by Peter Demetz
When Josef married Betty, he was proud of her beauty, and her later friends and enemies speak of her raven-black hair of metallic luster, dark eyes under strong brows, and a high seriousness of feeling. In Prague, scandalized mothers and adamant wives were quickly jealous rather than hospitable to the remarkable newcomer from the countryside; her free way of moving, talking, and conversing with the young did not endear her to the people in conservative salons (she may have occasionally smoked cigars, as did George Sand when she visited Prague). She loved to love, absolutely and in total disregard of the conventions, and when as a married woman and caring mother of four, she chose a man, she abandoned herself to her desires and in her letters, almost blindly. Her grands amours tended to follow a recurrent and depressing scenario: “a night of nightingales,” or a one-night stand on a Prague hill or in a newspaper office, then painful absence and renewed embraces, confessions and correspondences; finally, fiery demands on the men who, usually, feared her sudden passions and were unwilling to become prisoners of her almost masochistic surrender. At least one of them, a physician who was also a translator of Boccaccio, in a cynical communication to a friend called her “the Spleen,” alluding to her many health problems (she was to die of uterine cancer). All these men belonged to patriotic circles or were well-educated medical students or doctors, but none had the courage to confront her expectations, and what remained to her was, again and again, bitterness, silence, and despair. In a letter of searing honesty of June 13, 1857, when Josef wanted to return to her, she told him what she thought of modern marriage—“the deceit, the privileged slavery, duty enforced”—and confessed all her disappointments to him. “They possessed my body but my action, honesty and desire looked into a far distance, which I did not know myself … . I thought I could fill the emptiness of my feelings only loving a man but now I know that it was not so … . I wanted to be better, live in truth, and the world forced me to lie.”
Strangely enough, it was the gruff patriot Nmec himself who had greatly strengthened his wife’s renewed interest in Czech life and literature, dormant as long as she satisfied her emotional needs by reading sentimental German novels. Her grandmother had told her old Czech peasant stories, but it was her self-consciously Czech husband who prompted her to read Prague newspapers and Czech books, and even before she laid hands on Tyl’s sentimental prose, she perused as her first Czech text a local translation of a novel by the American writer Washington Irving, who had visited Prague too. After they moved to Prague, Nmec introduced her to the family of Dr. Josef Fri, the well-known lawyer and father of the radical, and at the Fries’ home she met all the important people of Czech polite society in the 1840s, including the young poet and medical student Nebeský, her lover, who corrected her first poem “To Czech Women!,” published to great acclaim. She enjoyed herself among her new friends and admirers, attended dances, balls, and patriotic picnics, which were then en vogue; “like a queen / you came,” Nebeský wrote in one of his ardent poems before he escaped to Vienna to continue his studies.
Another, perhaps more important mentor was František Matouš Klácel, an Augustinian priest who had been reprimanded for his Hegelian views and had conceived the idea of trying to organize ideal humanity from scratch, as it were, by founding a “Czech-Moravian brother- and sisterhood” of the happy few. Božena Nmcová, whom he called “Sister Ludmila,” was among the charter members of this small group, and Klácel addressed a series of letters to her, published in 1849 as a book on the origins of modern socialism and communism, the first treatise on these matters written in Czech. Klácel, too, admired her from afar, but when she slept with another brother, everybody was jealous and the brotherand sisterhood came to a premature end before it had really flourished. Klácel submitted to the ecclesiastical authorities again but later left for the United States, where he edited a number of Czech liberal newspapers for the poor people who had left their Bohemian homeland.
She had little patience with poetry, and by the mid-1840s she joined those romantic philologists and writers, German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Serb, who collected and retold fairy tales and the stories current, as they thought, among simple people—efforts intended to strengthen the national self-consciousness of societies still, or once again, deprived of states of their own. She was not, as the brothers Grimm and their Czech ally Karel Jaromír Erben had been, predominantly concerned with folk authenticity, and in the Slovak fairy tales and legends she gathered on many field trips to Slovakia, she magnificently played with the idiomatic potentialities of combining Czech and Slovak vocabulary, probably appreciated by modern readers even more than by her own contemporaries. Babika (The Grandmother), written at a time of despair and misery, intimately relates to her earlier anthropological interests in the service of national reawakening, but fortunately goes far beyond these restraints. She recalls the idyllic days of her childhood at home in northeastern Bohemia and the old woman closest to her heart; though she looks back at these serene days through tears, her evocations of peasant costumes, local habits of speech, and recurrent feasts and pilgrimages are remarkably precise. Portraits and scenes, not plots and counterplots (though more rapidly developing in the final chapters), predominate; the life of her grandmother, symbolic of strong vitality, loving wisdom, and the Czech plebeian tradition, distinctly emerges in confrontation with that of the duchess living in the nearby castle and poor Viktorka, a half-mad peasant girl roaming through the forests. Her social station has kept the duchess from living close to nature and people; and if the grandmother likens herself to a gnarled pear tree that has survived many a storm, the duchess enjoys but a collection of stones and desiccated plants on her shelves (she has no children of her own, only an adopted daughter). Critics and film producers have long felt that Božena Nmcová hid many of her own passions in Viktorka, the girl seduced by a soldier and left with a child, whom she drowns. Viktorka lives in a cave, wanders through the woods, gathers berries, and snatches pieces of bread left for her on the windowsills by peasants—until she is killed in the woods by lightning. (The real Viktorka was an alcoholic mother of two, who miserably died on the road not long after the novel was published.) It is the grandmother whom people call a truly “happy woman” without doubts or hesitations.
