Hradcany Castle and the St. Vitus Cathedral enclosed in the castle walls, loom over the city of Prague like its own 24-hour star—luminescent at night, brilliant and brimming during the day—an ever-present reminder of the city’s vast history. The castle, built on a high hill in the 9th century, was home to the princes and kings of Bohemia, the western region of the current Czech Republic, and today houses the offices of the President of the Republic. Construction on the present-day gothic cathedral was begun in the 14th century, but the original church was built in 934 by Prince Wenceslas, the first ruler of Bohemia and (a Christian revered for his devotion to the poor) the “Good King Wenceslas” of the Christmas carol. Wenceslas Square, where stands a statue of the prince, is the site of public gatherings in Prague, including the massive gathering in 1989 to celebrate the “Velvet Revolution” when the communist party was overthrown.
For those who live here, the castle complex brooding over the city, and the layers of history everywhere, must exert a civilizing influence—and a sobering one, bearing down with the weight of the centuries. Much of ancient Bohemia’s modern history has been tragic: born as “Czechoslovakia” in 1918, the Czech Republic is a young country buffeted by the tumult of a Europe that—in the words of Hanna P., a lifelong resident of Prague who lectured our tour group—“is too small, has too many people, and too many nationalities.”
A riveting account of the modern Czech Republic can be found in Madelyn Albright's Prague Winter. The former secretary of state provides a compelling survey of ancient Bohemia and Prague as a backdrop to the history of her own family and childhood, encompassing some of the most dramatic years in the Republic’s history. She was born in Prague in 1937 and lived there until age 12 when the family emigrated to England after the Nazi invasion. Her father was Josef Korbel, a diplomat who served under Edward Benes in the government-in-exile in London, until the defeat of the Nazis, when the family returned to Prague. Later, Korbel was named ambassador to Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. When the Communist Party came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Korbel resigned from the government and the family emigrated to the United States. Korbel founded a prestigious school of international relations at the University of Denver.
Czechoslovakia had been founded as a multinational democracy in the aftermath of World War I under the leadership of Thomas Masaryk, who envisioned a democracy aligned with those of western Europe, Great Britain and the United States. But just twenty years after its founding, the country would be at the center of questions that one way or another had convulsed Europe for centuries. Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the borders? An ascendant Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the territory of Sudetenland, bordering Germany. He made much of claims that ethnic Germans who had lived in the region for generations were discriminated against, harassed and otherwise treated as second-class citizens.
The Sudetenland had been a natural border between Bohemia and Germany since the Middle Ages, the mountainous region serving as a protective buffer. In Albright’s telling the claims of discrimination had some basis in truth but were substantially exaggerated. Moreover, the multinational nature of the Czech state, including Germans, had been inherent in the vision of the country’s birth. Edward Benes, who succeeded Masaryk as president, was relying on a treaty with France for assurance that if Germany attacked, the French would come to their aid. And that England and Russia would follow suit.
But in the aftermath of the first World War, no one had an appetite for fighting Hitler’s newly armed Germany. The Munich Agreement of 1938, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, was concluded among everyone important—Britain, France, Germany—except the Czechs themselves. In the immediate aftermath it was lauded in the west as a victory of peacemaking, avoidance of war. Hungary and Poland, seizing on the precedent established by Munich, also laid claim to portions of the Czechoslovakia envisioned in its 1918 independence.
Can Americans imagine such a thing—other countries deciding where our boundaries should be? And this was more than an abrogation of a nation’s sovereignty, it was a negation of the idea of an independent Czech Republic itself, allowing Hitler to claim—when, of course, he later overran the country entirely—that Czechoslovakia was a “made up country.”
Is there any country, anywhere, that is not “made up”?
Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and created a “protectorate” over the entirety of Bohemia/Moravia. Two years later, in response to a courageous Czech resistance that was beginning to affect the German war effort, Reinhold Heydrich was appointed Acting Reich Protector. Arguably the most sinister figure, outside of Hitler himself, in the entire Third Reich, Heydrich presided over the Wannsee Conference where Nazi leaders, including Adolph Eichmann, planned the logistical details of annihilating European Jews. In occupied Czechoslovakia, he rounded up Jews and dissidents of every stripe, ordering the torture and execution of thousands.
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When I was there, I found masking protocols and practices to be roughly similar to my own native Washington, DC—that is to say, a mixed bag. Outdoors, on the busy thoroughfare of the Charles Bridge for instance, masked walkers were in the minority. In shops and coffee houses, masks were more the norm; on the subway and heavily used (and packed) street trams, everyone is masked, and I saw no scofflaws. Who knows what the winter will bring? It is now generally recognized that COVID will be with us, at some level of intensity, indefinitely and the new omicron variant may scatter the cards.
