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

Authors: Peter Demetz

Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (2 page)

I owe a heavy debt of gratitude to many people and institutions, and I would like to thank all of them here for patience and encouragement. In the Café Slavia, now dormant, the famous Mánes, the new Savoy, and the little place at the National Library, I enjoyed talking, on post—1989 occasions, to old and new Prague colleagues and friends, who at times prevented me from rushing in with émigré arguments. I am thinking of instructive conversations with Dr. Anna Siebenscheinová, my old friend Dr. Ladislav Nezdafil, and helpful colleagues from Charles University of Prague, including Professor Dr. Kurt Krolop and Professor Dr. Ji
Stromšík, as well as Professor Dr. Josef Kroutvor of the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Kafka scholar Dr. Josef
ermák, and the learned archaeologist Dr. Ladislav Hrdli
ka of the Czech Academy. Veronika Pokorná, M.A.,
and Johanka Muchková, M.A., spent much time in Prague providing me with copies of rare articles and newspaper clippings, and, in New Haven, Ms. Jale Okay was untiring in her support of my research. When I began to write the present book, I was afraid that Yale University’s Sterling Library, my second home, would not have many of the fundamental monographs I needed, but I soon discovered that the Yale libraries were particularly strong in Slavica and Judaica; and I have to thank here also the Vienna Institute of Human Sciences, where I was able to present a few lectures from my gathering of materials.
I should like to express my gratitude to Ms. Luba Rašínová-Ortoleva, who provided the illustrations, as well as to Böhlau Publishers (Vienna), who permitted me to reprint a sketch of Prague’s social topography of 1930 from Elisabeth Lichtenberger’s study
Metropolenforschung
:
Wien/Prag
(1993). I am grateful to Professor Harry Zohn of Brandeis University, who translated my postscript (originally published in German by the magazine of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
and later reprinted in a collection of my essays gathered by Verlag Franz Deuticke, Vienna) into English for publication in
Cross-Currents
(unfortunately defunct) and gave me his permission to use his version here (I could not have done better). I owe a debt of gratitude to my agent, Bill Goodman, who attentively followed my progress and encouraged me when I felt disheartened, and to Ms. Suzanne G. Kelley, actually my first American reader, who brought order to my misplaced commas and to the early version of my manuscript. I was particularly happy in my editor, Elisabeth Sifton, who spent more time on my text than it ever deserved, gently tolerated my idiosyncrasies, and taught me, with an unerring eye, the architecture of effective argument.
Una corona d’alloro
goes to Paola, who for a long time tolerated at her side a writer constantly lost in the dark alleys of Prague (fictional) and yet never ceased to enjoy our walks and a native goulash (real) at the inn “U radnice” (at the Town Hall), not far from where Kafka was born.
 
