by Peter Demetz
Prague, September 21, 1937
The sad news of T. G. Masaryk’s demise did not come suddenly. He had been elected president of the republic four times, the last time in May 1934, but a year later decided that he should relinquish the office for reasons of health and age, and parliament voted to offer him his Lány residence and all his emoluments for life. He walked in the park, read, and welcomed a few visitors; his son Jan, an avid musician, said that his life went “from forte to fortissimo and then to pianissimo.” In mid-September 1937, symptoms of a stroke combined with an inflammation of the lungs, and on September 12, the attending physicians notified the family and the government that the inevitable end was near. Masaryk died peacefully, on September 14, at 3:29 a.m., being eighty-seven years, six months, and seven days old. It was not an easy moment for the republic or for European democracy. Hitler had gone from success to success; in the Spanish Civil War there was heavy fighting around Oviedo and a new government offensive against Franco, the Prague newspapers reported; and when it was decided that Masaryk’s funeral should be conducted by the army, people felt it was the right gesture of resolve and dignity in the face of increasing dangers. Citizens began to travel to Prague from all corners of Czechoslovakia, and the trains were crowded. His coffin was first placed in the Plenik Hall of Hradany Castle, and people lined up for days and nights to pay their respects. Nobody prodded them, and yet they came, 600,000 strong, a silent and dark column slowly moving ahead.
On September 21, the funeral was to proceed from Hradany Castle to the Old Town and up Wenceslas Square to the railroad station (actually reversing the path Masaryk had taken when he triumphantly entered the city after his exile), and people put up chairs and little stools in the streets the evening before, to be there in the morning. By 10 a.m., after the family members had a last chance to take their leave, the casket was carried by six generals to the courtyard of the castle, where, on black-clad tribunes, the official guests gathered, on three sides, row after row. After President Beneš’s funeral oration (which makes melancholy reading today, considering the development of his policies later), the old Hussite battle hymn, sung by a famous chorus of Prague schoolteachers, sounded out, and the procession formed while an air force squadron (later that air force was handed over to the Nazis plane by plane) crossed the sky. First in the procession was General Syrový on his horse, steel helmet and saber drawn; he was followed by representatives of all the Czechoslovak regiments, legions, and Sokols, carrying army flags and standards. The casket, placed on a howitzer gun carriage, was covered by the tricolor of the republic and accompanied by six soldiers who (a thought that might have pleased Masaryk) represented the six language groups serving in the army—Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians, Ruthenians, and Poles. Behind the gun carriage walked Jan Masaryk and two grandsons (daughters and granddaughters waited at the railroad station), and behind them President Beneš, all alone, and his staff of presidential advisers at some distance. I was in the crowd, a fifteen-year-old kid, and we all were especially excited to see the many foreign representatives, ministers, generals, and diplomats, among them Léon Blum of France (of the government of the French Popular Front) with his shaggy head; Constantine Stojadinovi, chief of the Yugoslav government; Norwegians, Americans, Albanians, British, Romanians, and dozens of others. I can see from newspaper clippings that Ambassador Eisenlohr of Germany was also there with two Wehrmacht attachés, and a first secretary of the Soviet embassy (actually a diplomatic snub, but the Soviets and Masaryk, who had financed a university of Russian émigrés in Prague from his own pocket, never liked each other very much). Konrad Henlein, Führer of the victorious Sudeten Party, called in sick at the last moment like a schoolboy, and he was represented by none other than Karl Hermann Frank, an ardent National Socialist, SS general (later), and Germany’s last state minister in Prague before the Reich collapsed (he was executed immediately after the war). Massive units of legionnaires concluded the procession; twenty-five thousand of the Russian legions, joined by units who had fought in France and Italy, marched together for the last time under a clear autumn sky. I remember the eerie silence of the day; one million people lined the streets, but you heard only the muffled sound of the horses’ hooves, the clink of wheels and weapons, the infantry boots on the cobbled streets, and quiet sobbing in the crowds.
