostly into Czech, published artful Dalmatian fairy tales, and his yearly lectures on his South Slav researches, presented to the literary section of the Beseda, were well attended. His quarrel now was with the Prague Jewish community; he did not want to pay the community tax, complained to the government in Vienna, and finally left the community—only to return to it, humbly and quietly, when he was gravely ill. He spent his last two years in Italy hoping against hope to cure his tuberculosis and died on June 7, 1879, in Pisa, where he was buried at the Jewish cemetery.

  Kapper would have been immensely pleased to know that the Prague Czechs did pay homage to his literary achievements; Neruda himself, in a two-part necrology in the Národní Noviny, the organ of the dominant Young Czech party, praised his lyrical talents and untiring efforts in the service of the Slavic cause. Earlier, in 1869, Neruda had published an essay in which he had argued against Jews, who, he said, constituted a “polyglot” and “international nation” that watched Czech striving with “icy coldness.” Kapper, however, was different—“he felt a Slav and remained a Slav”—and though Neruda had once quoted Richard Wagner’s diatribes against Jewish sterility in the arts, he now spoke highly of Kapper’s unusual gifts and falconlike thought. He passed over Kapper’s German publications, about three-quarters of his production, in a single sentence, and insisted that Kapper was the first Jew to take his rightful place on the Slavic Parnassus, the seat of the muses. Then times changed (somewhat); in 1876, a Spolek eských Akademik-Žid (Club of Czech-Jewish Professionals) was established in Prague, and by 1919 it changed its name to commemorate Siegfried Kapper, who had never feared to challenge his fellow citizens.

  Many generations of admiring poets, patriotic critics, and, at times, official propagandists have long transformed the bitter life of Božena Nmcová, the first Czech woman writer of importance, into a cherished national myth. Critics traditionally incline to read her more sentimental novellas as if they were biographical testimony, and in a recent spate of books and essays tell us that she was really of high aristocratic origins; in these genealogical fantasies the adventurous duchess of Sagan and none other than Metternich, the imperial chancellor, figure prominently. All talented Czechs of the past century, including T. G. Masaryk, came from rather humble circumstances—it could not be otherwise sociologically—and Božena Nmcová, christened Barbora, was the daughter of a Czech servant girl working, as thousands of others did, in Vienna, and Johann Pankl, an Austrian feschak and horse groom, who legitimized his relationship and his newly born daughter in 1820 after a brief delay. He was honest and faithful in the service of his master, moved his family to the Bohemian estate of Ratiboice, where he was put in charge of the stables while his wife worked as manorial laundress, insisting that she belonged to the higher servant ranks. She preferred to speak German and looked askance at her Czech family, all poor weavers originally. The stable master spent the winter season in Vienna and returned to Ratibofice in the late spring, fathered twelve more children, of whom six survived, and overworked Frau Pankl, as she called herself now, invited her widowed mother to help with the children. The old woman could not stand her daughter’s cantankerous ways, moved to another daughter, living in Vienna with a herring merchant, died there, and was buried at the Matzleinsdorfer cemetery in 1841. In Božena Nmcová’s novel The Grandmother (1855), she lives on as the true incarnation of Czech folk wisdom and kindness, forever surrounded by sublime forests and green meadows.

  Barbora attended the local elementary school and was later, after the grandmother had left, sent by her ambitious and impatient mother to live with the family of the steward of nearby Chvalkovice Castle to refine her manners, to perfect her German, and to play the piano. In a fashionable way, people called her Fräulein Betty, which she enjoyed, and as time went by she preferred the admiring glances of men, among them the steward himself, to the company of boys. There was flirting, whispers, and first kisses, and long hours of reading Schiller and Wieland, but also a good deal of third-rate German trash nourishing her dreams about the fairy-tale prince to arrive; yet Betty had also a sharp eye for the tangible social world, and at another time described the married life of the steward and his older wife with devastating precision: “in the evening, when she went to bed, she rigged herself out like a wagoneer who wants to go to Amsterdam, with flannel drawers, a skirt, a bodice, and stockings; and above all that she put a warm corset and a shawl around her neck.” The many-layered lady, who had served in Vienna, was jealous, so Betty returned home to her mother, who had her hands full and did not know what to do with her lively and imaginative seventeen-year-old daughter; when a member of the border guard revealed that his chief, a man with prospects, was looking for a young wife, the family was more than willing to arrange the marriage.

  In due course Josef Nmec, o
f military bearing, rather educated and coarse, presented himself to the parents and to Barbora. At first she was not ready to take the talk of marriage seriously, but she had no other choice and married Josef (twice her age) in a formal ceremony, she in a pale blue dress, he in his Sunday uniform, on September 12, 1827. They both came to regret the day.

  There is not another marriage in Czech intellectual history that has been more closely scrutinized by biographers and literary critics than that of Josef Nmec and Barbora Panklová. The bridegroom had been a student of philosophy when he was accused of participating in a silly street demonstration and, as punishment, forced to join the army (the regular term of service was fourteen years). Being a proud patriot, he refused to swear the oath of allegiance in German (his officer accepted the Czech version), served many years in Italy, carrying Professor Jungmann’s famous book on Czech rhetoric in his pack, perhaps the reason why he never had anything to say about the glories of Italy. When his time of service was reduced, he joined the financial, or border, guards, organized to levy food taxes and fight smugglers of tobacco and cheap cotton. He was a stubborn and pugnacious man, often in conflict with his superiors, and made a slow and meandering career through the ranks. In early June 1853, he was officially notified that he was suspended from the service, confined to a little Hungarian town (which he had chosen to speed up his promotion), and investigated as an enragé Czech of republican sentiments, especially dangerous because of his influence on his wife, the writer Božena Nmcová, who in turn enjoyed considerable prestige among Czech intellectuals (one of her women friends was a spy in the service of the police, elaborately trained for the job). For brief periods Josef, a man of the barracks, and Božena felt close to each other, especially in the Bohemian provinces, where they were both active in Czech civic life, or when they organized Karel Havlíek’s funeral in 1856; though it is impossible to say that he did not know the importance of literature (as correspondent of Czech newspapers he wrote more than sixty articles himself), he did not wish his wife to be a writer—wanting her to be a devoted and practical housewife as were the other petit bourgeois women of Prague. He certainly knew something about Božena’s passionate affairs, and there is evidence that he crudely mistreated her (she had to run for protection to the nearest police precinct) or locked her up in her room (she had to escape through the window). Marital rape has a variety of methods.