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

by Peter Demetz

  As Prague increasingly modernized, a special literature about it began to emerge internationally, insisting on its magic if not mystical image. Contemporary Czechs, concerned with commercial, technological, and political advances, celebrated Zlatá Praha, the golden Slavic city of past and future achievements, yet English, German, and American writers on the grand tour once again became enchanted by the metaphysical, strange, and spectral town of ancient cathedrals and synagogues, and dutifully wended their way through the old streets to the famous old Jewish cemetery. The walk itself followed literary convention; ever since the later eighteenth century, cemeteries had been sweet places of melancholy reflections about frail life and sublime death, and Prague’s Jewish cemetery exerted a strong pull on minds shaped by Christian tradition. Uncertain feelings of otherness, history, and eerie portents curiously mingled; it is not difficult to understand why English and American travelers, who are more substantially responsible for the literature of magic Prague than we perhaps assume, were ready for supernatural experiences, and they wrote stories of hypnosis, strange blood transfusions, ghosts, and weird revenants. The asanace ordered by the city magistrate may have razed much of the Jewish Town, but the many stories about magical Prague kept alive the literary image of a topography long gone.

  George Eliot, accompanied by her devoted friend George Henry Lewes on a trip from Vienna to Dresden, spent July 16, 1858, in Prague, walked through the Old Town, kissed “a lovely dark-eyed Jewish child … in all its dirt,” looked at the “somber old synagogue with its smoky groins,” and never forgot her impressions. Publishers and critics were confused about the immediate result of her first trip to Prague, a story called “The Lifted Veil,” written in 1859, and later she was inclined herself to hide it in a volume of other stories rather than risk independent publication again. She defended it by saying she had written “a jeu de melancholie ,” an “outré” story. That much is true: an aging Englishman who always wanted to be a poet but lacked inspiration confesses that instead he received the gift of “prevision,” the ability to look forward in time and into people’s secret thoughts. Strangely enough, it is the word “Prague” (where his father wants to go on a trip) that, for the first time, triggers a precise vision of a future moment; though he has never been in Prague or seen a picture of it, he suddenly sees “a city … in the summer sunshine of a long-past century arrested in its course … and the dusty, weary, timeeaten grandeur of a people doomed to live on in the stale repetition of memories, like the past and superannuated kings in their regal goldinwoven tatters,” and as he walks he passes “under the blank gaze of blackened statues” along “the unending bridge.”

  On a later trip to Prague, he discovers his extraordinary vision fully confirmed, but he also begins to feel how difficult it is to live on. He recognizes in one of his visionary moments that his late wife, whom he truly loved, had been possessed by an uncaring and dangerous egotism: her maid dies, and a medical friend by a rather unorthodox transfusion of blood brings the dead woman to life again and she confesses, in a hypnotic state, that she helped her lady in an effort to poison her husband (who is not totally surprised). Prague, “prevision,” and the occult sciences combine here, and yet it is less obvious that this man, burdened with his knowledge of the future, has become one of the denizens of the deadly city himself, “urged by no fear or hope … but compelled by this doom to be ever old and undying, to live on in the rigidity of habit … without the repose of night or the new birth of morning.” With the future known, time paralyzes the mind and petrifies the body, like the statues on the Charles Bridge. Only a few years later, George Eliot turned her attention to contemporary Jewish problems, and after she had met Rabbi Emmanuel Deutsch in London (1866) and taken Hebrew lessons, she returned to Prague in April 1870 (visiting the Old New Synagogue again) and reread Leopold Kompert’s Jewish stories in the original German, in preparation for her novel Daniel Deronda, in which Jewish Prague, among other cities, reappears.