Shortly after 3 p.m. the funeral procession arrived at the railroad station, and the small group that would accompany the casket to Lány County Cemetery was joined by Masaryk’s entire family, including his daughters Alice and Olga, granddaughters Herberta and Anna, his niece Ludmila, as well as Hana Benešová, wife of the president. Two trains were readied, and all along the short route people waited and many of them threw flowers on the rails. Railroad workers took the coffin from the train at 6:45 p.m., and the final ceremony in the peaceful cemetery was private and brief. A preacher of the Czechoslovak Brethren read a psalm and a page from the Revelation of John, so dear to Emperor Charles IV, and while the hymn of the republic was intoned, the coffin was lowered into the grave, where Masaryk’s mortal remains came to rest near his unhappy and courageous wife, Charlotte. Many poems and eulogies were published the next day, but none was more fair and moving than a short meditative piece written by Masaryk’s friend Karel apek. He tried to grasp the many strains of his personality at a moment when legend had already begun to prevail, and in simple words suggested that Masaryk had been a “Greek Platonic” but also a man of science and reason and a believer in Christ’s example. Capek clearly explained what many had felt that day in a diffuse and anxious way. In Europe, new forces were emerging, of blood and collective instincts, and Masaryk had embodied, without strain and in living deeds, the most powerful counterforces to these new threats: classical individualism coming to us from antiquity, sober reason in guiding the world, and, above all, a pristine Christian moral ideal of love for all your fellow people. apek was a student of American pragmatism, and it may have been his disinclination to accept metaphysical norms that made him particularly sensitive to what Masaryk had thought and done, in his own contradictory ways.
Author’s Note
A few suggestions about Czech pronunciation
Czech words are stressed on the first syllable, with the following syllables pronounced clearly and distinctly (“Smetana”).
Vowels are short unless marked by a diacritical sign (e.g., á, é, f, or ý); i () and y (ý), though different letters, indicate the same sound. These vowels are pronounced roughly as in English, except for long , which is always pronounced “ee” (as in “meet”). Short u sounds like the vowel in “good.” Long u (as in “shoot”) can be marked one of two ways: ú at the beginning or in the middle of a word or at the end. Vowels in final position are spoken clearly, at least in educated discourse.
Czech is like the English ch (as in “church”), and the Czech c is like the English ts (as in “bits”). Czech ch should be pronounced in the German way (as in “J. S. Bach”). Czech š is pronounced sh (as in “shoe”); Czech ž is like a soft English s (as in “leisure”).
The letter j is pronounced like the English y (as in “yes”). The letter h is always voiced (as in “Hungary”) and never dropped. The letters t’, d’, and are palatal (the back of the tongue touches the hard palate). The presence of (approximately, “ye”) and of i (but not y) always indicates the palatalized pronunciation of the preceding consonants t, d, and n—for example, the initial d in “dti” (children) sounds like the one in English “duty,” and the n in nic (nothing) like the ñ in Spanish “mañana.”
The letters p, t, and k are always without aspiration (Jerry Lewis knew) and never have the tense sound of the English initial consonants in “pass,” “tap,” or “key.”
The sound is rather difficult: phonology speaks of a “rolled postalveolar fricative,” but it may be easier to approach the sound by pronouncing a trilled r and an ess aitch (as in “shoe”) simultaneously, if possible: r/sh. For instance, the composer Dvoák is pronounced “Dvorsh
ak,” with the stress on the first syllable and a long vowel in the second.
Here are some examples of common Czech words that you will encounter in the book. The underlined sounds are stressed.
Arnošt (Ernest) = Arnosht
babika (grandmother) = babichka
eský (Czech) = chesky, with a long final vowel
Hradany (the Prague castle) = Hradchany, with a short final vowel
Kr (Prague suburban district) = Krch
Libuše (the Ur-mother) = Libushe
Pemysl (the king) = Pr/shemissle
Trh (market) = trch (ch pronounced the German way)
Újezd (street name, thoroughfare) = Oo-yezd
Also by Peter Demetz
MARX, ENGELS AND THE POETS
GERMAN POST-WAR LITERATURE:
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
AFTER THE FIRES: WRITINGS IN THE GERMANIES,
AUSTRIA AND SWITZERLAND
POSTCRIPT
A DIFFICULT RETURN TO PRAGUE
“When the express train rolled over the Smichov bridge, which leads from the west into the main railway station of Prague, he stood at the corridor window and looked at the walls and the rocky slopes of the Vyšehrad. If I turn around now, he thought, and look through the compartment window, I am bound to see Hradany Castle. At that point the castle and St. Vitus Cathedral came into view, as always, but they were even darker and thinner than he had expected. The train passed the Vyšehrad suburban station, a ruin, and its wheels rolled through a tunnel into the big hall built of steel and glass. Suddenly it seemed shabby and bare to him.”
