Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (62 page)
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Authors: Peter Demetz
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Mácha had to pay for the printing of
Máj
himself (600 copies, of which he sold nearly 350), and contemporary patriots were disturbed by the poem—arranged in four cantos and two intermezzi—one, though acknowledging his talents, declared it was “un-Czech.” It was certainly difficult to grasp the text, especially if read literally; whether Mácha was making use of the many Gothic novels which he read voraciously or was recording a Bohemian event of distant times, he suggested in his poem the story of a young man early abandoned by his family who becomes “terrible lord of the forests” and chief of a robber gang. In a fit of fatal jealousy (not foreign to the author) he kills the man who has seduced the girl he loves; the man was,
pace
Oedipus, his own father. The murderer is thrown into prison, accused of patricide, and, in a public execution, broken on the wheel; before he dies, he thinks of his guiltless guilt and—this was particularly shocking to the patriots, and one hundred years before existentialism—of the metaphysical void (
nic
) that he is about to enter, “an endless silence: not a voice / an endless space: night and time.”
Máj
himself (600 copies, of which he sold nearly 350), and contemporary patriots were disturbed by the poem—arranged in four cantos and two intermezzi—one, though acknowledging his talents, declared it was “un-Czech.” It was certainly difficult to grasp the text, especially if read literally; whether Mácha was making use of the many Gothic novels which he read voraciously or was recording a Bohemian event of distant times, he suggested in his poem the story of a young man early abandoned by his family who becomes “terrible lord of the forests” and chief of a robber gang. In a fit of fatal jealousy (not foreign to the author) he kills the man who has seduced the girl he loves; the man was,
pace
Oedipus, his own father. The murderer is thrown into prison, accused of patricide, and, in a public execution, broken on the wheel; before he dies, he thinks of his guiltless guilt and—this was particularly shocking to the patriots, and one hundred years before existentialism—of the metaphysical void (
nic
) that he is about to enter, “an endless silence: not a voice / an endless space: night and time.”
Mácha himself wrote in a commentary, perhaps addressed to the censor, that he wanted to celebrate the jubilant life force of spring as contrasted to the wild, impassionate, and restless love of human beings. But it may be more useful to explicate the poem—if music has meaning at all—from the penultimate canto, in which a young traveler passing the hill of the execution wonders about his own life, turning the entire poem, in which even clouds, spirits, and a skull sing their own songs, into an objective correlative of dire feelings about childhood loss and innocence gone:
Far as the dying thoughts of those who have long been dead,
Far as their names, far as the ancient battle’s ring,
The bygone northern lights, the glow they once had shed,
The tones of battered harp, the sound of broken string,
The deeds of a vanished age, the dying star’s last glow …
(
trans. by William E. Harkins
)
trans. by William E. Harkins
)
Czech scholars and critics have analyzed
Máj
more closely than any other text, and the ongoing discussion has been complicated by the publication of Mácha’s fragmentary
Diary of 1835
, long decoded but withheld by puritan editors from Mácha’s audience; it is certainly painful to many who honor Mácha as the supreme singer of love that he describes his relationship with Lori in such a matter-of-fact way, registering when and how he
fucked
her (his Czech street terms are far more vulgar), as if he wanted to punish her for not living up to his vision of the sublime woman, and she submitted to his despotic whims without much protest. The diary also reveals that his and Lori’s pillow talk, if it can be called that, was in German because she was more used to it than Czech. Fortunately, the Czech surrealists, experienced in defending antibourgeois sentiments, long ago warned against using Mácha in the service of national or political interests and suggested, even without knowing about the diary, that he should be accepted as the guardian genius of Czech poetry that he was. It is sound and memorable advice.