  In May 1859, not long after George Eliot’s first visit, the North German writer Wilhelm Raabe came on an excursion to Prague, although he had wanted to go to Italy; four years later his “Holunderblüte” (“Lilac Blossom”) appeared, a story that is late romantic in mood and yet a provocative signal of strong, ambivalent feelings laboriously repressed. In it a traveling medical student encounters a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, a kind of Mignon of Prague V, but he tells of their meetings at the old Jewish cemetery at a distance twice removed—by time and by another story about a life cut short. It is not easy for him to speak of Jemima Loew, and of how they walk hand in hand among the graves, clouded over by lilacs, and how the dead, among them Rabbi Loew, one of her ancestors, come to life in what she tells him. Raabe remarked, as did other writers of the time, on the “incredible dirt” of Prague’s narrow streets, but he also showed much compassion for the Jewish people, “so maliciously tormented, mistreated, scorned, and burdened by fear.” His traveler does not really want to speak about his most intimate feelings, tries to assure himself that he does not love young Jemima, yet spends his days in Prague almost paralyzed and feverishly driven by the expectation of seeing her again. He refuses to call his enchantment by its name, but later, in a suburban crowd in Berlin one day, he suddenly feels that Jemima has died, as she predicted she would, rushes back to Prague, and hears she was buried eight days earlier. Raabe barely skirts sentimentality, and yet Jemima, in spite of a few “exotic” elements, asserts herself as an astonishing figure, full of honest feelings, coquettish, loving, talking, and teasing. She does not hesitate to taunt her wide-eyed visitor with that famous Czech line without any vowels whatsoever and beyond the phonetic possibilities of any German visitor, “str prst skrz krk” (put your finger down your throat). No wonder that he is smitten.

  Only a few years later, as the American scholar Jeffrey L. Sammons has shown again, modern anti-Semitism seized on the motif of the Prague Jewish cemetery as the spectral place where Jewish world domination is plotted. Herrmann Goedsche—once an employee of the Prussian postal service, dismissed because of his involvement in an unsavory forgery case, and later a co-owner of an ultraconservative Berlin newspaper—among other sensational novels wrote a historical potboiler entitled Biarritz, dealing with Bismarck and Napoleon III. As early as in Volume 1 (published in 1868), he showed, in the eyes of a secret witness, how the delegates of the twelve tribes of Israel, with the Eternal Jew as an extra, meet in enclave at the Prague cemetery at midnight to consider the Jewish past and to discuss conspiratorial plans for the future domination of the world (the representative of the Prague tribe demands that all management positions in law and education be given to Jews). Goedsche published this popular historical novel under the name of Sir John Retcliffe, and the improvised alias served well when the Prague chapter was separately published in Russian translation (possibly by members of the tsarist secret police in Paris), losing its fictional character on the way and alleged to refer to incontrovertible facts. Sergei Nilus, a homespun Russian mystic and predecessor of Rasputin, added a text based on a French version (which has its own complicated history) to one of his own books; The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, thus born, was used by the tsarist secret police, French anti-Semitic groups, German proto-Nazis in the 1920s, and in Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. (Though in 1927 Ford disavowed personal responsibility for the publication, other rightwingers, and not only in the United States, continue to believe the stuff.) Hitler, of course, referred to the Protocols in Mein Kampf—the most notorious poison flower of magic Prague and, to this day, an underground best-seller of the extreme right in many countries.

  At the time when much of the old Jewish Town and other ancient quarters had been destroyed by city planners, the myth of Prague the fantastic city went on crystallizing. A small library of fin de siècle novels is built on this theme. The earliest example was The Witch of Prague (1890), written by Francis Marion Crawford, an American expatriate who otherwise preferred to write succe
ssful novels about Renaissance history; he was followed, in Prague, by Rilke’s König Bohusch (1899), Jií Karásek of Lvovice’s Gothic Soul (Gotická Duše, 1900), Guillaume Apollinaire’s Le Passant de Prague (1903), a witty novella which impressed French and Czech surrealists. After the stories and novels written by Anglo-Saxon and German authors and the publications by Prague “decadents” of both languages, the first German golem movie by Paul Wegener, in 1914, triggered a third and eclectic wave of darkly occult Prague novels. Gustav Meyrink, born in Vienna, in his own golem novel of 1915 concocted a European best-seller made up of mystical and whodunit elements; Paul Leppin liked to add erotic spice; and Leo Perutz, later, stuck to the traditional Baroque sets. It was not difficult to shift the conventions of the old gothic novel to Prague as long as it was considered an eerie place and a repository of eerie tales, with well-defined specters and dramatis personae—the golem, the Eternal Jew, Rabbi Loew, and Rudolf II—seen at particular places, on weird streets, in half-ruined churches, ancient synagogues, cemeteries, or prisons, and, of course, with melodramatic fatalities, creeping disease, Baroque miracles, occult power, and a “Jewish” exoticism that even the anti-Semites did not want to miss.

