Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (60 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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Mozart’s visits in Prague have left their traces on many minds but most impressively in the literary imagination of Eduard Mörike, an intriguing German writer of the mid-nineteenth century, and of the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert, who, at some distance from the official writing in his homeland, received the Nobel Prize in 1984. Mörike’s novella
Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag
(
Mozart on His Journey to Prague,
1855) exquisitely combines a dark view of the genius with many lively historical details, nearly constituting a playful little biography. The events are relatively simple (Mozart and Constanze as chance visitors at a castle on the Bohemian-Austrian border, where he plays
Don Giovanni
to the astonished guests) but they are shot through with Mozart’s memories of absolute beauty (a water ballet in the Bay of Naples) and anticipations of death; when the composer comes to the spectral appearance of the stony Commendatore, “the notes came … as falling through the blue night from the orbits of far distant stars … fierce trumpets, ice cold, piercing through heart and marrow.” The young countess, speaking for the narrator, distinctly feels that Mozart “would be swiftly and inevitably consumed by his own inward fires”—rococo images of the provincial nobility’s happy life contrasted, abruptly and painfully, with thoughts on the cruel burdens of being creative.
Jaroslav Seifert, one of the most important Czech poets of our age, always loved Mozart, as he assures us in his memoirs, and when the conductor Václav Talich asked him in 1946, just after World War II, to write a sequence of poems to be read at a chamber concert, Seifert wrote thirteen rondels for him. (Unfortunately, plans were changed, and the verses were not read publicly.) Reminiscences of long-lost love are closely linked to images of a wintry season, of rare melodies of sweet flutes, of Mozart’s death and shabby funeral, while Vienna furiously dances on; a tender panorama of Prague emerges into the rosy light of an early morning “like a painted vase.” In the final lines, however, Seifert has to concede in bitter melancholy that his poems, read against the master’s music,
are leaden (“
mé verše však jsou z olova
”). Yet there are other moments; in his memoirs, Seifert speaks of a walk through the narrow streets close to the Nostitz theater and senses the fragrant powder of Mozart’s wig still floating over the roofs of Prague. It is, and not only to him, a consolation and a joy.
1848 AND THE COUNTERREVOLUTION
Provincial, quiet, and darkly dominated by its historical monuments, early-nineteenth-century Prague began to attract many travelers, most of them from the north rather than from the east or south. A century before, fashionable aristocrats like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had made brief appearances, but now travelers were of the gentry and the well-to-do middle classes. Writers, musicians, and diplomats began to arrive in Prague and often stayed for weeks. The hot springs in western Bohemia, long considered of restorative beneficence, also increasingly attracted travelers from abroad. Europeans always believed more than Americans in the medical virtues of taking the waters: in the later eighteenth century, the ailing, the bored, and the fashionable, among them many mothers with eligible daughters, gathered at the chic places, including Teplitz (for those afflicted by rheumatism) and Karlsbad and Marienbad (prescribed for digestive problems). Prague profited from the new “tourists” (the term was first used in English around 1800); a sober observer remarked that Prague had approximately 80,000 inhabitants but 100,000 during the spa season, when people traveled to and from western Bohemia.
Political affairs were also of importance: when Napoleon defeated Prussia in 1809, many patriotic Prussians came to Prague to organize political and intellectual resistance to him. Among them were the diplomat and writer Varnhagen von Ense, with his lively wife, Rahel (busy going to the theater and, together with other Jewish and Czech women, helping wounded soldiers brought to the city from the battlefields); Baron Heinrich von Stein, formerly Prussian minister of finances and later to reform
the Prussian state; the poet Heinrich von Kleist, sick, feverish, and hypochondriac; and the linguist and diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt. Foreign, Catholic, ancient, and strange, Prague was felt to be an eminently romantic place by the romantics Clemens Brentano, Ludwig Tieck, Josef von Eichendorff, and, somewhat later, young Richard Wagner, who was a shrewd observer of his own enchantments and believed that he was so overwhelmed by exotic Prague because everything there seemed to happen on a stage.
