Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (88 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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I thought I would adjust soon, but then I saw an old friend, whom we shall call Vladimír, and realized I could never hope to feel at home again in Prague. The first moment of our reunion was noisily cheerful, an attempt to conceal our insecurity, and slowly I began to see the young Vladimír in the oldish man, especially in his high forehead and shining blue eyes that had wreaked such havoc among the ladies. Vladimír did not stay at the university for long; he did not want to collaborate, like many others, and found shelter in a school of languages, together
with other politically unaffiliated people. There he taught for four decades, without being able to publish his scholarly writings. A few years before the Velvet Revolution, the powers that be decided to publish a scholarly study of his. I asked him whether it hadn’t been hard for him to watch his colleagues who were active in the party rise to prominence, and he replied quite calmly that the careers of others had never affected him; he added that he was grateful for the chance to teach so many young and inquisitive pupils. For the rest, he had preserved his parents’ house and filled it with old furniture, pictures, and books; furthermore, his poems (written in a regional Moravian dialect acceptable to the Party) had long ago found a readership. In a city in which everything still seemed to be up in the air I was facing a happy person. But I also realized I lacked his infinite patience; in the West I had been trained for competition and competitiveness, and I felt vividly that even though we had done similar things, our experiences had separated us once and for all.
My friends in the West envy me my excursions to “magic” or “mysterious” Prague, and the worst thing is that these clichés about the city are already beginning to implant themselves in the minds of my Czech friends. For a long time they were cut off from the outside world, but now they are discovering that they are more likely to be understood if they talk about the golem than if they discuss the metaphysical poet František Halas, known to only a very few Western visitors. Even the learned Milan Kundera seems compelled to refer to the Kabbalah and Rudolf II in his “Central European” essays. With all due respect for Prague’s history, two dirty backyards do not add up to anything magic or mystical. In the famous Alchemists’ Lane lived honest lackeys, grooms of the chamber; and Rabbi Loew, a great moralist, was not connected with the legend of the golem until two hundred years after his death—because a good rabbi needed a golem and because later Jewish sectarians in Prague insisted on claiming him as one of their own (roughly as Paul Wegener’s film portrays him). More mystics lived in medieval monasteries of the central Rhineland than ever did in Prague, and in Safed, in Upper Galilee, there were more Kabbalists in the seventeenth century than ever lived in the shadow of Prague’s Old New Synagogue.
I am waiting for someone, at long last, to start speaking of Prague as the city of analytic minds and rationalists: the pragmatic administrator Charles IV (his personal piety notwithstanding); the Hussites and their social theology; Rudolf II, who built a modern observatory for astronomers; the Czech philologists Dobrovský, Gebauer, and Goll, who unmasked historical misrepresentations; the logician Bernard Bolzano; the
sociologist T. G. Masaryk (who, to be sure, preserved his evangelical piety); the Prague group of Franz Brentano’s disciples; the Prague Linguistic Circle; or the dramatist Václav Havel, who acknowledged having learned much from his brother, a mathematician and linguist.
In the Czech tradition, Prague has always been a “golden” and “motherly” city, and mystical and magical elements did not begin to creep into literature until the nineteenth century, when traveling British and American authors strolled through the old streets of the ghetto with chills running down their spines, followed by Czech and German
fin de siècle
writers, from Karásek of Lvovic to Gustav Meyrink and Paul Leppin, all of whom peopled the city with eccentrics, sex killers, and vampire women. Anyone who doubts my view is invited to go to Žižkov, Smíchov, Nusle, or Vršovice to visit the old industrial sections, where textile workers went on strike as early as 1844, the same year as the Silesian weavers. However, the travel bureaus would not have much use for such excursions.
When I walk through the streets of Prague in the morning when the light is bright, I almost feel at home, but it takes only a moment, a shadow over the pavement, for everything to collapse again and for me to know I do not belong here anymore. I know Prague, and do not know it. It has continued to exist, and so have I, but somewhere else. I am sad that my shoes left no trace on the sidewalk, that my eyes have burned no holes in the stones. Nothing that is not inside me still reminds me of myself, and everything that seems familiar to me I have brought along with me—even the feeling in my fingertips when I am in my old apartment and stroke the wood of the white kitchen cupboard, whose drawers I used to open when I was seven or eight to look for nuts and raisins. I mingle with the living, but the dead and the killed push their way in between—my mother, my mother’s mother, and others as well: Paul Kisch, Egon Erwin’s brother, who on the eve of his deportation to the death camps greeted me in the full regalia of German fraternity students of the past; Waldtraut W., a German medical student from the northern Bohemian mountains whom I was crazy about, killed in front of the Jesuit church by an aerial mine dropped over Prague by Allied bombers on their return from Dresden; our neighbor the Catholic poet Josef Kostohryz, whom the Communist courts of terror sentenced to a long prison term and who subsequently vegetated and died penniless.