  Crawford’s The Witch of Prague was in its time unusually popular in England and America (reprinted four times in 1891-92) and available to continental readers in an inexpensive Tauchnitz paperback edition. Much happens in this novel and most of it far beyond the ordinary: a traveling gentleman of artistic leanings and independent income roams all over Europe to find his Beatrice again, once loved and lost, and in his search for her stumbles into the arms of a Prague Czech femme fatale called Unoma. She comes to know that Beatrice lives in a Prague convent, yet charms the gentleman herself, in a hypnotic séance, in the shape of his lost love. Matters are made even more complicated by a dwarfish talkative Arab who experiments with mummies and revivifies the dying, and by Israel Kafka, young and handsome, who passionately loves Unorna. She, in turn, taps his blood to use in the strangest experiments (Kafka has the unfortunate habit of hiding behind gravestones in the old cemetery and surprising her when she walks nearby). The American author was not entirely happy with his occult Prague lore, and in one of his expansive footnotes tells us that Unorna’s hypnotic techniques can be fully explained scientifically by reading Professor Krafft-Ebing’s recent study, second edition. Yet Crawford, who usually lived in Italy or Munich, had spent some time in wintry Prague, had a good ear for Czech and the meaning of Czech history—“an ardent flame of life hidden beneath the crust of ashes”—and of course offered his readers a long set piece on the ancient Jewish cemetery. His Prague descriptions can amply compete with those of Gustav Meyrink, who transferred to his golem novel pictures of the London slums taken from his own excellent translations of Charles Dickens, done under contract for a German publisher, to serve as visions of magic Prague. “The winter of the black city that spans the frozen Moldau,” the American author wrote, “is the winter of the grave, dim as the perpetual afternoon … cold with the unspeakable frigid mess of a reeking air that thickens as oil but will not be frozen, melancholy as a stony island of death in a lifeless sea.” There are reasons why the witch incarnating the city calls herself Unorna or, translating from the Czech stem of the word, Februaria.

  The Republic in Its Monday Best

  When World War I entered its third year, Prague was a haggard, cold, and hungry city, and people moved in a gray zone of daily compromises, anger, and hidden hopes, trying to think of the future. Czech soldiers fought on both the Austrian fronts (as conscripts) and on the Allied side (as legionnaires); Hapsburg military tribunals harshly persecuted and imprisoned Czech politicians of note. Only a few courageous men and women knew exactly what Professor T. G. Masaryk and his friend Dr. Eduard Beneš were doing abroad, and they secretly collected information about events in Vienna and Prague to transmit to them in order to support Masaryk in his discussions with the Allies. The majority of the representatives of the Czechs elected to the Vienna parliament for a long time expressed satisfaction with the successes, if any, of the imperial armies, closely watching, all the time, the eastern and southern fronts; they adjusted the tenor of their opportunistic declarations to a rapidly changing situation. It was not a particularly dignified spectacle; in May 1917 Czech writers and intellectuals issued a manifesto, actually written by Jaroslav Kvapil, dramaturge of the National Theater, strongly rebuking these parliamentarians, who had been elected to defend national interests, the writers said, and should renounce their mandates if they thought they could not do so. After the Russian Revolution in October 1917, the Dual Monarchy itself began to explore the possibilities of making a separate peace with the Allies, regardless of Germany; parliament was called into session again; Emperor Charles, definitely not an ardent militarist, amnestied the imprisoned Czech leaders; and even regular publications were allowed to speak of national self-determination—within the Dual Monarchy, of course.

