by Peter Demetz
The spring and summer of 1920 were turbulent seasons, and by mid-November the disorders reached Prague again. Once again the national groups had a difficult time adjusting to each other; in the countryside, Czech soldiers, legionnaires, and Sokols, supported by nationalist journalists, were less than tolerant, and the Germans were unwilling or unable to grasp that they had grievously underrated the political potential of the Czechs, whom they had been looking down upon for so long. In late June, a legionnaire was found shot dead at Jihlava (Iglau), Czech soldiers and Sokols took over the town, disregarding the law, and all along the northern and western brim of Bohemia bitter fights erupted between Czechs wanting to do away with local German monuments, especially those to “the Germanizer,” Joseph II, and German townspeople defending his imperial glory, possibly for the wrong reasons. When the poet J. S. Machar, by now inspector general of the Czechoslovak army, was asked about the matter, he told the new iconoclasts that Joseph II had been, really, a revolutionary acting from the top and had advanced new ideas with which republicans would certainly have to agree. He spoke in vain, of course, and Czechs and Germans went on fiercely disputing their monuments. In Asch, units fired into the crowd (killing and wounding people), in Podmokly (Bodenbach), a statue of Joseph II being absent, the Czechs wanted to vent their rage upon Friedrich Schiller of all people, and in Cheb (Eger), after the monument to Joseph was destroyed, Germans were said to have attacked a Czech school. In Prague, four Cheb schoolchildren, bandaged and looking miserable, were exhibited at the St. Wenceslas monument to stir up the people; on November 16, enraged demonstrators shouting “Revenge for Cheb!” began attacking the Jewish quarters, destroyed the archives of the Jewish town hall, burned Torah scrolls in front of the synagogue, and occupied the offices of Prague’s German newspapers, including the liberal Prager Tagblatt; led by actors from the National Theater, who had long wanted another stage, they occupied by force the Theater of the Estates, established under the protection of Joseph II to reconcile nations through the joys of art. (My father, who happened to be dramaturge at the time, was rudely removed from his office and to my mother’s surprise came home early for dinner.) Unfortunately, the crowds were encouraged by the strident newspapers and by Karel Baxa, Prague’s mayor, who had risen to political power on the anti-Semitic wave at the time of the Hilsner affair, defending the idea of ritual murder, and it took a few years before the legal questions were sorted out by the hesitant courts. Yet there were intelligent people who did not yield to the demands of the street, among them Professor Emanuel Rádl, who declared that the crowds and their supporters “by occupying German institutions [and] the German theater and by persecuting Jews” acted against the fundamental ideas of the republic. Masaryk, as stubborn as ever, never again attended a performance at the Theater of the Estates because he did not want to seem to approve of any disrespect for the law, by whomsoever.
National conflicts became clashes of social interests, and in a city of rising prices and inflation, low wages, and unheated one-room apartments, after so many weeks of jubilation people were irritated, accusations were made easily, and riots were frequent, especially against the ket’asy (black marketeers) and lichvái (profiteers), who were held responsible for Prague’s economic malaise. On May 21, 1919, industrial workers left the suburban factories and marched to the city center; thirty thousand people gathered in the Old Town Square to protest against the enemies of the people, shops and emporia were occupied, and people began to sell at prices set by themselves or simply plundered the shops until the police and the army intervened. The left radicals, or rather the Bolshevik faction of the Social Democrats, led by Bohumil Šmeral and Antonín Zápotocký (later president of the Socialist Republic in 1953-57), strained against the bounds of the Socialist organization and a year later occupied its Lidový Dm (People’s House) and the editorial office of the party press. The government sent in the police, and the occupiers, barricaded behind office furniture, were turned out with only a few scratches. On December 10, 1920, the left faction responded with a general strike against the government, and, in its strike proclamation, went far beyond the party issues at hand, demanding that all industrial and agricultural production be controlled by workers’ delegates, that wages rise 30 percent, and that all property be nationalized. For a few uncertain December days, strikers in Prague clashed with the police (one worker was killed), and though many but not all working people actively joined in the strike, the new government resolved not to yield. After five days the left radicals finally called the strike off; unlike Berlin, where during “Spartacus Week” working people and the army brutally fought each other in the streets, Prague was spared the bloody battles of a civil war. Six months later, in May 1921, the left Social Democrats joined the Third International, and in late October a unification congress of the new Communist Party met to gather Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and a few anarchists (who were to regret it) in a Bolshevik party of proletarian solidarity. In the election to the Prague city assembly in 1923, the Communists polled 18.18 percent, beating the Social Democrats down to 9.2 percent of the popular vote.