Prague is a walkable city, though the cobblestones can be hard on the ankles (and on those with vociferous lower-back problems). Our tour group was warned early of an occasional issue with pickpockets on the streets, subways and trams, but I experienced no problems and never felt unsafe when I was out and about on my own, including a time or two after dark. The subways stations are clean, and the above-ground trams are efficient and user-friendly.
Lots of people speak English, though a visitor will certainly encounter those who don’t. One Uber driver who landed somewhere other than where I was waiting for him, knew only one English phrase: “I am here!” Since that was more Czech than I knew, we were unable to negotiate a rendezvous and we parted from each other on the phone in the throes of mutual incomprehension. I hopped on a tram and was back to the hotel in no time.
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“My Praguers understand me,” Mozart is reported to have said of the city where, in 1787, the composer arrived like a modern-day celebrity. In January he premiered what is now known as the Prague Symphony and in October her performed the opera Don Giovanni for the first time. Mozart’s reception in Prague speaks to a reverence for fine music that preceded the composer’s stardom and survives today. The composer’s footprint is prominent in the city; the Estates Theater, not far from the Old Town Square, features Mozart’s work, including weekly performances of Don Giovanni. (Parts of the movie “Amadeus” were filmed in Prague.)
Anton Dvorak is the city’s favored son, closely followed by Bedrich Smetana whose work expressed Czech cultural pride. Smetana’s Vlatva River Symphony is a musical poem that follows the flow of the winding river; it is sometimes played on Czech airline planes when they land at Ruyzne Airport. There is a tiny but elegant Dvorak Museum in the old town that houses the composer’s personal piano.
It might be impossible to exhaust all the venues for classical music in Prague (and there is certainly no shortage of western popular music venues and clubs). But there is an extraordinary opportunity that no visitor should pass up in the church and synagogue concerts that take place most nights of the week throughout the city. These are especially good for the non-connoisseur (or anyone not inclined to spend three hours at an opera). For the equivalent of roughly $35 (there are websites offering much cheaper tickets) elite musicians and opera singers from the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Symphony Orchestra or the Bohemian National Orchestra play one-hour concerts in one or more of the elaborately ornate medieval churches and synagogues of Prague. Masks are mandatory. Concerts are comprised of short excerpts of 12 or 15 pieces from the masters—Dvorak, Smetana, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahams, Vivaldi. The Spanish and Maisel Synagogues of the Jewish quarter also have some more eclectic offerings; the Spanish Synagogue is featuring The Best of Gershwin on December 27.
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I didn’t know the name of Alphonse Mucha before visiting Prague, but his posters on exhibit at The Municipal Hall were instantly familiar. His distinctive graphic style put a stamp on a genre and an era—Art Nouveau, La Belle Epoque—that high point of enthusiasm in the achievements of European civilization, in the years before the first world war demolished it. In these posters he brought a fine artist’s touch to advertising—for biscuits, liqueurs, tobacco products—and to publicity for theaters and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. (Mucha also has one of the most stunning stained-glass windows in the St. Vitus Cathedral.) The sexuality in these images seems to project forward to the modern advertising age and there is unforced joie de vivre, a real celebration of civilization and human achievement and human sensuousness. Spend some time with “Amants a Comedy,” one of the posters Mucha created for the Theater of the Renaissance, where Bernhardt was a star attraction; there’s a lot going on in that image.
Some of the posters on exhibit in the Municipal Hall are “enhanced” with digital magic: smoke billows from the cigarette in the advertisement for Job Rolling papers. Doesn’t do a lot for me, but I suppose it makes some sense: Mucha is certainly emblematic of a distinct time and era, but his images also speak to something perennially new, cutting-edge, of the moment. The Municipal Hall is a palatial building where the first Czech Republic was declared in 1918. Today its grand ballrooms and concert halls—many of the rooms and their ceilings are decorated with Mucha’s work—are used for pricey gatherings, wedding, celebrations, and official events and pageants. The posters on exhibit, the largest collection of Mucha’s work anywhere, are owned by the Czech tennis legend Ivan Lendl.
