Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (82 page)

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Authors: Peter Demetz

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In the 1920s and 1930s, Prague’s cafés constituted an entire planetary system; though Czechs would rarely venture to the Café Continental (it was elegant and German), the frontiers of language were honored more by habit than by resolve, and writers also liked to sit at the T
movka, the
Deminka (among retired civil servants), or the Akademická Kavárna (Academic Café) on Vodi
kova Street, now Prague’s McDonald’s #1. Other places catered to more specific inclinations and intents—for instance, the Café Rococo for the film industry or the Št
rba for ladies of the afternoon. Generations differed in their habits; Unionka regulars usually went, after hours, to the raunchy Montmartre in the Old Town, while the young Devêtsil people preferred the chic bars, including the Chapeau Rouge, the Sect Pavilion, and the Pigalle.
The Nazi occupation and the long years of Communist Party rule did away with most of Prague’s coffeehouses, but the new capitalism does not exactly favor comfortable places, either, where impecunious intellectuals can sip cups of coffee for hours and young people can hold hands (under the table, as they did at the Unionka). Since mid-century, the coffeehouse subculture has shifted to the writers’ weekend
chatas,
or dachas, or to local pubs where regulars have held the fort for decades. The octogenarian writer Bohumil Hrabal was rightly famous for loyally dwelling at U zlatého tygra (At the Golden Tiger), near the Dominican Church, and when President Clinton visited Prague and wanted to see the sights, his colleague Václav Havel obligingly took him there, after the joint had been cased by the Secret Service, much to the dismay of Hrabal and the other regulars. Many tourists like to gather at the new Café Milena, run by the enterprising Franz Kafka Society, and members of the society are privileged to have coffee in the extra room, where they can catch a glimpse of roving Kafka experts from Duke or Yale in search of an authentic Prague café.
 
For thirty years now, the Czech intellectuals of the 1968 generation have celebrated “the world of Franz Kafka,” or Prague German-Jewish literature, and it is difficult not to respond to their innocent generalizations with weary questions about history and its oddities. International tourists cannot complain that the Prague travel industry does not pander to their literary needs by offering Kafka T-shirts, ad hoc exhibitions, and Kafka pantomimes in every Old Town nook and cranny, but travelers have few opportunities to learn about the continuities and disjunctions of Prague’s Jewish literary developments, which began well before 1848, if not before Emperor Joseph. They were, step by step, strengthened by the liberalization of rules and regulations concerning Jewish life and education, by a productive accord with German writing by non-Jewish authors (often under the pressure of Czech nationalists who brought together Prague Germans and German-speaking Jews), and the emergence of at least three generations obsessed, in the absence of political options, with
literature and the arts. The Austrian Robert Musil, author of the
The Man Without Qualities,
was not entirely foolish when he remarked that in Prague true genius
refuses
to write. German-speaking Prague was too small and cliquish to guarantee spontaneity and fresh air, and as soon as young people in a new and talented cohort looked around, they decided to go elsewhere, to a place perhaps less magic but abounding with publishers, newspapers, and many divergent, clashing opinions.
The scholar Kurt Krolop (perhaps against his intentions) has shown that the brain drain was continuous: even before the revolution of 1848, young writers in Prague, whether German or Jewish-German, left for more challenging editorial jobs in Leipzig and Vienna and, beginning in the 1890s, went to Munich and Berlin. There were great departures in 1911-12 and in 1920 and after; even Kafka left for Berlin. Rilke, Werfel, Paul Kornfeld, and Ernst Weiss, deeply offended by the excesses of Czech nationalism, chose to go, and of the more important writers of German and Jewish-German Prague only four or five remained throughout the years of the republic—among them Max Brod (who died in 1968 in Tel Aviv), Paul Leppin (who died in 1945 back in Prague), Johannes Urzidil (who died in 1970 in Rome), and Ludwig Winder (who died in 1946 in London); it is a more melancholy than cynical observation that the only ones who remained had excellent, prestigious newspaper jobs, were incurably ill, or were too old to move. Few readers are aware that another young generation of writers grew up in republican Prague—my friend the poet H. W. Kolben (who died in 1942 at the Mauthausen concentration camp), the studious Orientalist Franz Baerman Steiner (who lived until 1952 in Oxford), the novelist and poet H. G. Adler (who died in 1988 in London), and the playwright and poet Franz Wurm, still living and working as a psychotherapist in Zurich, the last of the Prague Mohicans.
Even well-meant celebrations are not a good substitute for literary criticism, and the question was not often raised whether Prague German writers moved only in the modern mainstream of classical, neoromantic, or symbolist literature, or whether at least some of them contributed to the achievements of the European avant-garde. From the perspective of the Dev
tsil people, the intentions of their German-writing colleagues seemed a little old-fashioned and their continued admiration of Goethe, Heinrich von Kleist, or Adalbert Stifter (all high even in Kafka’s canon) rather odd. Yet quite apart from Kafka, other writers resisted tradition and advanced new ways of writing. First among them was Franz Werfel, who in his early poetry—
Der Weltfreund
(
The World’s Friend,
1911),
Wir sind (We Are
, 1913), and
Einander
(
To Each Other
, 1915)—was among those
who initiated the expressionist revolt even to Berlin readers and audiences (never mind the Hollywood best-sellers of his later years). His long, harsh lines breaking through neoromantic stanzas were no less astonishing than his sweeping gestures of love for earth, heaven, and all his fellow beings:
I am a corso in a sunny town,
A summer fete with lawns where women glide,
My eye is dazed by too much brilliancy,
 