Máj
more closely than any other text, and the ongoing discussion has been complicated by the publication of Mácha’s fragmentary
Diary of 1835
, long decoded but withheld by puritan editors from Mácha’s audience; it is certainly painful to many who honor Mácha as the supreme singer of love that he describes his relationship with Lori in such a matter-of-fact way, registering when and how he
fucked
her (his Czech street terms are far more vulgar), as if he wanted to punish her for not living up to his vision of the sublime woman, and she submitted to his despotic whims without much protest. The diary also reveals that his and Lori’s pillow talk, if it can be called that, was in German because she was more used to it than Czech. Fortunately, the Czech surrealists, experienced in defending antibourgeois sentiments, long ago warned against using Mácha in the service of national or political interests and suggested, even without knowing about the diary, that he should be accepted as the guardian genius of Czech poetry that he was. It is sound and memorable advice.
Neither Germans, whether they came as tourists or lived in Prague, nor Czechs knew much about the intellectual and linguistic developments in the city’s Jewish community. There were at least three groups that argued against each other: first were the older Jewish traditionalists, then the mystical believers in the messianic promises of Josef Frank (who died in Offenbach in 1791), and third the younger readers of Moses Mendelssohn, the Berlin philosopher of the Jewish Enlightenment and Lessing’s friend.
Frankists believed that the soul of God had lived on in Shabbetai Zevi and in the messianic Josef Frank, who had announced that within the traditional Torah a more spiritual revelation was yet to be found; Frankists in Poland and elsewhere had challenged and enraged the traditionalists by converting to Christianity and by seeking the protection of Catholic bishops and kings. In the last years of the eighteenth century and the first years of the nineteenth, the Prague Frankists, most prominent among them the distinguished Wehle family, were as ardent in their commitment as their brothers in Poland and Moravia; though they all carried “the burden of silence” and denied, in public, that they were mystical dissidents, most of them did not feel bound anymore by Jewish law.
The Prague elders were disturbed by the stubborn survival of Frankist ideas in their community, and when Rabbi Eleazar Fleckeles preached a sermon against them in 1799 and the traditionalists could not understand why the Frankists continued in their utopian beliefs (since the
promises of their erratic leader had remained unfulfilled), unrest swept through the Jewish Town. In the fall of 1800 suspected Frankists were insulted in schools and at funerals, and the warring factions even denounced each other to the Austrian authorities; Chief Rabbi Fleckeles was under arrest for a few days. Twenty years later, Frankism had faded away, and the last sympathizers may have joined the first Prague Reform Temple, established in 1833. Few friends of “magic” or “mystical” Prague have ever studied these events closely.
promises of their erratic leader had remained unfulfilled), unrest swept through the Jewish Town. In the fall of 1800 suspected Frankists were insulted in schools and at funerals, and the warring factions even denounced each other to the Austrian authorities; Chief Rabbi Fleckeles was under arrest for a few days. Twenty years later, Frankism had faded away, and the last sympathizers may have joined the first Prague Reform Temple, established in 1833. Few friends of “magic” or “mystical” Prague have ever studied these events closely.
The young readers of Moses Mendelssohn were inevitably philosophical adversaries of the mystical believers, and yet their principal difficulties were with the older generation of traditionalists, or their fathers. In an age of advancing secular education, many of that generation feared for the legacy of Judaism and yet much admired their learned sons, who studied medicine, theology, and philosophy, wrote and published poems and essays in different languages, and declared that the Prague Jews, a nation among other nations, should know more about their neighbors and about the gentile world. It was the renowned Jeitteles family who came to support these innovative Enlightenment ideas more strongly than any other. Jonas Jeitteles went to study medicine at Halle and Leipzig, even before Joseph II’s patents of tolerance, and as chief physician of the community defended vaccination against smallpox, inoculating four hundred patients, including his own daughter, with remarkable success. His older son, Baruch, published a timely pamphlet against the Frankists as well as treatises on Moses Mendelssohn in Hebrew and in German, but it was Baruch’s son Ignaz, whom the historian Ruth Kestenberg-Gladstein has called “the first modern Prague Jew.”