New Haven, April 1996
LIBUSSA, OR VERSIONS OF ORIGIN
In February 1893, the Czech writer Alois Jirásek, patriot, industrious historian, and late ally of Walter Scott, was preparing a little book for young readers and, in a letter to a friend, expressed his hope that it would make its way without “big band and loud advertising.” Jirásek’s
Old Czech Legends
first appeared in 1894, and his hopes, and those of his publisher, Josef Richard Vilfmek, were fulfilled far beyond their expectations.
Old Czech Legends
has been published and republished for a hundred years now, to be read in and outside school, and every educated Czech remembers at least some scenes and sayings from the book—though perhaps, among the more recent, skeptical generation, not so vividly as those from Jaroslav Hašek’s
Good Soldier Švejk
. Making eclectic use of old chronicles, Jirásek described the wandering of the Czechs, their arrival in Bohemia, where they settled after a perilous migration, and the wise Libussa, who, after she married the peasant lad P
emysl (father of future Czech kings), in one of her trances guided the people to a place in the forest where the castle and the city of Prague, of never-ending fame and glory, were founded.
Jirásek’s
Old Czech Legends
appeared thirteen years after the premiere of Smetana’s patriotic opera
Libuše
(1881), and Jirásek’s admiration for Smetana (as a Prague student he liked to go to the old Café Slavia because he could see the composer sitting there) clearly shows. The tales are grand opera, too, highly serious, intentionally archaic in vocabulary and syntax, and written without the slightest trace of irony. The movement of unnamed masses (the chorus) in proper old Czech costumes alternates with
ceremonious speeches (or, rather, arias) of the rulers, heroines, and heroes; and the space in which events occur is decorously arranged with a fine sense of symmetry and hierarchical proportions, lighting effects included. In Jirásek’s tale of origin a tribe from the east, later named after its leader and patriarch, Czech, moves westward and crosses three rivers, the Oder, the Elbe, and the Vltava, and the people think of the far country which they have left behind and begin to grumble about the perils and the fatigue; “there is no lasting rest for us anywhere.” Ur-father Czech, their Moses, ascends a mountain rising from the land, and when he arrives at the top: “Lo and behold! The broad landscape unfolded into the endless distance up to the bluish mountain ranges, easily and freely, forests and thickets, glens and meadows, and through the wild green the rivers shone like silver spilled.” The land is empty of other people, “and the rivers well stocked with fish, and the soil fertile,” and after three days of meditation, Ur-father Czech tells his people that the “land long promised” was right there and that their wanderings were over for good.
A golden age of love, peace, work, and mutual trust followed, at least as long as Ur-father Czech lived; after his death, his son Krok ruled the tribe, always deeply respecting the assembly of elders (Jirásek wanted to stress Czech democratic traditions), but there was trouble when Krok died without a male heir. Each of his three daughters had particular gifts and virtues: Kazi, the oldest, knew healing herbs and often, by uttering the magic names of the gods, was able to save a life in agony; Teta watched over religious rites and guided the people in observing the rhythm of sacrifices and prayers; and Libussa, the youngest, particularly beautiful, unworldly and serious, was able to see what was hidden from other people’s ken and to prophesy. The assembly of elders invested Libussa with the power to rule and to judge, and at first everybody was willing to accept a woman’s resolutions. Yet when two neighbors fought over the boundaries of their fields and Libussa resolved the case in favor of the younger man, the older exploded in unseemly anger, condemning her and all women, “long hair, short minds,” screaming, the spittle running down his chin, that it would be better to die than to bear with the rule of women, a custom unknown to any other tribe.
Pensive Libussa, far from losing dignity, answered that she was a woman indeed and behaved like one, judging not with an iron rod but with compassion, which was unfortunately taken for weakness. After a night of prayers in her sacred grove, she called a meeting of the elders and warned the assembly that a male ruler would demand service and tribute. The meeting would not nominate a candidate, and she made her
own decision with the help of the gods, sent out messengers to be led by her magic white horse to find, near a little river, the plowman P
emysl (the “thoughtful,” or even the “cunning”), who was working with his oxen. (For some time he has been reappearing on Czech TV before the evening news.) Libussa duly married P
emysl, invited him to see the treasures and her sacred grove, and he began to rule and to judge in his own male way. Once, on a mild summer night when Libussa, her husband, and the elders stood on a cliff above the Vltava River, while looking across the water to the wooded hills she was seized by the spirit, raised her hands toward the other shore, and uttered her prophecy: “I see a great city whose fame will touch the stars!” She guided her people to find a man there who was busy hewing the threshold (in Czech,
prah
) of a house and asked them to build a castle, to be called Praha, right on the spot. “Just as princes and army commanders bow their heads when they enter a house,” she proclaimed, “so will they bow their heads to my city. It will be honored, noble, and respected by all the world.”
Not everybody, however, was happy after Libussa’s marriage and the prophecy of future glory. Her maidens, who enjoyed high esteem in the time of gynocracy, felt abandoned and “angry when the men held them up to ridicule” and called them “lost sheep.” It was Vlasta, Libussa’s favorite, who gathered the disconcerted and harassed women; they seized arms, and the “Maidens’ War” against the menfolk began. Vlasta deftly organized her army and trained the many women who were leaving their husbands, brothers, and fathers to join the fight; the strong were chosen to lead the attack, and the most beautiful to entice the men away from their battle groups to be killed. P
emysl’s male retinue made fun of the armed women, but P
emysl himself warned the men not to underrate the women’s strength. In the forest and valleys, much blood was shed mercilessly, hundreds of men died in the field, many were killed in bed, and young Ctirad, strong and handsome—and particularly hated, or perhaps loved, by Vlasta—was lured into an ambush by attractive Šárka, then tortured and put to death. The warriors wanted revenge, and Vlasta, fighting stubbornly, was killed; a counterattack of the maidens failed, all were slaughtered, and the fortified D