For more than a hundred years now, Babika has been fundamental to the Czech prose canon, dear to any child and adult, and the long efforts of official critics to celebrate Nmcová as a socialist realist, relying on folk types and the optimism of the people, prompted an opposition that accentuated her romanticism, early stressed by the critic F. X. Šalda. Yet this debate about generalities has obfuscated the more difficult question of how Božena Nmcová used the literary conventions of her moment for her own purposes and where she fell victim to them. Czech feminists are lucky that the modern Czech prose tradition begins in her writings; instead of trying so hard to demonstrate that her father was Mettemich or another prince, it is far more important to grasp her pride and her thirst for independence, her plea for women’s education (she had almost none), her defense of Jews in the words of an old Czech peasant in her reports from southern Bohemia, and her sudden decision to come, in the disguise of a countrywoman, to the help of the Prague insurrectionists of June 1848 (too late, of course). Even before the Velvet Revolution of 1989, critical interests began to shift, and, as is suggested by a challenging inquiry undertaken by the Swiss scholar and translator Susanna Roth, among Czech writers at home and in exile Božena Nmcová is now being read and thought about in many different ways, and not only in response to the political correctness of yesteryear. Attention reaches out for the masterpieces among her smaller prose pieces, for instance, tyi Doby (Four Seasons), revealing in a few veiled pages the trauma of love defiled by marriage, or Divá Bára (The Wild Bára), celebrating innocence and energy. Important artists like Jii Kolá and many writers, among them Eva Kantrková, have rediscovered Božena Nmcová’s correspondence, and a new chapter of our response to her has just begun.
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T. G. MASARYK’S PRAGUE
A Modernized City and a Literature of Ghosts
As for other European cities, modernization for Prague was closely bound to advances in industrialization, long delayed, to new networks of communications, and to the economic boom of the 1850s and then again toward the end of the nineteenth century. The first to modernize, in his own way, had been Emperor Joseph II, who by his transformation and destruction of many monastic and ecclesiastical institutions and buildings, had greatly changed the historical charms of Prague’s ancient towns. In the 1830s and 1840s, the Prague burgrave Count Karl Chotek energetically pushed for a productive collaboration of urban architects and new industrialists, built new avenues, initiated a society to construct a second bridge over the river (the one that goes from the National Theater to Smíchov), reorganized the quay on the right riverbank, and yet also protected old gardens, parks, and churches against developers.
Another, far more incisive phase of urban modernization began in the mid-1880s, when a proud city government, by 1888 entirely Czech, suggested a radical plan to “sanitize” the most decrepit parts of the Old Town and a few other corners; in 1895 (after the plan had been approved by the Vienna authorities) the old Jewish quarter—with the exception of a few historic synagogues, the cemetery (though narrowed), and the old Jewish town hall—was totally razed, as was the northern side of the Old Town Square and at least three old churches together with adjacent buildings. The rubble was transported in 21,700 wagonloads to be used as landfill in a district still endangered by frequent inundations from the river. Neither the Hussite civil wars nor the enlightened policies of Emperor Joseph II had so massively threatened the historical shape of Prague, and while poets, artists, architects, and students voiced their protest in newspapers and in mass meetings, the city government did not substantially yield. International travelers who visit the Prague Jewish Town today walk in the ancient grid of streets, but all the apartment buildings, left and right, reflect fin de sièc/e middle-class tastes. Paížtská Street, now a concatenation of international airline offices, violently and destructively intrudes into the old street structure.
Yet the advantages of modern asanace (sanitation) did not primarily affect Jews, because in the fifth district, newly incorporated into Prague’s union of towns in 1850 under the name of Josefov (“Joseph’s Place”), Jewish civic life no longer prevailed and only 10 percent of its residents were still Jewish. The emigration of rich Jews to other parts of the city had started well before the revolution of 1848; a year later the familiant’s law was annulled; by 1852 Jews were allowed to acquire housing wherever they wished; and in 1867 they were assured all civil rights equal to those guaranteed to Czechs and Germans. Even the less well-to-do tried to find apartments somewhere else, especially in the New Town and at bourgeois Vinohrady (a little east of the New Town), although some families, like that of Franz Kafka, restlessly moved year by year, in a circle around the old ghetto. The shabby old houses in the Jewish Town had become the last refuge of the poorest of the poor; contemporary reportages by the Czech realist Jan Neruda described them as havens of unsavory crime, pimps, and low prostitution (the better places, like the famous Goldschmidt salon, were located elsewhere in the Old Town). Contemporary studies prepared by Dr. Václav Preininger were discouraging; by 1885, the Josefov district, or Prague V, with 186,000 inhabitants, was the most overpopulated of all Prague quarters; in the Old Town, 644 people lived on one hectare of housing space, but 1,822 in Josefov, and even in proletarian Žižkov the number had been 1,300. Overall in the city the proportion of one-room apartments was 53 percent, which was bad enough, but in Josefov it was as high as 64 percent; in one small house more than 200 people were found living together. On the average, one toilet served five to ten apartments. The mortality rate for infectious diseases in the Old Town in 1895 was 18.13 per thousand, in the Minor Town 20.61, and in Josefov, a quarter without clean water, sunlight, or gardens, however small, 30.61. So there was ample need for “sanitation” in the strict sense, but there was another reason too, less often discussed publicly. This was the age in which representative public buildings for the new Czech middle class were being constructed in grand neo-Renaissance style along the Vltava embankment and elsewhere—the National Theater (1881—83), the Rudolfinum concert hall (1884), the School of the Applied Arts (1884), the new National Museum (1885—90), and the Museum of the City of Prague (1898). Prague wanted to rise and shine, preparing for three international exhibitions in the 1890s to show its material and intellectual achievements, and the poor of Josefov were barely hidden by the surrounding new splendor.