Ignaz Jeitteles was educated in Prague’s best secular schools and at the university and, versatile in his languages, contributed to the short-lived Prague journal
Jüdisch-Deutsche Monatsschrift
(
Jewish-German Monthly,
1802), in which German texts were printed in Hebrew letters, following the example of Moses Mendelssohn, and published after 1806 in the Dessau journal
Sulamith
(German, published in German lettering). Going to Vienna, he made a good deal of money in commerce and continued there to write on history, statistics, and philosophy; later in life, when he parted ways with Judaism, he edited his famous
Ästhetisches Lexikon
(1835—37); in 1838 he was honored by the University of Jena with a doctorate in philosophy. The story of his life and his writings, which were never collected, symbolically reflects the career of many Jewish Prague and Bohemian writers who, whether they remained loyal to their religion or not, moved from the narrow streets of their hometown (increasingly
involved in German-Czech conflicts) to imperial and liberal Vienna, at least until the time when Dr. Karl Lueger, a selective anti-Semite, long opposed by the emperor, took over municipal politics there. By the late 1880s, Prague’s intellectual Jewish migration shifted to Berlin, metropolis of publishing, lively stock exchange of new ideas, and dominated by the liberal Freisinnige Partei, strong in the city government.
Jüdisch-Deutsche Monatsschrift
(
Jewish-German Monthly,
1802), in which German texts were printed in Hebrew letters, following the example of Moses Mendelssohn, and published after 1806 in the Dessau journal
Sulamith
(German, published in German lettering). Going to Vienna, he made a good deal of money in commerce and continued there to write on history, statistics, and philosophy; later in life, when he parted ways with Judaism, he edited his famous
Ästhetisches Lexikon
(1835—37); in 1838 he was honored by the University of Jena with a doctorate in philosophy. The story of his life and his writings, which were never collected, symbolically reflects the career of many Jewish Prague and Bohemian writers who, whether they remained loyal to their religion or not, moved from the narrow streets of their hometown (increasingly
involved in German-Czech conflicts) to imperial and liberal Vienna, at least until the time when Dr. Karl Lueger, a selective anti-Semite, long opposed by the emperor, took over municipal politics there. By the late 1880s, Prague’s intellectual Jewish migration shifted to Berlin, metropolis of publishing, lively stock exchange of new ideas, and dominated by the liberal Freisinnige Partei, strong in the city government.
Perhaps of greater importance, the changing writing practices of Ignaz Jeitteles and his friends reveal an age of cultural transitions in which Prague’s Jewish-German literature, so famous later, begins hesitatingly to form itself; even before the revolution of 1848, it constituted a first body of writings that were continued for more than three generations. A radical process of transformation, set into motion by Joseph II’s policies and Prague’s students of Moses Mendelssohn, accelerated in 1867 when Bohemian Jews were on the way to full citizenship in the Austrian monarchy, and it affected the languages of communication used inside the Jewish community and outside it. It also changed the way in which literary and scholarly communications appeared in print. To simplify one of the most complex Central European linguistic questions, it is probably appropriate to say that in eighteenth-century Prague, and long before, the language of communal and intimate communication among Jews was the old “Jewish-German” (later a branch of Yiddish), brought by Ashkenazi Jews from medieval western and southern Germany and over the passing centuries enriched by Hebrew, Latin, and ultimately Czech elements; the language of scholarship and ritual was Hebrew, accessible to educated males, while the underprivileged women, if they wanted to read, had to do with Jewish-German texts printed in an alphabet of simplified Hebrew letters (often called Weiberdeutsch, or Women’s German, typography).