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If Mucha is the visual representative of pre-World War I European civilization at its most confident, the German speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka is the voice of its later disillusionment. Although readers trying to affix to Kafka any label—“post-World War I Writer of Alienation”—have found that nothing quite sticks. Kafka created something wholly original and personal—harrowingly, laceratingly personal—a dream world terrifying and comical, but also bracingly real and specific and rooted. It has invited countless interpretations; he wrote in a style uncannily inviting of the reader’s own personal projections and captured something true about anyone’s night visions. He was born and died in Prague and wrote exclusively in German. His diaries reflect the outside world—the war, Czech independence—only glancingly. For Kafka, the inner world was where the action was.
Even for those with faint interest in the writer, the Kafka Museum offers a compelling glimpse at Prague in the early years of the 20th century, including some vintage film and photography. He trained as a lawyer and rose to some prominence in the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, adjudicating industrial injury claims. He expressed disdain for his job, mainly because it kept him from writing, but the fact is that he was quite good at it. One striking plaque informs us that Kafka and his boss presented a paper on “Organization of Accident Prevention in Austria” at the Second International Congress of the Rescue Sciences and Accident Prevention in Vienna in 1913. His reports on industrial accident prevention were published in professional journals and he might be regarded in hindsight as a pioneer of what we know today as the field of occupational safety.
For those of us reading him in translation, it can be hard to see the comedy in Kafka’s writing, but when he read his work aloud to friends he frequently broke out in laughter: if an individual was condemned, in his vision, to forever seek a redemption from which he was forever barred—then the effort was bound to take some outlandish turns. And “real life” certainly offers a harvest of slapstick, which Kafka found in his job, as expressed in a letter to Brod:
For I’ve got so much to do! In my four districts—apart from all my other jobs—people fall of the scaffolding as if they were drunk, or fall into the machines, all the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slide, whatever people carry up falls down, whatever they hand down they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware.
Kafka was writing on this side of the great war. Modernism, and all its anxieties, was nascent. The old world and all its comforting verities of caste and community and religious belonging were being cast aside. A man no longer had a craft or a vocation or a calling—he had a job, and he was gone to work in the great grinding engine of capitalism, renting himself out for someone else’s profit. He was on his own now to find such meaning as he could, with no signs or signals from without. Kafka found a refuge of his own in writing about this predicament.
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The Prague Jewish Quarter, an historic ghetto dating back to the 15th century, lies between the Vlatva River and the Old Town Square. Within its boundaries are five magnificently preserved synagogues--four of them built in medieval times and one, the stunningly ornate Spanish Synagogue, built in 1868. The five synagogues comprise The Jewish Museum of Prague; tickets at the Museum office purchase entry to the synagogues and to a Jewish graveyard with 12,000 tombstones, the oldest one dated 1478. Beneath the tombstones are more than 110,000 bodies; Jews were not permitted to be buried elsewhere in the city, so for successive generations earth was piled over the graves and bodies were buried on top of each other.
The Pinchas Synagogue, now a memorial to Czech’s who died in the Holocaust, includes on its upper floor a permanent exhibit of children’s artwork from the town of Terezin, 60 miles north of Prague, which was transformed during Nazi rule into a separate ghetto for deported Jews. Terezin, portrayed by the Germans as something like a model town, was in fact an overcrowded, disease-ridden concentration camp where more than 15,000 people died. And it served as a waystation for deportees who would be later transported to death camps further east.
In the face of this, though, Jewish leaders in the ghetto organized cultural events, lectures, and educational venues for the children, including classes in drawing and art that were led by a woman named Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who was a protégé of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Albright writes, “…the children produced more than four thousand drawings in pencil, crayon and watercolor; the subjects included virtually everything except what was not permitted—life as it truly was inside the ghetto. Many of the illustrations survived; when the ghetto was liberated a pair of suitcases was found in one of the children’s rooms, each crammed with pictures….”
Some of the artwork that survived was by Petr Ginz, described by Albright as the "improbably precocious son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father," a teenager who also edited a weekly magazine of articles written by the young people in Terezin.
"Possessed of a boundless appetite for self-improvement, Ginz was to be seen almost every evening sitting cross-legged on his bunk surrounded by writing and painting supplies," Albright writes. He kept a journal "in which he vowed to devote greater effort to drawing, bookbinding, increasing his weight, the study of Buddhism, linocuts, stenography, English, Russian, Plato and Blazac."
Petr was deported east in 1944 and died in Auschwitz. His diary was published after the war.