v
n, or “Castle of the Maidens,” was razed. The storyteller would like to side with the young women but finally turns against them because, he says, they had no heart.
In the beginning (after firm land had risen for the third time from the primal seas) were the clouds, the sun, the river, and the hills that gently descended to the east and southeast and softly flattened out to the north (at least after the recurrent glaciations of the alpine and northern lands of Europe had come to an end). The region in which, much later, many hamlets, villages, and townships were to constitute the city of Prague was attractive to human beings in search of food and shelter from time without time. A first “flake” of flintstone and traces of campfires, signaling a human presence by 250,000 B.C., have been found at Letky in what is now the north of Prague (a much older site near Podbaba is now being discussed by the experts). After long stretches of inclement climatic conditions, bands of roaming mammoth hunters appeared, as did later settlers, in the Šárka Valley and elsewhere on the west bank of the Vltava River, though always at a respectful distance from the water and, on the east bank, only at higher elevations.
At first, the river was treacherous and deeply cut into the rocks, and hunters and settlers were helpless when its banks were swiftly and recurrently inundated. Much, much later (counting in geological periods rather than historical ages), the river eroded the rocks, the riverbed filled with silt and sediments, and the broadened waters began to flow more slowly and quietly—the composer Bed
ich Smetana in his symphonic poem “Vltava” (it is known to many listeners by the river’s German name, “Moldau”) intoned an almost ceremonial and majestic rhythm to indicate the point when the waters enter the Prague region. The left, western bank was hilly, ascending steeply to a high plateau; the right, eastern bank was flatter, at least close to the river, with the exception of a single cliff, later called the Vyšehrad. A number of tongue-shaped, sandy islands emerged from the placid waters, and, in war and peace, people found a few places where they could ford, crossing over, for instance, from the left bank under the castle to what is now called the Old Town, slightly north of where the medieval stone bridges were later built. Economic historians presume that the flowering of Prague was due to its location at an intersection where an ancient trade route from Western Europe crossed the river to continue to Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
The first farming people, of unknown origin and possibly from the southeast, arrived after 4000 B.C. and settled across a wide arc in the
Prague regions we now know as Liboc, Bubene
, and, on the east side of the river, Libe
, and Vršovice and Kr
, farther south. They worked the soil with wooden and stone implements, and bartered for copper trinkets and shells with other tribes; in their cult, fertility was of prime importance (Neolithic “idols” showed large breasts and heavy buttocks but paid no attention to head or face). Evidently the Šárka Valley, now an idyllic place of cliffs, forests, meadows, and cherry trees, a forty-minute tram ride from the center of the city and much visited on Sundays by families with children and by little old ladies with their walking sticks, was among the oldest and recurrently peopled places of early settlement, and Dejvice and Bubene
, now districts in which shabby flats for blue- and white-collar workers jostle for space with office buildings of the first Czechoslovak Republic and obsolete industries, have the distinction, unsuspected by the tourists, of being sited on the oldest continuously settled places in Prague, perhaps contemporary with the organization of the Sumer city-states and the unification of Egypt.
The Ages of Bronze and Iron did not much change the patterns of settlement in the Prague region, but it was as thickly settled then, a Czech archaeologist has concluded, as it was in the beginning of “historical” time. Bronze and Iron Age farmers mostly lived and worked on the accustomed grounds of their predecessors and what was later Prague’s Minor Town (possibly making the first hesitant step closer to the river); on the east side, they still preferred to cling to higher areas, away from the water. All these settlers were “silent” people who left no trace in writing or stories told in chronicles by others; to name these societies and subsocieties, archaeologists tend to define their cultures by speaking of handmade pottery of diverse ornamentation—linear, spiral, and “stroke” wares; new waves of invaders are known as the people of “corded” pottery (their graves yielded skulls, trepanned to heal headaches or exorcise evil ghosts, or both); and the people of “bell-beaker” pottery, possibly from the Mediterranean, arrived with flint arrows and a knowledge of copper and silver.
The Celts appeared in the Prague region by the end of the fourth and the beginning of the third century B.C., and, for the first time, the “silent” evidence of pottery, implements, and graves is confirmed by stories to be read and words to be heard. Greek and Roman historians, from Hekataeus of Miletus to Herodotus and from Livy to Julius Caesar, told stories of the Celts’ homelands and far-reaching exploits, and the Celts themselves gave names to their tribes and rivers (Boii-Boiohaemum-Bohemia, Albis-Elbe-Labe), filtered by later Germanic speakers into Latin and Czech. They
were a people of ostentatious warriors who constantly improved their high technology, used the pottery wheel, and produced implements, weapons, and adornments; the older populations continued to farm for their Celtic masters, with increasing yields. In their time the Prague region participated in a cosmopolitan culture of imports and long-distance trade by exchange; the Celts were in contact with Greek colonies, imported their commodities, including metal mirrors and wine amphorae, as well as Macedonian coins, later imitated in Bohemia and Slovakia with the names of the rulers in the Latin alphabet. The Celtic topography of Prague followed the pattern of older settlements: graves of warriors and their wives have been discovered in the districts we now call Bubene
, Libe
, and (about eight miles farther south) Kr
, and Celtic warriors later fortified their villages as
oppida
(so called by Julius Caesar) to concentrate their military power and protect the mass production of weapons and jewelry made by craftsmen affiliated with the princes. The most important
oppidum
in the Prague region was constructed to the south, at Závist, across the river from Zbraslav, and another one at Stradonice, to the west, near Beroun.

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