REVIEW: Prague in Black and Gold
Jul. 31st, 2023 08:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllPrague in Black and Gold: Peter Demetz. Penguin, 1998.
I finally opened a non-fiction book and decided to try reading it one chapter at a time between other books, which may be the way to get through them. I bought this second hand in Prague itself, having fallen under the city's spell as a tourist. Its subtitle is ‘The History of a City’. The author sets out how he is writing about his hometown, but as one who emigrated from there many decades ago. Having watched his Jewish mother being forced to leave Prague by the Nazis for the camp where she would die, he left after the Communists took over.
I will now proceed to show you how subjective my notes were (the book is obviously better about dates and names!) The opening chapter tells of the city's founding myth, involving a figure called Libussa and her prophecy, then discusses the archaeological record of wave after wave of 'silent' people who settled in the region (that is, they left no written records.) The author then traces the history of Libussa as written in a pattern that will be followed throughout the book, where he discusses what was going on in the literature of the periods covered.
The next chapter focuses on King Otakar, his (religious) daughters, Italian diplomats and the wider context (of the ninth to thirteenth centuries.) This most successful Czech king did not spark the Czech imagination. The next chapter is quite long and involved, telling of the rise of the king/emperor who did, Vaclav/Charles. Well educated, well travelled and shrewd, when the prince came to his inheritance, he cut out the adventuring and wars, made his mother's hometown his seat and started consolidating laws, setting in train some city planning. He became Emperor of Italy, the title his father wanted, but failed to get. A pious man, he was loyal to the Pope of Avignon (this was when there were two popes.) A fan of conservative but high-quality architecture, he got a lot of castles built. The chapter ends with a horrifying account of a massacre of Jews.
I kept coming up against my ignorance of the details of geography and history. For instance, the fourth chapter, about the Hussite revolution, really highlighted to me how early John Wycliffe was. I had never grasped before that he lived in the late thirteenth century. Religious reform was afoot in Bohemia as in England, in part in response to the corruption of the powerful Catholic church. As some priests preached simplicity, pious women were involved in the building of chapels called Bethlehem and Nazareth in Prague (not the labour.) Jan Huss, under the influence of Wycliffe, came on the scene and spearheaded the spread of what looked like early Protestantism to me, although the author didn’t quite explain the relevance of the chalice in his beliefs.
The king of the day allied himself with reformers for political reasons, but there were revolutionaries around, while the Catholic church fought against the loss of its power (and wealth.) Huss was clearly martyred, but then I got confused about what the moderate and radical Hussites were for. A new emperor/king came in and called up a crusade that didn’t quite work. There were lots of killings – burning at the stakes, defenestrations or deaths in pitched battle, which were dismaying to read about. Then some very peculiar sects emerged.
Next, Prague was ruled by Polish kings (this wasn’t really explained), and then the Czech nobility voted in the new King of Bohemia, which is how the mostly Catholic Hapsbergs arrived. The author is determined to argue that there was less mysticism around than is generally thought (although John Dee would come to Prague.) Rudolf II is the king the fifth chapter is named after. He was into art, jewellery and curios. While negotiating to marry the Spanish Infanta over 20 years, he had several mistresses, his favourite seeming to be an antique dealer’s daughter, who bore him illegitimate children. The negotiations came to naught, and it seems as if he got very mentally ill and may have killed himself. His brother became king and emperor, and civil war (with international backing) broke out.
Eventually the Catholics won and Protestants were expelled from the Empire or forced to convert. The ‘Spanish faction’ of the Viennese court were on the up, and the Baroque period began, which is when some of the architecture around Prague castle was built. (Sometimes, the author used some fancy words to show off, and I confess I was always too lazy to reach for a dictionary.)
The next chapter tells of the decline of Prague, as imperial power centred in Vienna and it became a second-rate city. We get a portrait of Empress Marie Therese, an anti-Semite who was enough of a pragmatist to reverse her decisions if necessary. She was followed by her son Joseph, who cut down on Catholic high days and holidays for the sake of the economy.
Then we learn about the theatres that came to be built in Prague, Mozart’s visits to the city, and how he found it a congenial place for writing operas. There’s also an account of how the city’s two main languages, Czech and German, co-existed.
The seventh chapter covers the nineteenth century, when ‘tourists’ were called such and started coming to Prague in greater numbers. It discusses the tensions around the German and Czech languages and how those played out in Prague society. And then it moves on to the impact of the French revolution on the Austro-Hungarian empire. Where Vienna acted, Prague talked (although before then the working class had revolted against mechanisation.) The impact of the very brief revolution in Prague is covered in portraits of three very different patriotic literary figures.