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Somewhere near the hotel I was staying with my tour group must have been a grade school. In the morning when I would walk outside for exercise and to look for coffee, I would see parents walking their young children to the school. This made me happy, especially the first day or two I was in Prague, reminding me that while I was thousands of miles from home, I hadn’t left the planet. (I had not travelled outside North America since 1996!) The Moms or dads looked prepared for a workday—whether at an office, or COVID-bound, at home—and wore that slightly harried, or hurried, look of nervous anticipation for whatever lay ahead. Yet, unmistakably, you could see that these few moments, walking their child to school—the child chattering away about whatever loomed ahead for her in school, whatever lunacy passed through his imagination—was the high point, the very happiest part of their day. I passed one day a congregant of teenagers in the afternoon when school was out. Fidgeting with their phones, gossiping and conspiring in Czech, they looked and sounded like American teenagers anywhere—a confederacy of the superior, momentarily under the thumb of their idiot guardians.
Permit me, if you will, that most banal of all travel observations: People Are the Same Wherever You Go. So they are, and it can be counted as one of the great virtues of travel outside one’s boundaries to be reminded of it. But back at home here in my colossal country surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors, I couldn’t help reflecting on how differently Czechs must look out at the world around them.
We are shaped by the history we inherit. No one can say that American history has been serene, but consider what Czechs have experienced in a period still within memory of its oldest citizens:
After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a government-in-exile took up residence in London, headed by Benes. In May 1942, in a daring operation planned and approved by the government-in-exile, Heydrich was assassinated. Two members of the Czech army, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, parachuted into the hills surrounding the route Heydrich’s car took from his home to the Prague Castle every day and ambushed him. The attempt nearly went awry, but Heydrich died later in a hospital in Prague.
The act was a spectacular assertion of the legitimacy of the government-in-exile, leading to the dissolution of the Munich agreement by the western powers that had endorsed it. It also resulted in a brutal policy of retributive violence by the Nazis. The assassins were falsely linked to the town of Lidice, which was razed and bulldozed. Some 400 men and women were massacred, and more than 80 children were sent to death camps.
Albright in her book explores the kind of rearview mirror second guessing that historians can do: Was the assassination worth the collective punishment that was visited upon the Czech people? She comes down, sensibly I think, on the side of the assassins, noting that the act galvanized the war effort, inspiring allied soldiers (including the later arriving Americans), and weakened the Nazi’s in strategic ways. Today, Kubis and Gabcek are revered as heroes of the Czech Republic.
In 1945, with the defeat of the Nazis, Edward Benes returned from exile in London to a newly independent Czechoslovakia. In a sad but perhaps predictable irony, the “problem” at the heart of the Munich Agreement boomeranged when the Czech government expelled ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland. The plan had been to transfer only those who had collaborated with the Nazis, but bitterness about the experience under Heydrich, and toward the Germans generally, was everywhere; armed citizens carried out forced expulsions that were frequently violent. Some 15,000 Germans died in the course of the expulsions, and in the end more than 2 million Germans were forcibly removed. Albright writes with great intelligence about this dark and complicated legacy, for which Vaclav Havel, years later, offered a deft apology.
In a national election in May 1946, the Czech Communist Party surprised everyone (except perhaps the Communists) by garnering 38 percent of the vote (“Communism sounds very nice when you read about it in a book,” is how Hannah explained it), giving them a majority in the parliament and the right to name a prime minister. It also gave them the power, through a flurry of Bolshevik maneuvering, to snuff out the organs of civil society in the country and put an end to democracy. The country became a Stalinist satellite. Twenty years after that and 30 years after the Munich Agreement, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to put an end to the “Prague Spring,” the Czech experiment with liberalization. On January 16, 1969, in protest of the Soviet takeover, a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself ablaze at Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.
Fast forward twenty years again, tens of thousands of people gathered at Wenceslas Square to celebrate the Velvet Revolution and the peaceful overthrow of the Communist Party. In 1993, the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia split the country into the separate Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was a peaceful separation--sometimes referred to as the Velvet Divorce--but (if I did not misread the tone of our tour leader's comments) one that was not without some sadness or regret on the part of Czechs.
Czech citizens cannot be watching the drama on the Belarus/Polish border—or for that matter, Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine—without apprehension. On top of these forebodings from without, Czechia has experienced the same wave of populist discontent that has swept the rest of Europe and the United States. (Although they recently gave the heave-ho to the billionaire populist prime minister Andrej Babis, an ally of Hungary’s Victor Orban, after he was caught out in the Pandora Papers expose.)
Castles and canals, cobblestone bridges and charming narrow streets winding around ancient synagogues and churches. The Vlatva River flowing in and around it all like music. Prague—so brilliant, beautiful and radiant—is like a fairy tale. But like many a fairy tale, its beauty veils a solemn message or a sad warning, as well—something Franz Kafka, haunting the city’s streets like an open nerve, might have registered. In a striking poem entitled “Memories of Prague,” written at Terezin, young Petr Ginz was, to be sure, expressing his own grief of separation. But I think he captured, too, something of that melancholy in the city’s ancient stones.
