Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (61 page)
Read Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City Online
Authors: Peter Demetz
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
8.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Anticipating the assumptions of modern linguistics, Bolzano told his audiences that words and their meanings were arbitrary, originating in social agreements rather than in romantic nature, and declared that in Bohemia any involvement with only one language would “obfuscate” (
verdunkeln
) the fundamental equality of all citizens, whatever language they spoke. Differences of languages were “the most insubstantial of all” (
die allerunwesentlichsten
)
,
distrust in the equality of all people was high treason to humanity, and what was needed was a communal spirit reaching
out beyond nationality to other and higher values; national consciousness was but a means of acquiring something that went beyond all nationalisms. Unfortunately, the revolution of 1848 swept away Bolzano’s urgent appeal to communal and transnational obligations; and while in earlier times many Prague citizens (except in the Jewish Town) would have called themselves “Bohemians,” now they wanted to identify with a language nation forthwith. Bolzano’s efforts to reconcile nations were as quickly forgotten as his astonishingly modern social engagement—he developed detailed plans for inexpensive housing developments and urged that an organization be instituted to take care of the two thousand waifs living in Prague’s streets. But he was later rediscovered as a philosopher of science by Edmund Husserl, and again, somewhat later, by the Czech philosopher Jan Pato
ka, who in 1969 suggested that the Bohemian nations should have gone Bolzano’s way rather than that of his romantic adversaries.
verdunkeln
) the fundamental equality of all citizens, whatever language they spoke. Differences of languages were “the most insubstantial of all” (
die allerunwesentlichsten
)
,
distrust in the equality of all people was high treason to humanity, and what was needed was a communal spirit reaching
out beyond nationality to other and higher values; national consciousness was but a means of acquiring something that went beyond all nationalisms. Unfortunately, the revolution of 1848 swept away Bolzano’s urgent appeal to communal and transnational obligations; and while in earlier times many Prague citizens (except in the Jewish Town) would have called themselves “Bohemians,” now they wanted to identify with a language nation forthwith. Bolzano’s efforts to reconcile nations were as quickly forgotten as his astonishingly modern social engagement—he developed detailed plans for inexpensive housing developments and urged that an organization be instituted to take care of the two thousand waifs living in Prague’s streets. But he was later rediscovered as a philosopher of science by Edmund Husserl, and again, somewhat later, by the Czech philosopher Jan Pato
ka, who in 1969 suggested that the Bohemian nations should have gone Bolzano’s way rather than that of his romantic adversaries.Bolzano may have been the first social philosopher of a multiethnic European community to come, and his noble idea of a “Bohemian community” inspirited by shared social tasks may have found sympathy among the nobles, the older Czech generation of enlightened intellectuals, and the Prague German patriciate. But younger Czechs of romantic inclination held different views. In their minds, shaped by the experiences of the Napoleonic Wars from which so many national aspirations had emerged, and by study of Herder’s philosophy of individual nations with their inalienable languages, questions of nationality and idiom were far more important than the abstract dictates of an unloved polyglot state; to this new generation, mostly of the modest bourgeoisie and still firmly bound to their fathers and mothers in Bohemian villages, speaking and writing Czech was a fundamental commitment that defined all others.
It was the philologist Josef Jungmann who, in a new Czech periodical first appearing in 1806, published two seminal essays about the Czech language. He excluded the Bohemian nobility from the nation, for they usually did not speak Czech fluently (never mind what they had done in support of the first generation of learned Czech patriots), and went on to create the figures of Protiva (the “fiend,” representing many of Bolzano’s ideas) and Slavomil (the etymology suggests love of the Slavs), who condemns all those who publish in languages other than Czech and do not believe in the splendid future of their own nation competing with all the other nations of Europe. Jungmann himself turned into a magnificent Slavomil in his literary and scholarly publications; he demonstrated the importance of being Czech by showing the unusual riches of the language,
past and present. Distrusting the all too civilized and orderly idiom of the European Enlightenment, he looked to the opulence of the seventeenth century, and in order to display the full potentialities of Czech translated John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(he also translated Dryden, Goethe, and excerpts from
Hamlet
). His most magnificent achievement was his Czech-German dictionary, published with the help of a supporting team in five volumes in 1834—39; when he died, his dictionary was carried in front of the funeral procession in which thousands demonstratively marched. The question of what Bolzano would have said about Jungmann’s idea of the supreme value of national language has but a symbolic answer. In the 1840s, Bolzano, ravaged by a respiratory disease, was able to communicate only by signs and gestures rather than by articulate words, and he died a year after Jungmann, in the year of revolution (1848). It must have been a quiet funeral.