I found the talk of the Slavic consciousness in this period as well as glimpses of what was happening in the complicated German-speaking polities insightful. I don’t remember my history lessons about the second world war going this far back, but I found it illuminating as to how young Germany and the states Hitler would invade were and how they came to be formed.
The eighth chapter starts with an overview of an urban ‘sanitisation’ project that managed to leave a lot of too small one-bedroomed flats as they were, but targeted the Jewish quarter. The author then moves on to literature, mainly by foreigners who liked to write about ‘magic Prague’, an idea the author had thoroughly debunked already.
We then jumped ahead to the end of the first world war and the almost experimental way that the Republic of Czechoslovakia was formed, and how the issues of language and identity were intertwined. But I really needed the section that went back in time to give us the biography of Masaryk, the republic’s first president, how he was educated out of the working class, how his work ethic (more than ability) helped him progress in academia, and how he met his American wife (who would suffer from mental ill health, about which I felt the author was too circumspect, although maybe that’s because the sources were.) Because of my ignorance about Masaryk, who was so important to this new country, I felt that more could have been said about how he got into politics and more could have been explained about said politics.
Instead we learned how the Czech-writing avant garde were influenced by French Communists at the start of the twentieth century, while the Czech German writers had a totally separate tradition, and then Kafka (whose name is dropped throughout the book) suffered linguistic tribulations as a Jew who’d been forced to write in German by social pressures. Various people mentioned in this section would end up in concentration camps.
The chapter closes with Masaryk’s state funeral in 1937. The book closes with the autobiographical ‘A Difficult Return to Prague’ about the author’s return forty years since he fled Communism, to find a changed city, with some parts recognisable, and others making him aware of how much he’d changed. We get a little bit about his parents, from different linguistic and religious backgrounds, and his childhood and youth, the latter including living under Nazi occupation. This was published over two decades ago – Prague has surely changed a lot since then as its nation became the Czech Republic/Czechia, but the book is largely silent over what happened after the author left, not a word about 1969, and how all that influenced Prague after the Soviet Union collapsed. [Edited for typos and clarity, 2/6/25.]
I finally opened a non-fiction book and decided to try reading it one chapter at a time between other books, which may be the way to get through them. I bought this second hand in Prague itself, having fallen under the city's spell as a tourist. Its subtitle is ‘The History of a City’. The author sets out how he is writing about his hometown, but as one who emigrated from there many decades ago. Having watched his Jewish mother being forced to leave Prague by the Nazis for the camp where she would die, he left after the Communists took over.
I will now proceed to show you how subjective my notes were (the book is obviously better about dates and names!) The opening chapter tells of the city's founding myth, involving a figure called Libussa and her prophecy, then discusses the archaeological record of wave after wave of 'silent' people who settled in the region (that is, they left no written records.) The author then traces the history of Libussa as written in a pattern that will be followed throughout the book, where he discusses what was going on in the literature of the periods covered.
The next chapter focuses on King Otakar, his (religious) daughters, Italian diplomats and the wider context (of the ninth to thirteenth centuries.) This most successful Czech king did not spark the Czech imagination. The next chapter is quite long and involved, telling of the rise of the king/emperor who did, Vaclav/Charles. Well educated, well travelled and shrewd, when the prince came to his inheritance, he cut out the adventuring and wars, made his mother's hometown his seat and started consolidating laws, setting in train some city planning. He became Emperor of Italy, the title his father wanted, but failed to get. A pious man, he was loyal to the Pope of Avignon (this was when there were two popes.) A fan of conservative but high-quality architecture, he got a lot of castles built. The chapter ends with a horrifying account of a massacre of Jews.
I kept coming up against my ignorance of the details of geography and history. For instance, the fourth chapter, about the Hussite revolution, really highlighted to me how early John Wycliffe was. I had never grasped before that he lived in the late thirteenth century. Religious reform was afoot in Bohemia as in England, in part in response to the corruption of the powerful Catholic church. As some priests preached simplicity, pious women were involved in the building of chapels called Bethlehem and Nazareth in Prague (not the labour.) Jan Huss, under the influence of Wycliffe, came on the scene and spearheaded the spread of what looked like early Protestantism to me, although the author didn’t quite explain the relevance of the chalice in his beliefs.