How long since I last saw
The sunk sink low behind Petrin Hill?
With tearful eyes I gazed at you Prague
Enveloped in your evening shadows
How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water
Over the weir in the Vlatva River?
I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square.
Those unknown corners in the Old Town,
Those shady nooks and sleepy canals,
How are they? They cannot be grieving for me
As I do for them…..
Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember!
Czechs know history is no fairy tale. Perhaps so much history, so much tumult, has equipped them with a resilience and a clear-eyed realism that will help them navigate the future’s shoals. In any case, they have seen it all before.
I visited Prague with a tour group in the middle of September. At that time, a vaccination card and record of a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of entry was required. The fortunes of pandemic have shifted again and on November 15 the State Department advised not travelling to the Czech Republic on the basis of a CDC travel notice indicating a high level of COVID-19 in the country.
When I was there, I found masking protocols and practices to be roughly similar to my own native Washington, DC—that is to say, a mixed bag. Outdoors, on the busy thoroughfare of the Charles Bridge for instance, masked walkers were in the minority. In shops and coffee houses, masks were more the norm; on the subway and heavily used (and packed) street trams, everyone is masked, and I saw no scofflaws. Who knows what the winter will bring? It is now generally recognized that COVID will be with us, at some level of intensity, indefinitely and the new omicron variant may scatter the cards.
Prague is a walkable city, though the cobblestones can be hard on the ankles (and on those with vociferous lower-back problems). Our tour group was warned early of an occasional issue with pickpockets on the streets, subways and trams, but I experienced no problems and never felt unsafe when I was out and about on my own, including a time or two after dark. The subways stations are clean, and the above-ground trams are efficient and user-friendly.
Lots of people speak English, though a visitor will certainly encounter those who don’t. One Uber driver who landed somewhere other than where I was waiting for him, knew only one English phrase: “I am here!” Since that was more Czech than I knew, we were unable to negotiate a rendezvous and we parted from each other on the phone in the throes of mutual incomprehension. I hopped on a tram and was back to the hotel in no time.
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“My Praguers understand me,” Mozart is reported to have said of the city where, in 1787, the composer arrived like a modern-day celebrity. In January he premiered what is now known as the Prague Symphony and in October her performed the opera Don Giovanni for the first time. Mozart’s reception in Prague speaks to a reverence for fine music that preceded the composer’s stardom and survives today. The composer’s footprint is prominent in the city; the Estates Theater, not far from the Old Town Square, features Mozart’s work, including weekly performances of Don Giovanni. (Parts of the movie “Amadeus” were filmed in Prague.)
Anton Dvorak is the city’s favored son, closely followed by Bedrich Smetana whose work expressed Czech cultural pride. Smetana’s Vlatva River Symphony is a musical poem that follows the flow of the winding river; it is sometimes played on Czech airline planes when they land at Ruyzne Airport. There is a tiny but elegant Dvorak Museum in the old town that houses the composer’s personal piano.
Some of the posters on exhibit in the Municipal Hall are “enhanced” with digital magic: smoke billows from the cigarette in the advertisement for Job Rolling papers. Doesn’t do a lot for me, but I suppose it makes some sense: Mucha is certainly emblematic of a distinct time and era, but his images also speak to something perennially new, cutting-edge, of the moment. The Municipal Hall is a palatial building where the first Czech Republic was declared in 1918. Today its grand ballrooms and concert halls—many of the rooms and their ceilings are decorated with Mucha’s work—are used for pricey gatherings, wedding, celebrations, and official events and pageants. The posters on exhibit, the largest collection of Mucha’s work anywhere, are owned by the Czech tennis legend Ivan Lendl.
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If Mucha is the visual representative of pre-World War I European civilization at its most confident, the German speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka is the voice of its later disillusionment. Although readers trying to affix to Kafka any label—“post-World War I Writer of Alienation”—have found that nothing quite sticks. Kafka created something wholly original and personal—harrowingly, laceratingly personal—a dream world terrifying and comical, but also bracingly real and specific and rooted. It has invited countless interpretations; he wrote in a style uncannily inviting of the reader’s own personal projections and captured something true about anyone’s night visions. He was born and died in Prague and wrote exclusively in German. His diaries reflect the outside world—the war, Czech independence—only glancingly. For Kafka, the inner world was where the action was.