The turn of so many working people in Prague to the Communists may have been a signal to the Social Democrats and Agrarians to intensify their conversations with German comrades and colleagues; when the parliamentary election of 1925 again revealed much Communist strength, Prime Minister Švehla, acting in unison with Masaryk, negotiated with the German Agrarians (in the Bund der Landwirte) and Catholics, who were ready to test the possibilities of active participation in governing the republic; the first German ministers to be appointed, the ministers of public works and justice, were, respectively, Franz Spina, professor of Slavic studies at Prague University (he was to correct gently the bad Czech of his officials), and Robert Mayr-Harting, a distinguished lawyer. It was a time of slow consolidation and conciliation; though German nationalists remained unforgiving, German “activists” tried to do their best to transform the Czechoslovak state (including a few minorities) into a republic of nationalities; when Masaryk was reelected president in 1927, their vote was indispensable in defeating his adversaries from the Communist Party, the Slovak Populists, and the Czech National Democrats, who were inexorably drifting to the right. In Prague, of German-speaking citizens (many may have been Jewish) 12,386 voted for the republican “activists” and 3,631 for the nationalist intransigents. Few people nowadays remember Spina, Mayr-Harting and his later colleague Dr. Ludwig Czech (the Socialist minister of public works and health, who died in a concentration camp), or Erwin Zajíek, German minister without portfolio, who died, a modest Austrian school principal, in 1976. The tragedy of the German “activists,” Czechoslovakia’s unsung heroes of national conciliation, deserves respect and recognition, even though their names do not appear in any of the travel guides. In the catastrophic elections of May 1935, when 1,249,531 Germans voted for the Sudeten Party, 605,122 German “activists” (Social Democrats, Christian Socialists, and Agrarians) held their own against Hitler; and in the Prague municipal election of 1938, 15,423 German-speaking citizens cast their ballot with the nationalists, and 4,849 voted, against all odds, for the German “activist” parties. Some German-speaking voters (I believe) may have cast their lot with the Czech Social Democrats and Communists, strongly internationalist at that time.
The Czechoslovak Republic recognized Jews as a nation, and as early as September 3, 1918, Masaryk asserted in the United States that Jews would enjoy the same rights as all other citizens; a month later, in The New York Times, he declared his respect for Zionism: “not a movement of political chauvinism” but one that “represents the moral rebirth of [the Jewish] people.” Delegates of Jewish organizations in Prague presented a memorandum to the National Committee on October 28, and on December 31, 1918, delegates of the newly established Jewish National Council, one of them being Max Brod (Franz Kafka’s closest friend), were received by the president at Hradany Castle; he assured them that he looked with favor on their aims
, though he delicately reminded them that Jews who felt close to Czech or German tradition should be free to assert their views. Assimilation, or rather acculturation, had advanced far in the western lands of the Czechoslovak Republic, and there was a significant gap between Jews who defined themselves by religion and those by nationality: in 1921, of all Bohemian Jews, nearly 80,000 in number, only 14.6 percent felt they belonged to a Jewish nation, and nine years later the situation had not much changed—of 76,301 only 16.6 percent declared Jewish nationality.