This is what I wrote on the evening of my return to Prague, in a thick notebook I had been careful to take along. By the next morning, however, I was already laughing at the way I had arranged my experience into dignified sentences that one might expect to find in a sentimental little novella. Literature for the last time! Crossing the border at Cheb (Eger) had been rather grotesque: a female passenger leaning against a window said, “I thought I’d have a stroke if I ever returned here,” and as though summoned by her words, a stocky nurse wearing a starched uniform and carrying a medical bag appeared by the track and walked up and down alongside the train as though she expected whole clusters of sick homecomers to come tumbling out. A battalion of border guards in green uniforms with wolfhound insignia fanned out to check the train. The grim-faced captain, a good officer, seeing the notation “Born in Czechoslovakia” in my U.S. passport, stamped my visa and left the compartment as if inwardly goose-stepping, whereupon a lieutenant in Adidas shoes with his uniform gave me a Švejk-like look, handed me a customs form, and said that all this wasn’t so important.
I had escaped in 1949 through the Bohemian Forest with the assistance of a knowledgeable Boy Scout (whose organization the Stalinists had already banned), in the company of H. and a group of students. I have dreamed about that journey for years. One of our group was wearing a new leather jacket that made crackling noises in the quiet forest, and at a crossroads we all had to lie flat in the underbrush because our Scout thought he heard border guards. Now, more than forty years later, I was crossing Wenceslas Square again. The March sun was shining, and even though I was in the midst of things, I saw everything as if through a glass wall. People looked so very different: passersby in shoddy jeans and leisure jackets, pale young girls with almost diaphanous skin, too many men with beer bellies hanging over their belts. My mother had always complained of agoraphobia, particularly when traveling, and that is what I felt now in the face of the incomprehensible strangeness of the people and houses, which, like the settings in an old UFA film, seemed to be crowding in upon me. I sought refuge in a hotel, the old Golden Goose, but I did not know what to say. In what idiom does one order a cup of coffee after forty years? The waiter, unmoved, recognized immediately that I came from the West, for I was wearing a jacket and tie, said prosím (please) and dkuji (thank you), and desperately stirred the viscous coffee (ground beans and hot water), which, I learned later, was served that way throughout the republic.
Whenever I opened my mouth, I realized I also lacked the more modern vernacular intonations—a singsong that had earlier been characteristic in the suburbs and now, after the passing of the old bourgeoisie, had penetrated to the inner cities. Old women working as doorkeepers in the many old state institutions, sitting by their little iron stoves, were the only ones who responded in a friendly way when they heard me speak the antiquated language of Gymnasium students and solid citizens, an idiom untouched by their experience in the collective.
On my walks I told myself that it was high time for me to be moved, as homecomers are in works of fiction, and I caught myself watching for an opportunity to shed tears at last. The tears did come, but at a wholly unexpected and almost comical moment. I had climbed up to Hradany Castle in order to stand by the low wall on the castle square again and look out at the smoke curling over Prague’s rooftops, where it had always belonged. Only the television tower was new. Groups of tourists-Japanese and Italians as well as Slovak school groups—were flooding the inner courtyards of the castle. Suddenly the windows opened and revealed festively clad woodwind and brass players who seemed to be waiting for a conductor. And then there was President Havel, wearing a blue suit and a reddish tie that matched his hair, along with his entourage, one of them in a leather jacket with an American flag on the back. While he made his way through the crowd to take up a position near the castle gate, plainclothesmen tried to clear a wider path, for it was high noon, time for a changing of the castle guards. “Prosím Vás, lidiky, couvnte, tady se bude cviit” (Please, folks, we need a little room, we have to have exercise here), said one of the officers—and now my eyes finally filled with tears, not out of patriotism, but because I understood his tone, that of a policeman a bit embarrassed at being the guardian of order who wanted to do his duty without abridging people’s right to rubberneck. I remembered other times and other policemen. In February 1948, on the day of the Communist putsch, I was among the two thousand students who marched to the castle to prevent President Eduard Beneš from accepting the Communist regime, but because we were foolish enough to march up narrow Neruda Street, we found ourselves caught between the police and the goons of the party’s workers’ militia. Today it was all different; a new chapter of Bohemian history was beginning here and now, and I wiped my eyes dry. The castle guards came marching along, and it turned out that this was only a dress rehearsal. President Havel, an experienced theatrical director, had had new uniforms designed by Theodor Pištk, Jr. (whose father had once been a famous movie actor, playing father roles), and the young men looked as if they had stepped out of The Music Man.