There is a fine Kafka Museum in the “Lesser Town” of Prague. The exhibit is organized, intelligently, around Kafka’s “Letter to My Father,” a remarkable bloodletting (it was never read by his father), along with excerpts of letters to his friend and posthumous publisher Max Brod, diary fragments, and notes and letters to his several women friends. (In his short life of 40 years--he died of tuberculosis--he had several fraught relationships that never resulted in marriage.)
For Americans in the 21st century, it can be hard to absorb what a revelatory and searing personal document was the letter to his father; what a dramatic departure from decorum it was for this formal gentleman of Old World courtesies. Franz' father, Hermann Kafka, was a businessman, the owner of a clothing wholesale store, and—by his son’s account—a domineering, emotionally abusive loudmouth, unequipped to understand his son or even recognize that he had an existence outside of his father’s bourgeois expectations. Possibly, this portrait was unfair (children never really see their parents whole, as anyone who has once complained about his parents then gone on to be a parent himself, has learned). But it was from the crucible of his relationship with his father that Kafka extrapolated his vision of an unappeasable authority, a vision he managed through a unique literary genius to translate into something universal.
From the testimony of many who read him in the original German, this genius lay in the unique style of Kafka’s prose; even more than most writers, Kafka must lose something crucial in translation. His friends who heard him read his work aloud, and many reviewers and critics, have testified to a striking stateliness, a crystalline formality in his prose. In a 1996 forward to The Complete Stories, first published by Shocken Books in 1971, John Updike writes, “These lucid and fluent translations….can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity.” It is as if when he sat down to write he translated the world around him—and the visions in his head—into some higher linguistic register. As if he were, in the early part of the 20th century, recording scripture.
But there is something cult-like or over reverent that has grown up around Kafka and his aura of tortured aesthetic anxiety, something that may inhibit readers from approaching his fantastical stories and novels unburdened. This likely has to do with the veneration with which Brod and at least one early biographer regarded Kafka, as something close to a seer or a holy man. Kafka himself wrote about writing as a kind of sacred calling, a “form of prayer.” And it is surely related as well to the fact that the Nazi and Soviet regimes that followed his death came to make the writer’s visions of a torturous, lethal bureaucracy appear quite literally prophetic. (Kafka’s sisters perished in Nazi death camps.)
But something the Kafka Museum nicely illuminates is that he was a man embedded successfully in the world. And embedded in the city. “Prague won’t let you go,” he wrote. “The little mother has claws.” Though the city is never mentioned in his fiction, the labyrinth-like aura of its winding streets and the weight of ancient history is there. Surely, the Castle visible everywhere in the city must have figured in the imagination of his unfinished novel of that name. (He lived with his sister for a period in a tiny house on a slope leading up to the Castle.)
For Americans in the 21st century, it can be hard to absorb what a revelatory and searing personal document was the letter to his father; what a dramatic departure from decorum it was for this formal gentleman of Old World courtesies. Franz' father, Hermann Kafka, was a businessman, the owner of a clothing wholesale store, and—by his son’s account—a domineering, emotionally abusive loudmouth, unequipped to understand his son or even recognize that he had an existence outside of his father’s bourgeois expectations. Possibly, this portrait was unfair (children never really see their parents whole, as anyone who has once complained about his parents then gone on to be a parent himself, has learned). But it was from the crucible of his relationship with his father that Kafka extrapolated his vision of an unappeasable authority, a vision he managed through a unique literary genius to translate into something universal.
From the testimony of many who read him in the original German, this genius lay in the unique style of Kafka’s prose; even more than most writers, Kafka must lose something crucial in translation. His friends who heard him read his work aloud, and many reviewers and critics, have testified to a striking stateliness, a crystalline formality in his prose. In a 1996 forward to The Complete Stories, first published by Shocken Books in 1971, John Updike writes, “These lucid and fluent translations….can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity.” It is as if when he sat down to write he translated the world around him—and the visions in his head—into some higher linguistic register. As if he were, in the early part of the 20th century, recording scripture.
But there is something cult-like or over reverent that has grown up around Kafka and his aura of tortured aesthetic anxiety, something that may inhibit readers from approaching his fantastical stories and novels unburdened. This likely has to do with the veneration with which Brod and at least one early biographer regarded Kafka, as something close to a seer or a holy man. Kafka himself wrote about writing as a kind of sacred calling, a “form of prayer.” And it is surely related as well to the fact that the Nazi and Soviet regimes that followed his death came to make the writer’s visions of a torturous, lethal bureaucracy appear quite literally prophetic. (Kafka’s sisters perished in Nazi death camps.)