On the express train to Vienna that leaves Prague’s main railroad station at 2:50 p.m., I shared a compartment with three American college kids who spent twelve hours in “wonderful Prague” and are on their way to Venice and two Viennese girls who worry whether the train will arrive
in time for them to visit their favorite disco. As the train leaves the station, I tell myself that this cannot have been all, but we are already moving past open fields, and I see dilapidated signs at whistle stops bearing the names of places that were once our destination on summer Sunday excursions, and I know that I shall come back again, that I want to try it once more.
There are ancient chronicles of Bohemian events that tell of many Prague developments, but the first person to undertake a historical study from documents and records was the conservative city archivist Václav Vladivoj Tomek, in his
D
jepis m
sta Prahy
(Prague, 1855-1901), 12 vols. This magnificent fragment reaches up to the early seventeenth century, and all later writers and historians remain indebted to their predecessor, who also compiled a city topography,
Základy starého místopisu Pražského
(Prague, 1866-72); he was followed by Josef Teige (ed.),
Základy starého místopisu Pražského:
1437-1602 (Prague, 1910-15), 2 vols. In our century the art historian Oskar Schürer published a widely read volume, Prag:
Kultur/Kunst/Geschichte
(Munich, 1930, 2nd ed. 1934, 3rd ed. 1939), often almost expressionist in tone and particularly attentive to the arts (I prefer the first edition). Other topographies, both old and more modern, include Jaroslav Schaller,
Beschreibung der königlichen Haupt- und Residenzstadt Prag
(1794-97), 4 vols.; Max Julius Schottky,
Prag, wie es war und wie es ist
(Prague, 1830-32), 2 vols.; and František Ekert,
Posvátná místa hlav. král. m
sta Prahy
(1883-84), 2 vols., a treasure trove of information about churches and monasteries. Hugo Rokyta has reedited his topographical description, Prag (2nd ed. 1995), rich in literary associations. Prague:
Eleven Centuries of Architecture: A Historical
Guide (Prague, 1992), also available in German and French, was written by a group of learned architects and should please the educated traveler.
D
jiny Prahy
(1964), under the general editorship of Josef Janá
ek, shows all the virtues and problems of official Czechoslovak publications of the early 1960s; the historical chapters are instructive, but later segments, covering events after 1900, change into a chronicle of the dominant party; in the short chronology
D
jiny Prahy v datech
(1988) similar reductions can be observed. Other interesting volumes on Prague include, e.g., Valentin Count Lützow,
The Story of Prague
(London, 1902), and, after World War II and the “Prague Spring” of 1968, Hans Tramer,
Prague: City of Three People
(New York, 1956), rightly stressing the Jewish heritage; Karel Krej
f,
Praha legend a skute
ností
(Prague, 1981); Joseph Wechsberg,
Prague: The Mystical City
(New York, 1971); and, of course, Angelo Maria Ripellino,
Praga Magica
(Turin, 1973), which I have discussed in the text. The first Prague tourist guide was written by none other than František Palacký for the noble guests expected to attend the coronation of Ferdinand V (1836). It was edited by Amadeo Molnár and republished, with illustrations, as
Skizze einer Geschichte von Prag
(1983). Excellent for the siesta, Paul Wilson (ed.), Prague:
A Traveller’s Literary Companion
(San Francisco, 1995), includes a few classical tales and notable contributions by our contemporaries Ivan Diviš, Ota Pavel, Josef Škvorecký, and Ivan Klíma.
HISTORIES, HANDBOOKS, ANTHOLOGIES
Karl Bosl (ed.),
Handbuch der Geschichte der böhmischen Länder
(Stuttgart, 1966-70), 4 vols.
Ingeborg Fiala-Fürst,
Prag: Ein jüdisches Städtebild
(Frankfurt 1992), an anthology of Prague Jewish authors through the ages
Jörg K. Hoensch,
Geschichte Bðhmens
(Munich, 1987), balanced, with an excellent bibliography
Wilma Iggers,
Die juden in Bðhmen und Mähren: Ein historisches Lesebuch
(Munich, 1986).
Zden
k Kalista,
Stru
né d
jiny
eskoslovenské
(Prague, 1992), a voice long silenced for political reasons
Antonín M
štan,
Geschichte der tschechischen Literatur im 19. und 20 Jahrhundert
(Vienna and Cologne, 1984) —
Bausteine zur Geschicitte der Literatur bei den Slawen,
vol. 20.
Josef Mühlberger,
Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in Bðhmen 1900-1939
(Munich, 1981).
Jan Muka
ovský (ed. in chief),
D
jiny
esk
literatury
(Prague, 1959-61), 3 vols., comprehensive and official.
František Palacký,
D
jiny národu
eského
(Prague, 5th ed. 1965), 5 vols. The quintessential Czech history, and a literary masterpiece that has provided all the following generations with a guiding myth of national self-interpretation.
Tomáš Pêkný.
Historie žid
echách a na Morav
(Prague, 1993), the first comprehensive history in a long time of the Prague and Bohemian/Moravian Jewish communities.

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