Young early-nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals in Prague, following the examples of Moses Mendelssohn, developed a new practice in writing in eighteenth-century literary High German printed in Hebrew letters (for the learned elite), while the less privileged continued to read Jewish-German in Weiberdeutsch lettering, which Moses Mendelssohn and later Zionists considered undignified. Transition was not easy; and in the 1790s Isaac Landau argued that it was in the essential interest of the Enlightenment to reach out for a wider audience and to continue publishing Jewish-German texts printed in the traditional way. Yet the young students of the Enlightenment insisted on literary German (as written in Leipzig and Berlin) printed in Hebrew typography; only slowly did they begin to write in German and print in German letters. Ignaz Jeitteles’s poem in praise of Emperor Franz I, written and printed in German
in Prague in 1804 by the publisher Gottlieb Haase, may have been the first signal of what linguistic choices were to be made in the future; and the
Galerie der Sippurim
(
Gallery of the Sippurim
), an anthology of stories incorporating old Prague tales, was written by Jewish writers of the 1840s and first published by Wolf Pascheles in 1847. They amply documented that, to a new group of Prague Jewish readers, German texts printed in German had become more easily accessible; Hebrew remained the idiom of ritual, and Jewish-German receded even among the privileged members of the community. Subsequent editions of the
Sippurim
indicate by their increasing number of annotations of Hebrew and Yiddish terms that the new reader, enchanted by German
Bildung,
was quietly losing an understanding of the older idioms.
in Prague in 1804 by the publisher Gottlieb Haase, may have been the first signal of what linguistic choices were to be made in the future; and the
Galerie der Sippurim
(
Gallery of the Sippurim
), an anthology of stories incorporating old Prague tales, was written by Jewish writers of the 1840s and first published by Wolf Pascheles in 1847. They amply documented that, to a new group of Prague Jewish readers, German texts printed in German had become more easily accessible; Hebrew remained the idiom of ritual, and Jewish-German receded even among the privileged members of the community. Subsequent editions of the
Sippurim
indicate by their increasing number of annotations of Hebrew and Yiddish terms that the new reader, enchanted by German
Bildung,
was quietly losing an understanding of the older idioms.
There was at least one young Prague Jew, however, Siegfried Kapper, who decided to write and publish his poetry in Czech (1846), but Czech liberal opinion did not cherish the idea of a Jew appropriating Czech for poetic purposes. A German literature written by Jews was continuously developing, but Czech distrust of “Germanizing” Jews delayed the full emergence of a Jewish-Czech literature for at least a generation, if not more.
There are many reasons why industrialization developed in Prague so slowly. The nobles who owned land, forests, and money preferred to invest in coal, iron, and, somewhat later, sugar refineries in the countryside; the middle classes of any language usually lacked capital and interest in technological innovations; and the Jewish entrepreneurs, essential to Prague’s industrialization, at least until 1848 faced too many rules, prohibitions, and regulations. In industrial production, Prague was definitely behind the German areas of northern Bohemia (which quickly made up for the lost Silesian textile plants) or the leading city of Moravia, Brno (Brünn), infamous as the Manchester of the Hapsburg monarchy. By 1840, Brno had at least 10,000 workers out of 45,000 inhabitants (a century later, when the Nazis came, there still existed in Brno a genuine German proletariat of the left); Prague had only 5,000, at most, out of more than 100,000 citizens. As early as 1791, when the first industrial exhibition was held in Prague to celebrate the coronation of Leopold II, the silks of Joachim Lederer and the fashionable corsets of Messrs. Popper and Fränkel received special awards; Jewish entrepreneurs invested in the cottonprinting
industry, which was freed of guild restrictions early, or took over smaller firms ruined by foreign competition. By 1830, two steam engines were functioning in Prague’s suburbs, and two years later the first machines to print cotton. But famous travelers usually ignored these new factories in Karlin, Libe
, and Smichov. At about the same time, the English engineer Edward Thomas established, at the fringes of Libe
, the first machine shop to provide or to repair steam engines for the local market. Technology began to invade towns and communications; early in the 1830s, the steamer
Bohemia
, first of its kind and built by the industrialist Vojt
ch (Adalbert) Lanna and the English John Andrews, chugged north along the Vltava River, and people began to discuss the opening of a railway line connecting Prague and Vienna via Olomouc. It was opened in 1845, and was of some importance in the revolutionary events three years later.