German and Austrian travelers did not have much time to learn what was really going on in Prague’s towns (especially when they did not understand the languages), and yet a few of them found their way to pay respects to renowned Czech scholars, who still published mostly in German: the philologist Abbé Dobrovský, the historian Palacký, and—visited by the historian Leopold Ranke and a few visitors from Poland and Moscow—the librarian Václav Hanka, famous far beyond Bohemia because he had found (or rather forged, as it turned out) ancient Czech epic songs. In the early 1830s, another group of political travelers, French and monarchist, came to Prague to demonstrate their allegiance to their former king Charles X, who had been dethroned in the 1830 revolution and was living on the second floor of Hrad
any Castle with his family and a few servants. Among the French visitors to Prague were, above all, diplomats, generals, and the romantic poet Chateaubriand, who appropriately thought of the “concatenation of history, human fatality, the fall of empires, the intentions of providence,” when gazing from Hrad
any Hill down to the roofs and towers of Prague’s towns. Joachim Barrande, loyal to the exiled king (he was tutor to the king’s grandson, the duke of Chambord), stayed on in Prague, worked as engineer and paleontologist, published a monumental work about Bohemia’s Silurian formations, closely collaborated with Czech scientists, and left his manuscripts, his library, a good deal of money, and his collections of trilobites to the Bohemian Museum. (On rainy Sundays, I was among the kids who were supposed to admire his collection at the museum, and I was bored stiff.) To Praguers, the name Barrandov has a more modern ring, for it refers, above all, to Prague’s film studios, which in the 1930s were as innovative and powerful as the ones in Rome’s Cinecittà and Berlin-Neubabelsberg.
Travelogues and reports about journeys to exotic Bohemia and fascinating Prague were a virtual literary genre of German Biedermeier writing, and most tourists from the north on the Dresden road early established a sightseeing route that is closely followed even two hundred years later. Approaching Prague from the northeast, they admired
the historical panorama from the right bank of the river, crossed over the Vltava on Charles’s stone bridge (invariably compared with the bridge over the Elbe at Dresden but found more interesting), went up to see Hrad
any Castle and its art galleries (Hegel admired the old German paintings), spent some time in one of the many cafés on Celetná Street in the Old Town, imbibed a lot of bad punch, then in vogue, and downed a few refreshing beers; waitresses made a little cross on the wooden top of the mug, the assumption being that nobody would be satisfied with one beer alone and that it would be difficult later to account for the many consumed (the custom has endured: present-day waiters make pencil marks on the round cardboard coasters for the beer glasses). Travel reports never missed out on the ladies; Prague women were charming and vivacious but used too much makeup, in spite of their impeccably pale skin, and they were obsessed with lottery games and dancing. Few were slim, and all travelers unanimously noticed the full curves of their seductive bodies. In an elaborate comparison with women of Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, they came out first because in their eyes a flame burned that was both mystical and sensuous, insisted Heinrich Laube, a young German liberal and later director of the Vienna Burgtheater.
Of course, romantic Prague had bad plumbing and a few other problems; the narrow streets were muddy, street lighting, if any, was dubious, and bathrooms primitive. Caroline Pichler, a Vienna society lady of note, complained about the absence of hot water for her bath; it had to be brought in from a nearby brewery. The ladies of the world’s oldest profession were usually out in force in the streets, or served beer in the little taverns around the Meat Market (Masný trh) near the Old Town Square—simple pleasant girls who plastered the walls of their little rooms with pictures of Bohemian saints and the Virgin Mary, and covered an occasional crucifix with a veil before joining their customers in bed. What the travelers did not discover easily was the harsh presence of Austria’s well-organized and oppressive police state: spies and paid informers were everywhere—at the hotels, in the cafés and inns, and especially in the university library and the bookshops, where they noted the books that people read and bought. Karl Postl, an ex-monk and later known as the American writer Charles Sealsfield, noted in his clear-eyed analysis,
Austria As It Is
(1828), that the police were interested not so much in the traveling foreigners as in the local people who dared to talk to them.