But something the Kafka Museum nicely illuminates is that he was a man embedded successfully in the world. And embedded in the city. “Prague won’t let you go,” he wrote. “The little mother has claws.” Though the city is never mentioned in his fiction, the labyrinth-like aura of its winding streets and the weight of ancient history is there. Surely, the Castle visible everywhere in the city must have figured in the imagination of his unfinished novel of that name. (He lived with his sister for a period in a tiny house on a slope leading up to the Castle.)
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| House where Kafka lived for a period on a slope leading up to The Castle |
For those of us reading him in translation, it can be hard to see the comedy in Kafka’s writing, but when he read his work aloud to friends he frequently broke out in laughter: if an individual was condemned, in his vision, to forever seek a redemption from which he was forever barred—then the effort was bound to take some outlandish turns. And “real life” certainly offers a harvest of slapstick, which Kafka found in his job, as expressed in a letter to Brod:
For I’ve got so much to do! In my four districts—apart from all my other jobs—people fall of the scaffolding as if they were drunk, or fall into the machines, all the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slide, whatever people carry up falls down, whatever they hand down they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware.
Kafka was writing on this side of the great war. Modernism, and all its anxieties, was nascent. The old world and all its comforting verities of caste and community and religious belonging were being cast aside. A man no longer had a craft or a vocation or a calling—he had a job, and he was gone to work in the great grinding engine of capitalism, renting himself out for someone else’s profit. He was on his own now to find such meaning as he could, with no signs or signals from without. Kafka found a refuge of his own in writing about this predicament.
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In the face of this, though, Jewish leaders in the ghetto organized cultural events, lectures, and educational venues for the children, including classes in drawing and art that were led by a woman named Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who was a protégé of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Albright writes, “…the children produced more than four thousand drawings in pencil, crayon and watercolor; the subjects included virtually everything except what was not permitted—life as it truly was inside the ghetto. Many of the illustrations survived; when the ghetto was liberated a pair of suitcases was found in one of the children’s rooms, each crammed with pictures….”
Some of the artwork that survived was by Petr Ginz, described by Albright as the "improbably precocious son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father," a teenager who also edited a weekly magazine of articles written by the young people in Terezin.
"Possessed of a boundless appetite for self-improvement, Ginz was to be seen almost every evening sitting cross-legged on his bunk surrounded by writing and painting supplies," Albright writes. He kept a journal "in which he vowed to devote greater effort to drawing, bookbinding, increasing his weight, the study of Buddhism, linocuts, stenography, English, Russian, Plato and Blazac."
Petr was deported east in 1944 and died in Auschwitz. His diary was published after the war.
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Somewhere near the hotel I was staying with my tour group must have been a grade school. In the morning when I would walk outside for exercise and to look for coffee, I would see parents walking their young children to the school. This made me happy, especially the first day or two I was in Prague, reminding me that while I was thousands of miles from home, I hadn’t left the planet. (I had not travelled outside North America since 1996!) The Moms or dads looked prepared for a workday—whether at an office, or COVID-bound, at home—and wore that slightly harried, or hurried, look of nervous anticipation for whatever lay ahead. Yet, unmistakably, you could see that these few moments, walking their child to school—the child chattering away about whatever loomed ahead for her in school, whatever lunacy passed through his imagination—was the high point, the very happiest part of their day. I passed one day a congregant of teenagers in the afternoon when school was out. Fidgeting with their phones, gossiping and conspiring in Czech, they looked and sounded like American teenagers anywhere—a confederacy of the superior, momentarily under the thumb of their idiot guardians.
Permit me, if you will, that most banal of all travel observations: People Are the Same Wherever You Go. So they are, and it can be counted as one of the great virtues of travel outside one’s boundaries to be reminded of it. But back at home here in my colossal country surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors, I couldn’t help reflecting on how differently Czechs must look out at the world around them.
We are shaped by the history we inherit. No one can say that American history has been serene, but consider what Czechs have experienced in a period still within memory of its oldest citizens:
After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a government-in-exile took up residence in London, headed by Benes. In May 1942, in a daring operation planned and approved by the government-in-exile, Heydrich was assassinated. Two members of the Czech army, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, parachuted into the hills surrounding the route Heydrich’s car took from his home to the Prague Castle every day and ambushed him. The attempt nearly went awry, but Heydrich died later in a hospital in Prague.
