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

by Peter Demetz

  In the first years of the republic, Prague’s housing shortage was catastrophic, and rather than freeze in their rented rooms, young writers, and many of the older people, assembled at the Národní Kavárna (National Café), exactly midway between the river and the Unionka; radicals, enamored of the Soviet habit of abbreviations, called it their Nárkav—though the regulars were of at least three different persuasions: the Devtsil people crowded in the back corner, the progressive Catholics in front, and the more sedate liberal journalists on the banquettes along the wall. In a separate room, the famous scholars of the Linguistic Circle, among its members professors Jan Mukaovský, Vilém Mathésius, Jakobson, and young René Wellek, later to establish the modern study of comparative literature in the United States, met to discuss recent literary theory. Only if the place was too crowded or the Devtsil writers became too noisy did people move down to the Slavia, a Prague showplace often visited by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. For a long time, the Slavia had been second home to people from the National Theater, across the street, but after the demise of the Unionka and the Národní Kavárna it became a (last) literary meeting place, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when the dissidents had their regular tables here and the police agents (nearby) too.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Prague’s cafés constituted an entire planetary system; though Czechs would rarely venture to the Café Continental (it was elegant and German), the frontiers of language were honored more by habit than by resolve, and writers also liked to sit at the Tmovka, the Deminka (among retired civil servants), or the Akademická Kavárna (Academic Café) on Vodikova Street, now Prague’s McDonald’s #1. Other places catered to more specific inclinations and intents—for instance, the Café Rococo for the film industry or the Štrba for ladies of the afternoon. Generations differed in their habits; Unionka regulars usually went, after hours, to the raunchy Montmartre in the Old Town, while the young Devêtsil people preferred the chic bars, including the Chapeau Rouge, the Sect Pavilion, and the Pigalle.

  The Nazi occupation and the long years of Communist Party rule did away with most of Prague’s coffeehouses, but the new capitalism does not exactly favor comfortable places, either, where impecunious intellectuals can sip cups of coffee for hours and young people can hold hands (under the table, as they did at the Unionka). Since mid-century, the coffeehouse subculture has shifted to the writers’ weekend chatas, or dachas, or to local pubs where regulars have held the fort for decades. The octogenarian writer Bohumil Hrabal was rightly famous for loyally dwelling at U zlatého tygra (At the Golden Tiger), near the Dominican Church, and when President Clinton visited Prague and wanted to see the sights, his colleague Václav Havel obligingly took him there, after the joint had been cased by the Secret Service, much to the dismay of Hrabal and the other regulars. Many tourists like to gather at the new Café Milena, run by the enterprising Franz Kafka Society, and members of the society are privileged to have coffee in the extra room, where they can catch a glimpse of roving Kafka experts from Duke or Yale in search of an authentic Prague café.

  For thirty years now, the Czech intellectuals of the 1968 generation have celebrated “the world of Franz Kafka,” or Prague German-Jewish literature, and it is difficult not to respond to their innocent generalizations with weary questions about history and its oddities. International tourists cannot complain that the Prague travel industry does not pander to their literary needs by offering Kafka T-shirts, ad hoc exhibitions, and Kafka pantomimes in every Old Town nook and cranny, but travelers have few opportunities to learn about the continuities and disjunctions of Prague’s Jewish literary developments, which began well before 1848, if not before Emperor Joseph. They were, step by step, strengthened by the liberalization of rules and regulations concerning Jewish life and education, by a productive accord with German writing by non-Jewish authors (often under the pressure of Czech nationalists who brought together Prague Germans and German-speaking Jews), and the emergence of at least three generations obsessed, in the absence of political options, with literature and the arts. The Austrian Robert Musil, author of the The Man Without Qualities, was not entirely foolish when he remarked that in Prague true genius refuses to write. German-speaking Prague was too small and cliquish to guarantee spontaneity and fresh air, and as soon as young people in a new and talented cohort looked around, they decided to go elsewhere, to a place perhaps less magic but abounding with publishers, newspapers, and many divergent, clashing opinions.