Many German romantics came to Bohemia and Prague, but local German writing was, for a considerable time, rather provincial and conservative. Varnhagen von Ense, from his Berlin point of view, rightly felt
that Prague German writers were really quite Bohemian (
recht eigentlich böhmisch
) by inclination and by their constantly going back to what was “ancient and national” in the Slavic manner; they were territorial patriots in the supranational eighteenth-century sense. The most prominent among these was Karl Egon Ebert, who was born in 1801 and died in 1884, the year after Franz Kafka was born; polished and learned, he was, to his contemporaries, well known for his popular ballads and patriotic verse epics celebrating Czech mythical heroines, such as
Wlasta
(1829), about ancient Amazons. Goethe made a few approving noises about his nature descriptions but failed to see Ebert’s formal paradox of telling Czech sagas in the German Nibelungen stanza (four long lines, rhymed in pairs, with a sophisticated use of accents and alliterations), a courageous and desperate effort to bind together Czech myth and German art. (Needless to say, neither German nor Czech scholars have touched on Ebert’s efforts since 1900.)
Admired by all Prague writers, Goethe came to Bohemia seventeen times between 1785 and 1827 to take the waters in the company of Europe’s most fashionable society, and he kept many Prague correspondents on tenterhooks, always promising a little excursion to “majestic” Prague but hesitating at the last minute; he never came. Among Goethe’s Prague correspondents was Karl Ludwig von Woltmann, a professor of history, who had removed himself from Napoleonic Germany to Prague, and his wife, Caroline, author of many novels and editor of a literary periodical as well as a remarkable collection of Bohemian folktales, unfortunately long forgotten today. Prague writers and readers competed in writing to Goethe; Leopoldine Grustner von Grussdorf, seventeen years old, initiated a poste restante correspondence behind the back of her grandfather, sent Goethe her sketches, and prompted him to tell her to concentrate on “the moving, active, strong, and consequential” in art; art should first grasp a “strong reality” (
eine kräftige Wirklichkeit
), Goethe wrote to her, before ascending to the ideational realm (
das Ideelle
) and religion. Alas, when Leopoldine suggested that she wanted to come to Weimar to work under his very eyes, seventy-seven-year-old Goethe answered that an excursion to a Bohemian spa would be more appropriate and then ceased to write. She was the only Prague woman to exchange letters with Goethe; as Johannes Urzidil has ascertained, she later switched from drawing to ballad writing and died in utter poverty.
 
The most independent mind to write in German was Bernard Bolzano, an ordained priest, mathematician, theorist of science, and social
philosopher; he was to pay dearly for his quiet courage and intrepid thought. His father was an Italian art dealer from the Como region, his mother a Prague German, but he called himself a “Bohemian of the German tongue” (
ein Böhme deutscher Zunge
); though he did not know much Czech himself, Bolzano always encouraged Bohemians of the Slavic tongue to do their best to develop their own culture and individuality. His superior gifts as scientist, lecturer, and philosopher were evident early; as soon as he had submitted his dissertation on a mathematical problem and had been ordained, he was appointed in 1805 to teach philosophy of religion, which he defined, a true disciple of the eighteenth century, as “the quintessence of such truths as lead to our virtue and happiness.” Almost immediately he was denounced as a freethinker, and he had constantly to defend himself against investigative commissions, secular, legal, and even papal, until, in 1819, he was accused of heterodoxy and of being a danger to the state, was publicly rebuked and deprived of his teaching post. Fortunately, a middle-class benefactor invited him to an estate in southern Bohemia where he had a chance to go on with his scientific studies; he spent the last years of his life under the protection of Count Thun, who took great care to provide him with all the books needed for his work.
Bolzano was, at heart, a Catholic radical who believed in the equality of all people; his own territorial patriotism, differing from that of the Bohemian nobility, who mainly fought Hapsburg centralism by allusions to their independent past, insisted on a present and
future
fatherland, with the people engaged both in cultivating their own aspirations and in learning to see why they should look beyond their egotistic concerns. In his sermons, regularly attended by German and Czech students, Bolzano turned against romantic visions imported from Germany, where people, he said, had ceased to think. He suggested that people should first of all try to acquire more knowledge about their own language and culture, in order to understand more of other communities’ languages and cultures; self-definition was only productive when looking at what was not the self.

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