The king of the day allied himself with reformers for political reasons, but there were revolutionaries around, while the Catholic church fought against the loss of its power (and wealth.) Huss was clearly martyred, but then I got confused about what the moderate and radical Hussites were for. A new emperor/king came in and called up a crusade that didn’t quite work. There were lots of killings – burning at the stakes, defenestrations or deaths in pitched battle, which were dismaying to read about. Then some very peculiar sects emerged.
Next, Prague was ruled by Polish kings (this wasn’t really explained), and then the Czech nobility voted in the new King of Bohemia, which is how the mostly Catholic Hapsbergs arrived. The author is determined to argue that there was less mysticism around than is generally thought (although John Dee would come to Prague.) Rudolf II is the king the fifth chapter is named after. He was into art, jewellery and curios. While negotiating to marry the Spanish Infanta over 20 years, he had several mistresses, his favourite seeming to be an antique dealer’s daughter, who bore him illegitimate children. The negotiations came to naught, and it seems as if he got very mentally ill and may have killed himself. His brother became king and emperor, and civil war (with international backing) broke out.
Eventually the Catholics won and Protestants were expelled from the Empire or forced to convert. The ‘Spanish faction’ of the Viennese court were on the up, and the Baroque period began, which is when some of the architecture around Prague castle was built. (Sometimes, the author used some fancy words to show off, and I confess I was always too lazy to reach for a dictionary.)
The next chapter tells of the decline of Prague, as imperial power centred in Vienna and it became a second-rate city. We get a portrait of Empress Marie Therese, an anti-Semite who was enough of a pragmatist to reverse her decisions if necessary. She was followed by her son Joseph, who cut down on Catholic high days and holidays for the sake of the economy.
Then we learn about the theatres that came to be built in Prague, Mozart’s visits to the city, and how he found it a congenial place for writing operas. There’s also an account of how the city’s two main languages, Czech and German, co-existed.
The seventh chapter covers the nineteenth century, when ‘tourists’ were called such and started coming to Prague in greater numbers. It discusses the tensions around the German and Czech languages and how those played out in Prague society. And then it moves on to the impact of the French revolution on the Austro-Hungarian empire. Where Vienna acted, Prague talked (although before then the working class had revolted against mechanisation.) The impact of the very brief revolution in Prague is covered in portraits of three very different patriotic literary figures.
I found the talk of the Slavic consciousness in this period as well as glimpses of what was happening in the complicated German-speaking polities insightful. I don’t remember my history lessons about the second world war going this far back, but I found it illuminating as to how young Germany and the states Hitler would invade were and how they came to be formed.
The eighth chapter starts with an overview of an urban ‘sanitisation’ project that managed to leave a lot of too small one-bedroomed flats as they were, but targeted the Jewish quarter. The author then moves on to literature, mainly by foreigners who liked to write about ‘magic Prague’, an idea the author had thoroughly debunked already.
We then jumped ahead to the end of the first world war and the almost experimental way that the Republic of Czechoslovakia was formed, and how the issues of language and identity were intertwined. But I really needed the section that went back in time to give us the biography of Masaryk, the republic’s first president, how he was educated out of the working class, how his work ethic (more than ability) helped him progress in academia, and how he met his American wife (who would suffer from mental ill health, about which I felt the author was too circumspect, although maybe that’s because the sources were.) Because of my ignorance about Masaryk, who was so important to this new country, I felt that more could have been said about how he got into politics and more could have been explained about said politics.
Instead we learned how the Czech-writing avant garde were influenced by French Communists at the start of the twentieth century, while the Czech German writers had a totally separate tradition, and then Kafka (whose name is dropped throughout the book) suffered linguistic tribulations as a Jew who’d been forced to write in German by social pressures. Various people mentioned in this section would end up in concentration camps.
The chapter closes with Masaryk’s state funeral in 1937. The book closes with the autobiographical ‘A Difficult Return to Prague’ about the author’s return forty years since he fled Communism, to find a changed city, with some parts recognisable, and others making him aware of how much he’d changed. We get a little bit about his parents, from different linguistic and religious backgrounds, and his childhood and youth, the latter including living under Nazi occupation. This was published over two decades ago – Prague has surely changed a lot since then as its nation became the Czech Republic/Czechia, but the book is largely silent over what happened after the author left, not a word about 1969, and how all that influenced Prague after the Soviet Union collapsed. [Edited for typos and clarity, 2/6/25.]