  Within a year, the situation had changed. In Rome, the Congress of Oppressed Austrian Nationalities met in early April 1918 to declare their right to self-determination, the Allied War Council at Versailles two months later fully supported these aspirations, and the governments of the Western Allies, including the United States, confirmed that a “state of belligerence existed between Czechoslovakia and the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires.” Later that spring, delegates of all the Czech political parties from left to right met in Prague, and on July 13 constituted, once again, a National Committee to prepare for the future. What the committee members had in mind was not a bloody revolution but administrative and economic blueprints for a new state once the Austrian monarchy had collapsed under the weight of its own burdens. The Socialist members, distrustful of middle-class liberals, wanted to have their own piece of the pie but, on October 14, went too far in trying to organize a general strike to protest the export of grain and coal from suffering Bohemia: Prague was immediately occupied by regular army units—for the last time, however—and, after some discussions, the Socialist organizations submitted to the discipline of the National Committee. Dr. Karel Kramá, a distinguished Young Czech of conservative leanings, who had visions of a Bohemian kingdom under the aegis of the Romanovs, was chairman of the committee; at his side were Antonin Švehla, of the Agrarian Party, a patient negotiator; Alois Rašín, an experienced economist; the National Socialist Vilém Klofá; and the Social Democrat František Soukup. These five men emerged as the National Committee’s most important members and formed a de facto government of the new state; they were later to serve the Czechoslovak Republic long and in prominent functions.

  In the course of September and October, the monarchy, in order to save itself, in rapid sequence offered more radical concessions to the Czechs than it had done in the last century, but it was too late. The Czechs, encouraged by the United States, which had recognized the Czechoslovak National Council organized in Paris, told Vienna that the Czech cause would depend more on international agreements than on arguments between Vienna and Prague about the extent of its new autonomy. On October 16, Emperor Charles published his last manifesto to his “loyal Austrian nations,” calling on them to transform the monarchy into a federation of national states (Palacký’s grand vision of 1848); in Prague it was noted immediately that the federalization would not affect Hungary, with its Slovak, Serb, and Romanian citizens. The Prague National Committee felt more in consonance with the Czechoslovak Declaration of Independence that T. G. Masaryk issued in Washington on October 18, followed by President Woodrow Wilson’s note of the following day stating that it was not enough any longer to discuss the future of the Dual Monarchy on the basis of his earlier Fourteen Point program; the Czech and the Yugoslav nations would themselves have to determine which way they wished to go. Within a few days, the Italian front collapsed, the Austrian armies retreated, and Count Gyula Andrássy, the empire’s last minister of foreign affairs, addressed a polite communication to President Wilson asking, in the name of the Dual
Monarchy alone, for a speedy discussion of an immediate armistice. The monarchy, Andrássy said, “by offering federalization to Czechs and Yugoslavs” was, after all, in full compliance with Wilson’s program (Point 10) that had demanded the “freest opportunity of autonomous development” for the peoples of Austria-Hungary. Even the brand-new Austro-Hungarian government headed by the pacifist Heinrich Lammasch clearly underrated Wilson’s change of mind and foolishly hoped that there might be negotiations between Vienna and the White House. When the Andrássy note was made public in Prague, under great red headlines, in the display windows of newspaper offices at Wenceslas Square by 9:45 a.m. on Monday, October 28, people decided to read the text in their own and perhaps slightly anticipatory way, and began to celebrate the demise of the empire on the spot.

  October 28 was a day of immense joy and grand illusions, of little planning and many improvisations, of an astonishing lack of communication between Czechs at home and those abroad (acting, nevertheless, in surprising accord); historians even of the most patriotic kind rightly hesitate to call these events a revolution but call them, rather, a pevrat, a takeover of power. Since both the Austrian authorities and the National Committee were, after so long a war, concerned with preserving law and order, not a drop of blood was spilled. On the evening of October 27, a Social Democrat named Vlastimil Tusar, who was in close touch with the new Lammasch government, telephoned the National Committee from Vienna to say that, in view of the Austrian defeat on the Piave River earlier in the summer and the breakthrough of the Italian armies in September, Austrian surrender was possibly imminent; the gentlemen of the National Committee agreed to meet the next day at a leisurely nine o’clock in Svehla’s apartment to discuss the new situation and to prepare for the hour of Austria’s capitulation, which would also be the first hour of a new state.