past and present. Distrusting the all too civilized and orderly idiom of the European Enlightenment, he looked to the opulence of the seventeenth century, and in order to display the full potentialities of Czech translated John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
(he also translated Dryden, Goethe, and excerpts from
Hamlet
). His most magnificent achievement was his Czech-German dictionary, published with the help of a supporting team in five volumes in 1834—39; when he died, his dictionary was carried in front of the funeral procession in which thousands demonstratively marched. The question of what Bolzano would have said about Jungmann’s idea of the supreme value of national language has but a symbolic answer. In the 1840s, Bolzano, ravaged by a respiratory disease, was able to communicate only by signs and gestures rather than by articulate words, and he died a year after Jungmann, in the year of revolution (1848). It must have been a quiet funeral.
The intellectual shift from territorial patriotism to a revolutionary Czech consciousness was rapidly accompanied by a transformation of older institutions and the establishment of new ones, designed to emancipate a Czech civic society proud of its own culture. The old Bohemian nobility had been politically and financially prominent in the established scholarly and scientific groups—such as the Royal Bohemian Society of Science of 1774—but when a distinguished group of scientists and scholars, among them the botanist Caspar Count Sternberg and his cousin, an expert in numismatics, founded a Bohemian Museum in 1818 to serve all the inhabitants of the land, the young historian František Palacký, who had just come to Prague, shrewdly initiated a more modern national orientation at the museum by suggesting that it publish separate journals in German and Czech (1827); it turned out that the German publication, much favored by Goethe but few other readers, ceased publication within four years, while the
asopis
eského Musea
(
Journal of the Bohemian Museum
) in scholarly and literary matters flourished throughout the century and beyond. A similar and perhaps even more efficient method was used to change the Society for the Promotion of Industry in Bohemia, established in 1833 by the nobility: in 1843 the original charter was modified to allow middle-class membership, Czechs (all future politicians of note) virtually took over the section for economics and research, and the demand for founding a Czech industrial school appeared high on the list of its new plans. Redirection of older institutions proceeded in synchrony with the foundation of these new bourgeois and distinctly Czech organizations. In 1831 the untiring Palacký initiated the Matice
eská (Czech Foundation) to support the
development of Czech culture by subventions for the publication of important books; in the first year, the foundation had 35 members, and 2,329 by 1847. Czech was “going public”; the first Czech ball was held on February 5, 1840, and after some difficulties with the authorities the M
št’anská Beseda (the Citizens’ Club) was established five years later, to gather the new Czech middle-class elite for polite conversation, dances, concerts, literary discussions, and scholarly lectures. Prague Czech culture had found an alluring home.
asopiseského Musea(
Journal of the Bohemian Museum
) in scholarly and literary matters flourished throughout the century and beyond. A similar and perhaps even more efficient method was used to change the Society for the Promotion of Industry in Bohemia, established in 1833 by the nobility: in 1843 the original charter was modified to allow middle-class membership, Czechs (all future politicians of note) virtually took over the section for economics and research, and the demand for founding a Czech industrial school appeared high on the list of its new plans. Redirection of older institutions proceeded in synchrony with the foundation of these new bourgeois and distinctly Czech organizations. In 1831 the untiring Palacký initiated the Matice
eská (Czech Foundation) to support thedevelopment of Czech culture by subventions for the publication of important books; in the first year, the foundation had 35 members, and 2,329 by 1847. Czech was “going public”; the first Czech ball was held on February 5, 1840, and after some difficulties with the authorities the M
št’anská Beseda (the Citizens’ Club) was established five years later, to gather the new Czech middle-class elite for polite conversation, dances, concerts, literary discussions, and scholarly lectures. Prague Czech culture had found an alluring home.Czech patriots of the 1830s, especially among the teachers, did not know exactly what to think about Karel Hynek Mácha, a student, amateur actor, and writer of romantic verse, but later generations came to believe that he was the first creator of modern Czech poetry, suddenly and inexplicably surging from his lyrical “novella”
Máj
(
May