On January 6, 1919, a Jewish Party, claiming a right to self-determination based on Wilsonian principles, was established in Prague, but factional and ideological tensions continually ran high; in the elections, it failed to rally sufficient support to enter parliament and later succeeded in sending two delegates to parliament only by agreements with a Polish group in 1928 and in tandem with Socialists in 1935. In Prague, most middle-class Jews acculturated to the German tradition regularly voted for the German Democratic Freedom Party (Deutsche Demokratische Freiheitspartei), ably led by Dr. Bruno Kafka, a cousin of the writer; those closer to the Czechs more often than not voted Social Democratic (the record of the right-wing National Democrats was not inviting to either of them). The elections in the Prague Jewish community, reflecting the many Jewries of the republic, clearly revealed the polarity of options: of 31,751 Jews entitled to the ballot, less than one-third cared to vote at all in 1921, with the Jewish Party polling 1,968 votes, and, among other groups, the German Liberals 2,362, and the Union of Czech Jews nearly as many (2,344). Zionists, active in the Jewish Party and in many other organizations, were deeply divided between those who wanted to help build Eretz Israel here and now and the others, influenced by the theologian Martin Buber, who were committed to studying Jewish history and philosophy to increase Jewish religious and cultural self-consciousness. “Little mother Prague,” as Franz Kafka well knew, did not let go of its people easily, and though Kafka’s friend Hugo Bergmann and others left for Palestine early, Max Brod, personally committed to Jewish affairs, left on the last train from Prague to the Polish border (on March 15, 1939) and saw, through the windows, advance German units occupying Ostrava station. When he died, it is said, the 1939 Prague telephone directory was found on his desk.
The Cultured of Republican Prague
Punctually on October 28, 1918, a new committee, chaired by Pemysl Šámal, chief organizer of Masaryk’s Mafie, took over Prague’s city administration, but the discussion about how to reorganize the new capital of the republic dragged on for years; only on January 1, 1922, was Great Prague legally established. This new city consisted of the five towns that had been brought together in the mid-nineteenth century (Old Town, New Town, Hradany, Vyšehrad, and Josefov), the five suburbs that joined subsequently, and thirty-eight towns and villages; the new metropolitan region incorporated nearly 700,000 citizens and was the sixth-largest city in Europe. At that time, 27.2 percent of all its apartments still consisted of only one room, and 81.3 percent lacked baths; it is not surprising, though patriots were astonished, that one-fifth of all votes in the municipal elections were Communist. Prague was distinctly behind in constructing affordable housing for the less privileged, and while in post-World War I Vienna, a Socialist city government had immediately employed outstanding architects to build apartments and switnming pools for the proletariat (or, rather, for loyal Social Democrats), in Prague funds and energies were invested in public office buildings and the new ministries. Prague architects had already broken with the past by 1911-12 (perhaps a little later than the painters who, after exhibitions of works by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, formed the Czech-German Group of Eight), and František Kotra had trained a remarkable group of disciples; from abroad came the Slovene Jože Plenik, who made Hradany Castle more habitable for Masaryk. Kotra was fortunate to have patrons who did not interfere with his projects; his sternly playful Mozarteum, now a bit grimy and disfigured by a bazaar on the ground floor, the Koruna building on the lower left corner of Wenceslas Square, and, above all, the Lucema complex of elegant shops, restaurants, theaters, and bars, built for Václav Havel’s father, have become attractive elements of the modern cityscape. Younger members of the group tended to a Czech version of Cubism, which was among the most remarkable achievements of the Czech arts—e.g., Josef Goár’s house of the black Madonna (now, appropriately, a showplace of modern art) and Josef Chochol’s ingenious apartment houses, hidden from the tourists in the gray streets under the Vyšehrad.