The decisions of the magistrate to change so much of Prague provoked the opposition of many organizations, including the Czech Club of Architects and the German Club for City Affairs, yet people were not concerned about the disappearance of the former ghetto, though they helped to protect the streets nearby, the churches of the Old Town, and a few old buildings in the New Town—for instance, the “Faust” house—endangered by city planners. In 1895, the Czech Club of Architects and the Mšt’anská Beseda submitted a memorandum reminding the city fathers of the ancient history of Prague, and soon artists and intellectuals were on a collision course with the powers that be. The distinguished novelist and playwright Vilém Mrštík (a Moravian) unsparingly attacked Prague’s urban renewal, speaking against the “blindness” and “ignorance” of the few people robbing Prague of its “most precious treasure,” and in yet another, even more belligerent essay (1896—97) called those responsible for the cleanup the “bestia triumphans,” a term derived from Friedrich Nietzsche to denote the absolute victory of brutal power over sensible intelligence.
One of the old palaces people fought about was the late Baroque Benedictine prelacy originally built by Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer in 1730 to be affiliated with nearby St. Nicholas. In that prelacy, secularized by Joseph II, Franz Kafka was born in 1883, but the original building was destroyed by fire (1897) and a new construction, in style and adornment imitating the old prelacy, was built on the spot in 1902. In 1966, after considerable conflict with the Communist authorities, people were able to affix a plaque to the house saying that Franz Kafka was born there—true, in a purely topographical sense—and international pilgrims deciphering the Czech inscription have to learn that in the Old Town, as in Kafka’s writings, things are not always what they seem.
In the time of the asanace, continuing into the first year of World War I, Prague advanced, as if with a sudden leap of energy, to being a modern city, massively industrialized, especially in its expanding suburbs, and run by a new strong Czech middle class legitimately proud of its splendid cultural and economic institutions, the Czech University, and new banks and insurance companies. Germans had been defeated in the city council elections of 1861 and, increasingly excluded from the political administration of the community, tried to balance their political losses by much attention to their theater, a flowering literary life, and innumerable social clubs. Since the new industries attracted a continuous immigration from the Czech countryside, the number of German speakers in Prague quickly decreased (in 1880 to 15.5 percent, and in 1900 to 7.5 percent).
The four original Prague towns grew constantly; not only was the Jewish community incorporated as Josefov (Prague V) but the Vyšehrad district and Holešovice-Bubny, a mighty bastion of the Czech proletariat, followed in 1901. Other suburbs did not want to be incorporated into the city; they were afraid of its special tax on rents (approximately 14 percent) and enjoyed being favored by the government, which readily granted them the privilege of being imperial and royal towns on their own, as was Vinohrady and Žižkov; Vienna recognized, of course, that rapid incorporation of so many Czechs into Prague would wash away the last vestiges of German entitlements there.
Matters were complicated even more by the social transformations of Prague’s Jewish community, which demographically held its own, though its members were now dispersed, predominantly all over the Old and
New Towns. An increasing number of families, though continuing to send their sons to German schools and the German university, preferred to declare during statistical inquiries that their language was Czech; by 1900, 14,576 Prague Jews declared themselves to be speakers of Czech, while the number of German speakers had dropped to 11,599. The reorientation of language did not immediately affect the community’s religious life; administrative functions were in the hands of well-to-do German-speaking liberals, and the major synagogues, including the Old New and the Pinkas synagogues, retained the old Hebrew rites. Mixed marriages, in spite of the advancing acculturation to other language groups, were surprisingly rare (in 1894, 1 in 655, rising to 4 in 684 in 1895 and 21 in 676 in 1897). (The corresponding numbers in Vienna and especially Berlin were twice as high.) The notion of Jews as a “nation among nations” had been current among the young writers of the Sippurim in 1847, and yet the first Zionist student group was not established until 1893, renewed as Bar Kochba (bilingual) in 1899, while the Czech Theodor Herzl group suffered from a dearth of Jewish students at the Czech University (by 1911, there were only 101, and even by 1921, only 469, as compared with 1,400 Jews studying at the German university).