  The scholar Kurt Krolop (perhaps against his intentions) has shown that the brain drain was continuous: even before the revolution of 1848, young writers in Prague, whether German or Jewish-German, left for more challenging editorial jobs in Leipzig and Vienna and, beginning in the 1890s, went to Munich and Berlin. There were great departures in 1911-12 and in 1920 and after; even Kafka left for Berlin. Rilke, Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Ernst Weiss, deeply offended by the excesses of Czech nationalism, chose to go, and of the more important writers of German and Jewish-German Prague only four or five remained throughout the years of the republic—among them Max Brod (who died in 1968 in Tel Aviv), Paul Leppin (who died in 1945 back in Prague), Johannes Urzidil (who died in 1970 in Rome), and Ludwig Winder (who died in 1946 in London); it is a more melancholy than cynical observation that the only ones who remained had excellent, prestigious newspaper jobs, were incurably ill, or were too old to move. Few readers are aware that another young generation of writers grew up in republican Prague—my friend the poet H. W. Kolben (who died in 1942 at the Mauthausen concentration camp), the studious Orientalist Franz Baerman Steiner (who lived until 1952 in Oxford), the novelist and poet H. G. Adler (who died in 1988 in London), and the playwright and poet Franz Wurm, still living and working as a psychotherapist in Zurich, the last of the Prague Mohicans.

  Even well-meant celebrations are not a good substitute for literary criticism, and the question was not often raised whether Prague German writers moved only in the modern mainstream of classical, neoromantic, or symbolist literature, or whether at least some of them contributed to the achievements of the European avant-garde. From the perspective of the Devtsil people, the intentions of their German-writing colleagues seemed a little old-fashioned and their continued admiration of Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, or Adalbert Stifter (all high even in Kafka’s canon) rather odd. Yet quite apart from Kafka, other writers resisted tradition and advanced new ways of writing. First among them was Franz Werfel, who in his early poetry—Der Weltfreund (The World’s Friend, 1911), Wir sind (We Are, 1913), and Einander (To Each Other, 1915)—was among those who initiated the expressionist revolt even to Berlin readers and audiences (never mind the Hollywood best-sellers of his later years). His long, harsh lines breaking through neoromantic stanzas were no less astonishing than his sweeping gestures of love for earth, heaven, and all his fellow beings:

  I am a corso in a sunny town,

  A summer fete with lawns where women glide,

  My eye is dazed by too much brilliancy,

  Upon the twilight grass I will sit down,

  And with the earth into the evening ride …

  Oh Earth, oh Evening, Joy, Oh in the world to be!

  (trans. by Edith Abercrombie Snow)

  Only a few experts remember Werfel’s young Prague disciple Karl Brandt, who was too sick to fulfill his promise, or Melchior Vischer, the only Prague Dadaist, who later moved with his Jewish wife to Berlin, where he published a book on Jan Hus in 1940 that was immediately destroyed by the Nazi authorities. Literary history rarely recalls that Prague’s expressionist playwrights, among them Kornfeld and Weiss, gave the German stage an entire repertory of plays far into the 1920s and early 1930s. Most of Prague’s early nonconformists published in the Berlin avant-garde periodical Der Sturm (where Max Brod developed his idea that true poetry was based on the importance of the individual word) or in Die Aktion, edited by the anarchist Franz Pfempfert, committed to discover art and literature in radical opposition to its time and place. One of the inte
resting writers contributing from Prague was Marie Holzer, who in her own way anticipated Milena Jesenská by about a generation. Holzer had a sharp eye for changing mores, unveiled the sham relationships between men and women, called loyalty in traditional marriage “a drug,” refused to submit to “nationalist egotism,” and acknowledged not without pain that the Czechs, in 1915 a people certain of victory, had “poets of a wonderful force and of an unerring formal power.” Mrs. Holzer was shot by her husband in a marital dispute, and her courage has yet to be honored in our memory.