National and political demands have long burdened the free play of the arts in Central Europe and it can be argued that republican independence was a mixed blessing to the new architecture, requiring as it did that architects take on official tasks not necessarily consonant with avant-garde ideas. In Vienna, there was sufficient space for new offices in the old imperial palaces, but the new Czechoslovak Republic wanted its own ministries, not merely old Baroque shells for new files. State-sponsored competitions favored a massively modern tradition, as was evident in the ministries of transport and agriculture, and cubists began patriotically to play with Slavic folklore in which abstract and bright lines were softened in a “Rondocubism,” exemplified by the bank of the Czechoslovak legions on Poí Street, or compromised their radical principles with colorful facades and, possibly, ironic memories of the Italian Renaissance. (An Italian insurance company building on Jungmannova Street was called by visiting Le Corbusier a project of “Assyrian character,” and he thought it showed Czech opposition to recent architecture.) By the end of the 1920s, pure lines and long glass fronts began to dominate in the new projects within the inner city; Josef Fuchs built the impressive Prague Fair Place (its history was spoiled by the Nazi order that Jews gather there to leave for the camps), and on Wenceslas Square constructivist norms determined the sober shape of the Štýblo Passage (now Alpha) and Hotel Juliš, unsure of its function today but in its time elegantly incorporating a cinema popular with chic young couples and a splendid café. Avant-garde architecture and the new film industry were bound to meet: functionalist principles prevailed at the Barrandov site on the south of Prague, incorporating the new film studios, a fashionable restaurant, U-shaped terraces, and a magnificent swimming pool at the bottom of a cliff. It was the meeting place of the jeunesse dorée—poets of uncertain income and great talent, starlets of the budding film industry—in the first republic’s best years. Thanks to Václav Havel, Sr., father of the president, a rich and intelligent real estate mogul (perhaps the only one in Czech history), it was a far cry from the dark, self-centered Prague that international travelers nowadays want to discover at almost any price.
Social Topography of Prague 1930
Source: Elizabeth Lichtenberger Wien - Prag/Metropolenforschung. Böhlau Verlag Wien, 1993 ( Sketch by M. Paal). By permission.
Among the soldiers who returned from the Siberian front to Prague in 1919 was the writer Jaroslav Hašek, but he did so halfheartedly at best. His picaresque novel The Good Soldier Švejk has been called by many of his contemporary colleagues a Dada enterprise, and his life was Dada even more. At home (when he did not roam on foot through Central Europe), the young man stylized himself as a Prague Maxim Gorki, worked for a while for a periodical specializing in zoological questions (among others, he contributed an article suggesting that elephants like gramophone music whereas tigers do not), and organized with his beerguzzling friends a Party of Moderate Progress According to the Law, demanding a more severe supervision of the poor, the nationalization of sextons, and the transfer of all credit institutions into the hands of the clergy. When war broke out, he enlisted as a cadet officer; on August 13, 1915, he was awarded an imperial and royal silver medal for valor. A few months later, when the Russians broke through the Austrian positions, he used his chance, as did thousands of Czechs, and changed sides. The fraternal Russians put him first into a camp (where everyone suffered from hunger and typhoid fever), and from there he joined Czechoslovak legions fighting on the eastern front.
Politically, Hašek developed rather fast, to say the least; early in 1916 he declared in a soldiers’ newspaper that Bohemia should be ruled by Romanovs, but a year later he defended parliamentary democracy (and Masaryk), in February 1918 he joined the left Social Democrats, and in May was among Bolsheviks, who sent him to Samara, on the Volga River, to do propaganda work there. Promoted to chair the party committee of the Fifth Soviet Army in April 1920, he edited a revolutionary newspaper in Irkutsk and married his assistant, Comrade Shura, a former aristocrat; somehow he forgot to tell her about his wife and son in Prague. He felt quite comfortable in Siberia, and the Prague party committee had to ask Moscow to send him home to Prague, where he was urgently needed. But when he finally arrived with Shura, the Communists had just lost their first battle against the parliamentary government and most of their leaders were in prison. Hašek was nearly lynched in the street when Czech legionnaires recognized the “commissar” who had deserted to the Bolshevik enemy, and the police suspected him, rightly, of bigamy. His idea was to write a novel that would end all his struggles, and he withdrew to a Bohemian village, where he wrote, or rather dictated, the first volumes of his Švejk, slowly drinking himself to death. Members of the Sokol, whom he had always ridiculed, were honor guards at his lonely village funeral, and the novel, which his publisher issued in installments on bad paper, was the first book in the new republic to attract international attention.