The act was a spectacular assertion of the legitimacy of the government-in-exile, leading to the dissolution of the Munich agreement by the western powers that had endorsed it. It also resulted in a brutal policy of retributive violence by the Nazis. The assassins were falsely linked to the town of Lidice, which was razed and bulldozed. Some 400 men and women were massacred, and more than 80 children were sent to death camps.
Albright in her book explores the kind of rearview mirror second guessing that historians can do: Was the assassination worth the collective punishment that was visited upon the Czech people? She comes down, sensibly I think, on the side of the assassins, noting that the act galvanized the war effort, inspiring allied soldiers (including the later arriving Americans), and weakened the Nazi’s in strategic ways. Today, Kubis and Gabcek are revered as heroes of the Czech Republic.
In 1945, with the defeat of the Nazis, Edward Benes returned from exile in London to a newly independent Czechoslovakia. In a sad but perhaps predictable irony, the “problem” at the heart of the Munich Agreement boomeranged when the Czech government expelled ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland. The plan had been to transfer only those who had collaborated with the Nazis, but bitterness about the experience under Heydrich, and toward the Germans generally, was everywhere; armed citizens carried out forced expulsions that were frequently violent. Some 15,000 Germans died in the course of the expulsions, and in the end more than 2 million Germans were forcibly removed. Albright writes with great intelligence about this dark and complicated legacy, for which Vaclav Havel, years later, offered a deft apology.
In a national election in May 1946, the Czech Communist Party surprised everyone (except perhaps the Communists) by garnering 38 percent of the vote (“Communism sounds very nice when you read about it in a book,” is how Hannah explained it), giving them a majority in the parliament and the right to name a prime minister. It also gave them the power, through a flurry of Bolshevik maneuvering, to snuff out the organs of civil society in the country and put an end to democracy. The country became a Stalinist satellite. Twenty years after that and 30 years after the Munich Agreement, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to put an end to the “Prague Spring,” the Czech experiment with liberalization. On January 16, 1969, in protest of the Soviet takeover, a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself ablaze at Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague.
Fast forward twenty years again, tens of thousands of people gathered at Wenceslas Square to celebrate the Velvet Revolution and the peaceful overthrow of the Communist Party. In 1993, the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia split the country into the separate Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was a peaceful separation--sometimes referred to as the Velvet Divorce--but (if I did not misread the tone of our tour leader's comments) one that was not without some sadness or regret on the part of Czechs.
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| Wenceslas Square 1989/ Time Magazine Credit: Corbis/VCG via Getty Image |
With all this tumult in mind, I think about those Czech teenagers and wonder what they will bring to the future of their country. What must it be like to grow up as a citizen of a small country in a crowded continent with too many competing nationalities? To live at the crossroads of some of the finest and richest intellectual, musical and artistic currents—and the most disastrous political ideologies? How does it affect one’s consciousness to be surrounded, at nearly every turn, by centuries of history? Or to be taught that powerful friends abandoned your country in a dire time, and that malevolent neighbors twice overran it? What does it mean to live in the tortured crux of the most salient questions of nationality: Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the boundaries?
Czech citizens cannot be watching the drama on the Belarus/Polish border—or for that matter, Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine—without apprehension. On top of these forebodings from without, Czechia has experienced the same wave of populist discontent that has swept the rest of Europe and the United States. (Although they recently gave the heave-ho to the billionaire populist prime minister Andrej Babis, an ally of Hungary’s Victor Orban, after he was caught out in the Pandora Papers expose.)
Castles and canals, cobblestone bridges and charming narrow streets winding around ancient synagogues and churches. The Vlatva River flowing in and around it all like music. Prague—so brilliant, beautiful and radiant—is like a fairy tale. But like many a fairy tale, its beauty veils a solemn message or a sad warning, as well—something Franz Kafka, haunting the city’s streets like an open nerve, might have registered. In a striking poem entitled “Memories of Prague,” written at Terezin, young Petr Ginz was, to be sure, expressing his own grief of separation. But I think he captured, too, something of that melancholy in the city’s ancient stones.
How long since I last saw
The sunk sink low behind Petrin Hill?
With tearful eyes I gazed at you Prague
Enveloped in your evening shadows
How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water
Over the weir in the Vlatva River?
I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square.
Those unknown corners in the Old Town,
Those shady nooks and sleepy canals,
How are they? They cannot be grieving for me
As I do for them…..
Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember!
Czechs know history is no fairy tale. Perhaps so much history, so much tumult, has equipped them with a resilience and a clear-eyed realism that will help them navigate the future’s shoals. In any case, they have seen it all before.