  Prague German-writing Jews, not much liked by the Czech nationalists, did their best, especially during the years before World War I and between the wars, to make the achievements of Czech art and literature widely known outside Bohemia. Czech writers tended to look to Paris, which rarely responded to their love, while their German-speaking friends were busy in Leipzig and Berlin triggering interest in Czech Prague. Max Brod had a certain inclination to see himself at the center of a Prague “circle” which actually consisted of many circles within circles, but I do not want to dispute his long and caring efforts to have the works of his German and Czech friends published in Germany and to attract attention to Czech literature and art. He was responsible for bringing Hašek’s Svejk to the attention of the Berlin theater (and, indirectly, to Brecht) and he was instrumental in having Leoš Janáek’s operas performed in European opera houses.

  Prague Germans and German-writing Jews had long been active translating from contemporary Czech. In 1837- 48, Rudolf Glaser had edited the courageous periodical Ost und West (East and West), cultivating German-Slavic togetherness. Siegfried Kapper was among the first translators of K. H. Mácha, and in the following generation Friedrich Adler rendered Jaroslav Vrchlický, a master of formal versatility, into German. During World War I, Pfempfert, in his Aktion, published German versions of Czech authors persecuted by the Austrian authorities, yet passed Prussian war censorship without much difficulty; he even printed three special Prague issues, dedicated to the expressionist Franz Werfel, the Czech artist Josef Capek (brother of Karel), and the architect Vlastimil Hoffman. The trouble was that German and Czech poetic idioms had ceased to run close to each other; and as soon as Czechs relied, in a revolt of their own, on the spoken word of the family, the street, the pub, and the workplace, Prague German translators were immediately handicapped, for their literary as well as their spoken language was bookish and it lacked popular dialect or plebeian terms. Werfel’s translation of the Czech visionary Otokar Bezina (done with the support of Erik Saudek) was perfect, because both the Czech original and the German used rare and artful words, but translators had a far more difficult time in tackling Petr Bezru, spokesman of the oppressed Silesian miners, or playful Vitzslav Nezval; it is not surprising that the best translations of Bezru and Nezval were often undertaken by outsiders (the Bezru translator Georg Mannheimer, for instance, came to Prague from Vienna before going to Israel). In the years of the republic and until mid-century, Paul/Pavel Eisner was the most productive literary mediator between the two languages, and he devoted so much loving effort and sympathy to Czech that he had become for all practical purposes a writer of the Czech tradition himself. During World War I he translated recent Czech poetry into German, often with expressionist overtones, but by 1930 he turned around and translated German into Czech. Eisner survived the Nazi occupation hidden in his room in Prague and, after the liberation, emerged as a Czech writer; in a widely read book he praised the strength and courage of Czech. His Czech translation of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus was published in 1948, linguistically congenial to the original text and an irreplaceable monument to the translator’s art.

  As the Prague philologist Emil Skála has shown, many elements appeared and disappeared in the long history of Prague German; if, in early centuries, northern and central German idioms combined, the events of 1620 and the Hapsburg centralization brought about an “Austrianization” of the Prague idiom; the scene was thoroughly provincial. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offered a late, uneasy stage; Yiddish had gone underground and was spoken with ambivalent feelings by family patriarchs (Kafka’s father, for instance); when Czechs and Germans met in everyday situations, curious constructions with many interferences and fusions could be heard. Czechs spoke Kucheldeutsch (kitchen German) with German employers and superiors; middle-class German housewives used Kuchelböhmisch (kitchen Czech) to discuss culinary matters with their Czech cooks and servant girls. Mauscheldeutsch (the term used by the Jewish-German nationalist Fritz Mauthner, which suggests “kinky” German) denotes the last traces of ancient Jewish-German stubbornly defying the rules of polite German conversation. Phonetically, spoken German in Prague was part of an equally complicated situation: Whether Jew or gentile, Prague speakers of German immediately revealed to German listeners that they were “different,” using the consonants p, t, k for b, d, g, simplifying all diphthongs in a uniform ai, and relying on Czech prepositions where German would have been appropriate. Johannes Urzidil renewed the romantic belief that Prague German was the purest of them all, going back to Johannes Noviforensis, chancellor to Emperor Charles IV—a defensive myth that compensates for the idiosyncrasies of speech and the literary abstractions of a middle-class idiom largely out of sync with the everyday speech of small-town Bohemian and Moravian Germans.

