Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (81 page)
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Authors: Peter Demetz
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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Their most effective plays and films were produced in the mid-1930s, including the anti-Nazi
Osel a Stín (The Donkey and the Shadow,
1933, against which the German ambassador protested),
Balada z hadr
(A Ballad of Rags,
1935), and
Rub a lic
(
Heads or Tails
, 1936), which became the film
Sv
t pat
i nám (The World Is Ours
, 1937). By that time, fights between rightist and leftist students often erupted in the auditorium, and in the fall of 1938, after the Munich conference, a new Czech minister of the interior ordered the theater closed. The V&W team left for New York, where unfortunate Jaroslav Ježek (now totally blind) died in a hospital; the two friends worked for the Czech section of the Voice of America. They both returned to Prague in 1945, Werich first and Voskovec later, a little hesitatingly, but times had changed, and the Communist Party knew all too well what it wanted to tolerate and what to exploit. Werich stayed on and became a popular television personality; Voskovec left again and made his way as a serious actor in Chekhov and Shakespearean plays and in Hollywood. Werich died in Prague in 1980 and his friend Voskovec of cancer in California a year later. In Prague, CDs of their original repertory, edited in six installments, are among the hot items on the electronic market.
Osel a Stín (The Donkey and the Shadow,
1933, against which the German ambassador protested),
Balada z hadr
(A Ballad of Rags,1935), and
Rub a lic
(
Heads or Tails
, 1936), which became the film
Sv
t pati nám (The World Is Ours, 1937). By that time, fights between rightist and leftist students often erupted in the auditorium, and in the fall of 1938, after the Munich conference, a new Czech minister of the interior ordered the theater closed. The V&W team left for New York, where unfortunate Jaroslav Ježek (now totally blind) died in a hospital; the two friends worked for the Czech section of the Voice of America. They both returned to Prague in 1945, Werich first and Voskovec later, a little hesitatingly, but times had changed, and the Communist Party knew all too well what it wanted to tolerate and what to exploit. Werich stayed on and became a popular television personality; Voskovec left again and made his way as a serious actor in Chekhov and Shakespearean plays and in Hollywood. Werich died in Prague in 1980 and his friend Voskovec of cancer in California a year later. In Prague, CDs of their original repertory, edited in six installments, are among the hot items on the electronic market.
It is deplorable that we have to satisfy our nostalgia for the avant-garde of the past, certainly more exciting than that of the present, by listening to CDs and by reading in libraries. But the old glory places are gone: the Café Union at Perštýn Corner, lovingly called Unionka, in a shabby building marked by a strange edge-stone (with a grinning flat face, which I feared when I walked by it as a boy), was long the principal home for artists and intellectuals. Here Pan Dávidek, the owner, played his gramophone, mostly for his own entertainment, and the headwaiter, Patera, a mythical baldhead, provided newspapers (he had to pay for them out of his own pocket), remembered for years who owed him for a cup of coffee, and benevolently functioned as a kind of one-man credit institute, lending money to young painters, chess players, and anarchists.
Architects, editors, and critics sat here in the warrenlike little rooms or went from table to table—from the architect Go
ár to the brothers Karel and Josef Capek, from Jaroslav Hašek (who had his headquarters at the Zv
ina Pub) to Richard Weiner, interested in all things French. The German counterpart to the Unionka was the Arco, between the stock exchange and the old railway station, which was mostly frequented by traveling salesman, businesspeople, and bank clerks yet, for reasons difficult to fathom, attracted the most important German-writing authors and their artist friends; the headwaiter was weaselly Pan Po
ta. Kafka, Brod, and Franz Werfel, whenever he was in town, as well as the painters Friedrich Feigl and Willy Novak met here in a convenient extra room; occasionally, a Czech leftist turned up to demonstrate for Socialist solidarity; and, among the few women, Milena Jesenská was seen, to be close not to Kafka but to Ernst Pollak, a minor bank manager of a shrewdly critical mind, one of her future husbands. Hanging out at the Arco, she at least had a good chance to spite her father, an upright Czech nationalist who heartily disliked her German and Jewish acquaintances.
Architects, editors, and critics sat here in the warrenlike little rooms or went from table to table—from the architect Go
ár to the brothers Karel and Josef Capek, from Jaroslav Hašek (who had his headquarters at the Zvina Pub) to Richard Weiner, interested in all things French. The German counterpart to the Unionka was the Arco, between the stock exchange and the old railway station, which was mostly frequented by traveling salesman, businesspeople, and bank clerks yet, for reasons difficult to fathom, attracted the most important German-writing authors and their artist friends; the headwaiter was weaselly Pan Pota. Kafka, Brod, and Franz Werfel, whenever he was in town, as well as the painters Friedrich Feigl and Willy Novak met here in a convenient extra room; occasionally, a Czech leftist turned up to demonstrate for Socialist solidarity; and, among the few women, Milena Jesenská was seen, to be close not to Kafka but to Ernst Pollak, a minor bank manager of a shrewdly critical mind, one of her future husbands. Hanging out at the Arco, she at least had a good chance to spite her father, an upright Czech nationalist who heartily disliked her German and Jewish acquaintances.In the first years of the republic, Prague’s housing shortage was catastrophic, and rather than freeze in their rented rooms, young writers, and many of the older people, assembled at the Národní Kavárna (National Café), exactly midway between the river and the Unionka; radicals, enamored of the Soviet habit of abbreviations, called it their Nárkav—though the regulars were of at least three different persuasions: the Dev
tsil people crowded in the back corner, the progressive Catholics in front, and the more sedate liberal journalists on the banquettes along the wall. In a separate room, the famous scholars of the Linguistic Circle, among its members professors Jan Muka
ovský, Vilém Mathésius, Jakobson, and young René Wellek, later to establish the modern study of comparative literature in the United States, met to discuss recent literary theory. Only if the place was too crowded or the Dev
tsil writers became too noisy did people move down to the Slavia, a Prague showplace often visited by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. For a long time, the Slavia had been second home to people from the National Theater, across the street, but after the demise of the Unionka and the Národní Kavárna it became a (last) literary meeting place, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when the dissidents had their regular tables here and the police agents (nearby) too.
tsil people crowded in the back corner, the progressive Catholics in front, and the more sedate liberal journalists on the banquettes along the wall. In a separate room, the famous scholars of the Linguistic Circle, among its members professors Jan Mukaovský, Vilém Mathésius, Jakobson, and young René Wellek, later to establish the modern study of comparative literature in the United States, met to discuss recent literary theory. Only if the place was too crowded or the Devtsil writers became too noisy did people move down to the Slavia, a Prague showplace often visited by Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann. For a long time, the Slavia had been second home to people from the National Theater, across the street, but after the demise of the Unionka and the Národní Kavárna it became a (last) literary meeting place, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, when the dissidents had their regular tables here and the police agents (nearby) too.Other books
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