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

by Peter Demetz

  Like so many young people, my father had his heart set on becoming a Prague poet and dramaturge, and he studied the Berlin avant-garde periodicals. On Sundays the young betrothed would take the paddle steamer to Zbraslav—an obligatory excursion that Franz Werfel described in his early poem “Moldaufahrt im Vorfrühling” (“Voyage on the Moldau in Early Spring”): “Oh Tanzlokale am Ufer, oh Brüder, oh Dampfer, Fährhaus, Erd- und Himmelsgeleit” (O dance halls at the shore, o steamer, ferry house, escort of earth and heaven!). They strolled through the sparse woods and fortified themselves with beer and coffee at a garden restaurant, where they listened to a K.u.K. (imperial and royal) band. On Monday my father would write his weekly love poem for Mama, which would appear in the Prager Tagblatt the following Sunday. At first these verses were a bit neoromantic (“Tonight, Madonna, when the first stars …”), but later they displayed expressionist boldness (“In the distance the organ tones of a toilet”). Thanks to German literary scholarship, they are all neatly preserved in the files of a research institute for Prague German literature in Wuppertal in the west of Germany.

  The situation was not simple for these young people, for they were moving across invisible boundaries. The goyim spoke German, and Jews from small towns in Bohemia spoke Czech (though my Czech-Jewish grandmother lulled me to sleep by singing Heine’s romance about the two grenadiers in German). There were other conflicts as well, for in both groups the older people, who valued business matters, were in conflict with the younger people, who defended pure intellect against their materialistic fathers. That was the case with the Kafkas and with the glove manufacturer Werfel, but they were not the only ones. Using terms from a satire by Karl Kraus, on one side there was tachles, the resourceful business mentality, and on the other shmontses, the creative values, though the tachles faction frequently dismissed these in the cultural section of the newspaper as shmontsetten (trifles). Oh, well, even the most important writers sometimes began with shmontsetten (for example, Franz Kafka in Bohemia), although fifty years later my father was still unable to comprehend that “Frankie” Kafka was a great writer, like Goethe or Dante.

  I did not learn for some time what it meant to be a half-Jew, halfgoy making his way between languages and nations, but at the age of fourteen or fifteen I certainly realized that my life was tied to T. G. Masaryk’s republic and its liberal principles. Even later, when I was a prisoner of the Gestapo, did forced labor in a camp for half-Jews, and studied at the Charles University of Prague, I saw no reason to change my views. During my childhood in the late 1920s, all that was indistinct and remote. I grew up on St. Peter’s Square, with a view of the old church, and I remember visiting old shops with long fishing poles in a corner, for the Vltava was nearby. My mother liked to take me, unfortunately in the aforementioned velvet suit, to the Stadtpark (now destroyed by a new superhighway, despite Franz Werfel’s poetry and Hermann Grab’s beautiful prose), or to Žofín Island, from which one had a view of a “swimming school” (a Prague specialty: public baths on rafts), or, in winter, to the bumpy improvised skating rink below the National Theater. In the afternoon lady friends would visit my mother. They clinked the teacups with the little silver spoons that were part of the Podbrady dowry, and speculated on the maiden name of one society lady or another. Only when the conversation turned to my aunts or uncles was I sent out of the room to read something educational (Egon Erwin Kisch).

  Ah, yes, the aunts and uncles! My father’s sister, Aunt Fritta, was the problem child of the family. No sooner had she memorized the monologues from Schiller’s Maid of Orleans than she made off for the theaters of Frankfurt and Berlin, where she played leading roles; one of her partners was the star actor Heinrich George (of all people, for he turned to the Nazis later). Her first husband was the expressionist dramatist Paul Komfeld, who later perished in the Lodz ghetto. Her visits to Prague caused great excitement, but my mama refused to stroll on the boulevard Na Píkopech with her because Tante Fritta, like Marlene Dietrich, wore pants. I liked her very much; she always paid me a handful of copper coins for an hour of golden silence, for she was etepetete (persnickety), as my father put it, and could not abide my Prague German with its Slavic consonants. Twenty years later, after an exile in Oxford, she told me that my German had still not improved all that much.

  The ladies might also have gossiped about my uncle Karl (the Christian side and yet a member of the shmontses faction), but unfortunately he was unter allem Niveau (absolutely substandard). Karl, a graphic artist and draftsman, had a small studio not far from the Hradany; family moralists disapproved of his taste in women, which tended toward the plebeian and the buxom (Café Štrba). Karl was talented but not clever, for one evening in 1940, when he was drinking coffee in a hotel lobby, he declared to a man at his table that despite all the special communiqués the war was already lost for the Germans. That man was an official of the Gestapo; Uncle Karl was charged with high treason and promptly sentenced to twenty years in prison. At first he was incarcerated in the fortress Terezín, where sadistic Kapos tortured political prisoners to death, but then he was lucky enough to be transferred to a prison in Dresden, where he was rescued by the Allied air raids that destroyed it; he made his way through forests and across rivers to Prague, hid out in his father’s apartment in the Týn, and did not leave the house again until the days of liberation came, in early May 1945. He helped build barricades, but a neighbor recognized him as German, he was removed from his post, and if he had not been saved by the testimony of former fellow prisoners, he would have gone to prison again, this time as a German.