  It may be misleading to regard Kafka as incarnating “Kafka’s world” or Prague German writing (he was not even representative of himself, he would say), but he was one of the few writers who wrote about writing, and he did not avoid even the most painful, if not self-destructive, reflections about the language he was doomed to use in a city he wanted to leave. Kafka wrote little about Prague, and his early prose, as in Beschreibung eines Kampfes (Description of a Fight, 1909), combines literary considerations with rare allusions to Prague’s streets, churches, and monuments, all unhesitatingly named; a similar combination can be found only in his late Das Stadtwappen (The City Escutcheon), though there in a more impersonal mode of narration. In the first part of the early text, a Prague flaneur who knows his Hugo von Hofmannsthal talks to a chance companion who turns out to be a writer too, characterized in a lively way by his theatrical manners as an actor and a thorough solipsist (I hesitate to think of Franz Werfel, who is chronologically wrong for the part, but the thought persists). The flaneur does not have a high opinion of his colleague’s writings; they are too exalted, restless, “this fever, this seasickness on the firm earth.” Unfortunately, the fellow writer is not content to call a poplar tree a poplar tree; he is not satisfied, in his “utter heat” to use “the truthful names of these things,” and pours out words, in striking impatience, over things. He does not even want to know what kind of a tree a poplar is, speaking of it as “the tower of Babel,” and the critic ironically adds he could have called the tree, swaying in the wind, “Noah as he drank.” Such metaphors, though biblical and of high seriousness, hardly yield valid insights into matters as they are, though they do reveal good or bad writing; mobilizing metaphors, refusing to call a tree a tree, turns into a central indication of bad style. Good writing, the Prague flaneur assumes, would be unadorned, free of ornament, like Adolf Loos’s architecture, and confident of a language of untroubled reference.

  In their splendid and chaotic essay classifying Prague Jewish-German writing among the “minor” literatures of strong political potential, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have suggested that Kafka, trying to solve his authorial problems, did not opt for Czech—as if it had been an option to leave or take. Kafka’s knowledge of Czech was better than Rilke’s, who knew deplorably little Czech (as emerges from his as yet unpublished correspondence with Valerie David-Rhonfeld, his first Prague love), but, after a completely German education from elementary school to his law degree, he never mastered it. He read it with great philological empathy, shown in his German letters to Milena, born and bred Czech, but his difficulties are revealed in letters he had to write to his superiors at the Labor Insuranc
e Company (1908-24); as Josef ermák has shown, he found himself in dire language straits when the company after 1918 switched to functioning solely in Czech; Kafka, when writing to his director, had to enlist the services of his “family translation office,” as he put it, consisting of his sister Ottla and her Czech husband, Josef. Kafka himself wrote about the “gorgeous lie about [his] knowledge of Czech” to his sister, and, when he went on writing in Czech to Josef, he curiously mixed spoken and literary idioms, ordered his sentences according to German syntactical rules, and stumbled over vocabulary and morphology, particularly difficult for anybody educated in German schools. Yet he could not escape to Yiddish either, which powerfully attracted him when he attended the performances of a Jewish traveling theater group in the shabby Café Savoy; he even arranged an evening of Yiddish recitations for his acculturated Prague Jewish audience, who truly feared, he believed, a language that had been spoken in Prague two generations ago. He felt, in one of his romantic moods, that Yiddish was the vital and lustful language of an authentic and proud community of Jews, but he, son of his father and member of a German acculturated society, had gone too far the other way. More clearly than anyone else, he recognized himself as one of the young Jews who resolved to write in German, though “with their hind legs … still glued to their father’s Jewishness and with their waving front legs they found no new ground,” who made their despair their inspiration. (His story of the young man who awakes one morning in the shape of an ugly insect may be a linguistic self-portrait.) In his search for pure and simple words, Kafka was, among all the impossibilities of writing (including the one not to write), condemned to German; he believed that the product of his despair “could not be German literature, though outwardly it seemed to be so.” In his self-flagellation, he used images current in the vocabulary of contemporary German anti-Semites, as the historian Christoph Stölzl has reminded us, and asserted in 1921 that he was producing “a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone has to dance on the tightrope.” His anxieties were a far cry from the joy and exultation that brought together his Czech contemporaries, blissfully walking under his dark windows.