), written in 1836. Mácha was born and bred in Prague, which he described as a silent city of the dead: “everything is desolate and barren / doors ajar to every silent dwelling, / and the rooms stand open and unguarded.” His father worked for a miller, his talented mother was the daughter of a musician, and the family had to move, in search of ever cheaper lodgings, from the Minor Town to the district of St. Peter and later, when the father acquired a small shop, to the Cattle Market (now Charles Square), where the student lived in a shabby little room, attending prescribed courses of philosophy and, finally, law school. He was freely involved in the student life of his time, going on long walks with his many friends, singing Czech folk songs (proscribed by the police) in the open fields, and showing his histrionic talents by playing heroic roles in Czech performances at the Theater of the Estates, scheduled only on Sundays from 4 to 6 p.m., and with other amateur groups in the Minor Town. Yet people also noticed his sudden bursts of cold despair, a certain theatricality that extended beyond the stage, and an inclination to play the Byronic dandy, which patriots disfavored. Tall, handsome, and sad, he liked to walk around in a light greatcoat with a conspicuous red lining and made people stare. A military guard once presented arms to him, assuming that he was a visiting Hapsburg prince. He restlessly marched through Bohemia from castle to castle, making precise lists of all the ruins he visited, and with a friend walked the entire way from Prague to Venice, Trieste, Ljubljana, and then Vienna, occasionally rolling in the hay with Austrian peasant girls. Yet he was also energetic enough to conclude his legal studies and to take a job with a Litom
ice (Leitmeritz) lawyer—doing so largely because he planned to marry his
Lori, a Prague girl, pregnant with his child. In 1836, twenty-six years of age, three days before he was to go to the altar he died of an infectious disease, listed in the parish register as cholera, and he was buried at the local cemetery. His bodily remains were disinterred in 1938, shortly before the Wehrmacht occupied Litom
ice (now in the Sudentenland); his bones were put in a small coffin and buried at the Prague Vyšehrad, pantheon for the great sons and daughters of the Czech nation.
Máj
(
May
), written in 1836. Mácha was born and bred in Prague, which he described as a silent city of the dead: “everything is desolate and barren / doors ajar to every silent dwelling, / and the rooms stand open and unguarded.” His father worked for a miller, his talented mother was the daughter of a musician, and the family had to move, in search of ever cheaper lodgings, from the Minor Town to the district of St. Peter and later, when the father acquired a small shop, to the Cattle Market (now Charles Square), where the student lived in a shabby little room, attending prescribed courses of philosophy and, finally, law school. He was freely involved in the student life of his time, going on long walks with his many friends, singing Czech folk songs (proscribed by the police) in the open fields, and showing his histrionic talents by playing heroic roles in Czech performances at the Theater of the Estates, scheduled only on Sundays from 4 to 6 p.m., and with other amateur groups in the Minor Town. Yet people also noticed his sudden bursts of cold despair, a certain theatricality that extended beyond the stage, and an inclination to play the Byronic dandy, which patriots disfavored. Tall, handsome, and sad, he liked to walk around in a light greatcoat with a conspicuous red lining and made people stare. A military guard once presented arms to him, assuming that he was a visiting Hapsburg prince. He restlessly marched through Bohemia from castle to castle, making precise lists of all the ruins he visited, and with a friend walked the entire way from Prague to Venice, Trieste, Ljubljana, and then Vienna, occasionally rolling in the hay with Austrian peasant girls. Yet he was also energetic enough to conclude his legal studies and to take a job with a Litom
ice (Leitmeritz) lawyer—doing so largely because he planned to marry hisLori, a Prague girl, pregnant with his child. In 1836, twenty-six years of age, three days before he was to go to the altar he died of an infectious disease, listed in the parish register as cholera, and he was buried at the local cemetery. His bodily remains were disinterred in 1938, shortly before the Wehrmacht occupied Litom
ice (now in the Sudentenland); his bones were put in a small coffin and buried at the Prague Vyšehrad, pantheon for the great sons and daughters of the Czech nation.Other books
Armando Returns (Barboza Brothers) by Austin, Reeni
New Uses For Old Boyfriends by Beth Kendrick
In Harm's Way by Lyn Stone
Lost by Sarah Prineas
Blue Sacrifice (Blue Davison) by Horn, Angela
Inhuman by Kat Falls
Vendetta by Jennifer Moulton
To Catch a Princess by Caridad Pineiro
The Wild Places (Penguin Original) by Macfarlane, Robert
Escape from the Past by Oppenlander, Annette