  My father had a rather low opinion of the pitiful poems and dubious novels of his Prague fellow writers, and it was some time before I realized that all these were famous people who later were the subjects of dissertations. My father thought very highly of Ludwig Winder, loved reciting from Paul Leppin’s poetic collection Glocken, die im Dunkeln läuten (Bells That Peal in the Dark), and enjoyed his friendship with Hans Regina von Nack, who tended to cultivate the lighter muse, and Louis Weinert, who wrote dramas and popular detective novels (the Prague Edgar Wallace). He had no use for the young Rilke, and about Max Brod, of whom he was secretly jealous, he mainly told anecdotes, among them, according to him, about Brod corrupting the driver at the Cedok travel bureau with an annual Christmas goose and a driver always stopping the tourist bus in front of Max’s apartment and calling out through his megaphone, “This is the home of the German poet Max Brod!” They (especially the ladies) “knew all about” Johannes Urzidil, later an ally of Adalbert Stifter, because he had addressed his expressionistic primal screams (published by the well-known Munich publisher Kurt Wolff) to my Aunt Fritta, who had, however, given him the cold shoulder, and later to my mother, who had had her fill of expressionist poetry. (Decades later Urzidil told me this in his apartment in his New York exile.) Live and let live—even when a nationalist mob occupied the old Ständetheater for the Czech nation in November 1920 and threw my father out of his office and down the stairs, he accepted this, as he later told me, as a traffic accident of Bohemian history. I also remember a borrowed frock coat that was ironed at home (to be exact, our Czech servant girl did the pressing and my mother the supervising) when my father was invited to an audience, at Hradany Castle, with President T. G. Masaryk, who awarded him a scholarship from his private fund.

  In my youth Prague did not attract as many tourists as it does today. The city was not particularly chic, and the palaces, churches, gardens, and bridges were open to the strollers, old people, lovers, and poets—all of them, Prague poets who wrote in German and surrealists who wrote in Czech.

  Prague … I am the tongue of your bells and your rain

  I am the tongue of the grapes and also that of the shelters

  I am the tongue of boredom on Sundays and also of the water

  over the weirs.

  (Vítzslav Nezval)

  In the cafés and wine taverns people gossiped about the latest scandals of Milena Jesenská or discusse
d the latest play of Karel Capek, but today this would no longer be so simple. The Café Unionka, where Prague modernism happened under the care of that mythical headwaiter, long ago gave way to a dull glass palace in which government-approved children’s books were produced, and the Café Slavia, where even dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s had a regular table under police surveillance, was claimed after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 by international tourist groups and European youths with alternative lifestyles, including “punks.” (It is closed today, pending the legal resolution of difficult restitution problems.) In the evening a two-man band that Billy Wilder might have invented played there. The little wine tavern U Šup, where surrealist poets used to discuss Trotsky, now serves Chinese food, and a waiter takes reservations three days in advance in a leather-bound red book. When I let it be known that I planned to visit the Arco Café, once the headquarters of the so-called Prague Circle, everyone repeatedly warned me that this was now the hangout of pickpockets, swindlers, and purse snatchers whom President Havel amnestied when he assumed office (and who are popularly known as “Havel’s children”). At first they met in the buffet of the Ernest-Denis railroad station, but when the station management closed the buffet, they moved across the street to the venerable Arco. I went there anyway; the new picaresque element was, if anything, petit bourgeois, and the chairs were standard Prague café furniture from the Third Five-Year Plan. Retirees and lovers waiting for trains to the provinces were drinking Red River, the local Bohemian tonic water; I began to develop a taste for it too.

  In my youth even the Charles Bridge was virtually deserted, and I had a trysting place there—on the left bank, under the bridge, down the steps in the direction of the Minor Town. There, near the sloshing old rental boats, was a little bench, and overhead the outlines of the saints’ statues on the bridge and the stars. There it was easy to recite a poem and boldly undo a button on a blouse. My Italian friend Paola, who had read her compatriot Angelo Maria Ripellino’s book about magic Prague, now wanted to sit on the bench with me, but I discovered that it now abutted a concrete-covered playground and crowds of tourists were passing by overhead. I had to content myself with telling her how I had sat there fifty years ago—with W. (no kisses, for she had a steady boyfriend), R. (Mondays), and C. (Wednesdays), when the Prague May nights with the streets filled with blossoming chestnuts worked their magic; failing that, we went to an outdoor restaurant, the Golden Well (Zlatá Studn), from which we could see the entire city (ganz Prag in weiter Runde, as Rilke put it), and finally we would ascend the Petín Hill to the monument of Karel Hynek Mácha, the first Czech romantic poet, and, as tradition required, place a small bunch of violets on the pedestal as an offering to the spirit of love.

  It is easy to avoid the international masses that push their way across the bridge; all you have to do is change direction and proceed upstream. After all, Prague has a second castle mountain, the Vyšehrad. For a long time the Pemyslid dynasty was not certain where it should reside, but once it decided on the Hradany, the Vyšehrad with its chapels and churches began to lead a shadow existence. Now it is very quiet there, and the strollers are of a different kind: retired women lingering in the sunshine, high school kids smoking their first cigarettes, learned connoisseurs bent on knowing everything exactly. After all, Prague has always been a dual or triple city, and its topography has changed with the language that was spoken and the religion that was espoused. On Sundays, German residents went to the shady Stromovka, on the left bank, near the curve in the river, while the Czechs were more attracted to the old Vyšehrad cemetery, where the most important daughters and sons of the Czech nation are buried. I sat for a long time on a bench over the old bastions, where it was absolutely quiet, and then walked through the rows of crowded graves. Antonín Dvoák’s grave is not far from the entrance, and by the other exterior wall is the tomb of Božena Nmcová. In front of her grave were two gangly schoolgirls, who looked as their kind had looked forty years ago, and when one said earnestly to the other, “Here lies our Božena,” I felt melancholy again.

  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 stri
ke 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.