industry, which was freed of guild restrictions early, or took over smaller firms ruined by foreign competition. By 1830, two steam engines were functioning in Prague’s suburbs, and two years later the first machines to print cotton. But famous travelers usually ignored these new factories in Karlin, Libe
, and Smichov. At about the same time, the English engineer Edward Thomas established, at the fringes of Libe, the first machine shop to provide or to repair steam engines for the local market. Technology began to invade towns and communications; early in the 1830s, the steamerBohemia
, first of its kind and built by the industrialist Vojt
ch (Adalbert) Lanna and the English John Andrews, chugged north along the Vltava River, and people began to discuss the opening of a railway line connecting Prague and Vienna via Olomouc. It was opened in 1845, and was of some importance in the revolutionary events three years later.The first riots and strikes of working people in Prague in the summer of 1844 were directed against the mostly Jewish early industrialists, and they combined a Chartist rage against the new machines with traditional anti-Semitism. Social historians discuss these events with much discretion; the Prague proletariat does not appear in Hegelian splendor. These riots were sudden explosions of desperate anger; they were triggered on June 15, in the mill yard of Porges and Sons, where it was announced without warning that (because of the efficiency of the new printing presses) wages would be lowered. Over the weekend, the workers promptly elected a delegation of ten, which presented their demands that the old wages be restituted and work proceed without the machines; and when the demands were turned down, they were repeated a day later. The strike was led by one Josef Ulbrich (who had earlier organized a mutual-aid association among his friends), rapidly spread to five other factories, all owned by Jews, and on June 18 the strikers systematically smashed machines at the Porges, Epstein, Brandeis, and Dormitzer works. The army moved in when the strikers demonstrated at the residence of the imperial governor, and when the working people marched to the Old Town to pillage Jewish shops and to attack the merchants, they were dispersed by troops, not a shot being fired (yet). On June 24, over five hundred cotton printers were arrested and let go later, possibly because the magistrate did not want the riot to spread.
The situation was unstable; 20,000 workers employed to complete the eastern branch of the railway line to Olomouc had difficulties with the subcontractors and foremen, who submitted false reports that reduced wages. In early July a group of brickyard and construction workers rioted
at the Karlín Viaduct demanding higher pay. They were immediately transferred to other work sites, but they came back on Monday, marching together with other workers from down the line, one thousand strong, and on July 8 reached Libe
at the Hospital Gate, where army grenadiers blocked their path. The men tried to push their way through the gate, bricks were thrown at the soldiers, who nervously opened fire (mostly into the air but hitting onlookers in the windows of nearby houses). Five people were killed, including a little girl in the embrace of her nurse, eleven soldiers were wounded, and a troop of hussars cleared the gate by evening. Two days of anti-Jewish rioting in the Old Town followed, and General Alfred Prince Windischgrätz, in charge of the Prague military, had his chance to show that he was ready to suppress disorder by force. Four years later his artillery was to bombard Prague and defeat the revolution.
at the Karlín Viaduct demanding higher pay. They were immediately transferred to other work sites, but they came back on Monday, marching together with other workers from down the line, one thousand strong, and on July 8 reached Libe
at the Hospital Gate, where army grenadiers blocked their path. The men tried to push their way through the gate, bricks were thrown at the soldiers, who nervously opened fire (mostly into the air but hitting onlookers in the windows of nearby houses). Five people were killed, including a little girl in the embrace of her nurse, eleven soldiers were wounded, and a troop of hussars cleared the gate by evening. Two days of anti-Jewish rioting in the Old Town followed, and General Alfred Prince Windischgrätz, in charge of the Prague military, had his chance to show that he was ready to suppress disorder by force. Four years later his artillery was to bombard Prague and defeat the revolution.Other books
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