So they restored the Royal Road, which Bohemia’s rulers ascended when they came from the Old Town via the Charles Bridge to Hradany Castle, and this is now the route taken by tourists and foreign currency. Everything is spic-and-span architecturally, but on the right and the left, to the north and the south, Prague is crumbling: on entire streets people move under primitive wooden boards that catch falling plaster and fragments from window ledges. The sidlišt, the mighty housing developments on the city outskirts, precisely where the first Bronze Age people lived in the Prague area, were built with cheap prefabricated parts; the balconies are decaying and the nameplates disintegrating. The tenants call these bedroom communities, once the pride of the working class, their “rabbit hutches.” What comes as a surprise is that the facades of Prague’s houses, whether prefab or Renaissance, reveal nothing about their interiors. The exteriors may rot, but the rooms and apartments are clean and ingenious. People have furnished them individually, preserving and defending their own taste—older people with bric-a-brac and old carpets, the younger ones with bookshelves, artwork, and electronic gear obtained in one way or another.
The new customs require that one remove one’s shoes before entering an apartment and leave them in the hall or in a niche (in the prefabricated houses, even outside the door), and Prague bedroom slippers get their histo
rical due. This rule also applies at our old flat, kept in wonderful order, as though forty years of history out there meant nothing, by my stepmother, an amiable and vigorously sensible lady, a former dancer whom my widowed father married. When I entered, it was literally as if I had just come back from a quick errand in the city (that is, before I looked at myself in the hall mirror). Even the ashtray made of violet glass that I suddenly remembered was still on the desk. I fell asleep on the same sofa as in the past, and in an envelope I found faded family photos that were very familiar to me: of Father, Mother, my aunts and uncles, of vacations in Marienbad or in Silesian Karlsbrunn, and of me wearing the velvet suit with a white collar that my mother had made herself.
My father first caught sight of my mother at eight in the morning on a fine April day in 1913 or 1914, at the corner of Štpánská and Wenceslas Square, and he was “hooked right away.” On the next day he waited at the same corner, and she again showed up punctually, for she was a seamstress and had to hurry to work. Later the two strolled along the Vltava, and it turned out that they both came from immigrant families. He, Hans (his artistic name; his real name was Franz), came from a poor Ladin peasant family in the South Tyrol (ethnically related to the Swiss Romansh: I wonder in what language they conversed) that could no longer survive on the farm and therefore had migrated north, first to Linz, then to the Prague Týn, where my grandfather hoped to earn a living by selling wooden toys carved in the Groedner Valley; when metal toys appeared on the market he went bankrupt. She, Anna, came from a Jewish family in Podbrady, a small town in central Bohemia, where her father was a textile merchant, but they had not wanted to stay there because their Czech fellow citizens displayed a certain tendency to demolish Jewish shops on the main square. In both Ladin and Jewish families old notions lived on unchanged. When the wedding carriage stopped in front of my father’s house (I can picture the Czech coachman stopping the horses with a mighty Prrr), my paternal grandfather asked the bridegroom, “Do you really want to marry that Jewish sow?” and my mother’s family shrugged their shoulders at the goyish cavalier, whose South Tyrolean mother was said to carry a rosary in her belt and speak Ladin while cooking. It sounded like old Provençal.