Upon the twilight grass I will sit down,
And with the earth into the evening ride …
Oh Earth, oh Evening, Joy, Oh in the world to be!
(trans. by Edith Abercrombie Snow)
Only a few experts remember Werfel’s young Prague disciple Karl Brandt, who was too sick to fulfill his promise, or Melchior Vischer, the only Prague Dadaist, who later moved with his Jewish wife to Berlin, where he published a book on Jan Hus in 1940 that was immediately destroyed by the Nazi authorities. Literary history rarely recalls that Prague’s expressionist playwrights, among them Kornfeld and Weiss, gave the German stage an entire repertory of plays far into the 1920s and early 1930s. Most of Prague’s early nonconformists published in the Berlin avant-garde periodical Der
Sturm
(where Max Brod developed his idea that true poetry was based on the importance of the individual word) or in
Die Aktion,
edited by the anarchist Franz Pfempfert, committed to discover art and literature in radical opposition to its time and place. One of the interesting writers contributing from Prague was Marie Holzer, who in her own way anticipated Milena Jesenská by about a generation. Holzer had a sharp eye for changing mores, unveiled the sham relationships between men and women, called loyalty in traditional marriage “a drug,” refused to submit to “nationalist egotism,” and acknowledged not without pain that the Czechs, in 1915 a people certain of victory, had “poets of a wonderful force and of an unerring formal power.” Mrs. Holzer was shot by her husband in a marital dispute, and her courage has yet to be honored in our memory.
Prague German-writing Jews, not much liked by the Czech nationalists, did their best, especially during the years before World War I and between the wars, to make the achievements of Czech art and literature widely known outside Bohemia. Czech writers tended to look to Paris, which rarely responded to their love, while their German-speaking
friends were busy in Leipzig and Berlin triggering interest in Czech Prague. Max Brod had a certain inclination to see himself at the center of a Prague “circle” which actually consisted of many circles within circles, but I do not want to dispute his long and caring efforts to have the works of his German and Czech friends published in Germany and to attract attention to Czech literature and art. He was responsible for bringing Hašek’s Svejk to the attention of the Berlin theater (and, indirectly, to Brecht) and he was instrumental in having Leoš Janá
ek’s operas performed in European opera houses.
Prague Germans and German-writing Jews had long been active translating from contemporary Czech. In 1837- 48, Rudolf Glaser had edited the courageous periodical
Ost und West (East and West),
cultivating German-Slavic togetherness. Siegfried Kapper was among the first translators of K. H. Mácha, and in the following generation Friedrich Adler rendered Jaroslav Vrchlický, a master of formal versatility, into German. During World War I, Pfempfert, in his
Aktion,
published German versions of Czech authors persecuted by the Austrian authorities, yet passed Prussian war censorship without much difficulty; he even printed three special Prague issues, dedicated to the expressionist Franz Werfel, the Czech artist Josef Capek (brother of Karel), and the architect Vlastimil Hoffman. The trouble was that German and Czech poetic idioms had ceased to run close to each other; and as soon as Czechs relied, in a revolt of their own, on the spoken word of the family, the street, the pub, and the workplace, Prague German translators were immediately handicapped, for their literary as well as their spoken language was bookish and it lacked popular dialect or plebeian terms. Werfel’s translation of the Czech visionary Otokar B
ezina (done with the support of Erik Saudek) was perfect, because both the Czech original and the German used rare and artful words, but translators had a far more difficult time in tackling Petr Bezru
, spokesman of the oppressed Silesian miners, or playful Vit
zslav Nezval; it is not surprising that the best translations of Bezru
and Nezval were often undertaken by outsiders (the Bezru
translator Georg Mannheimer, for instance, came to Prague from Vienna before going to Israel). In the years of the republic and until mid-century, Paul/Pavel Eisner was the most productive literary mediator between the two languages, and he devoted so much loving effort and sympathy to Czech that he had become for all practical purposes a writer of the Czech tradition himself. During World War I he translated recent Czech poetry into German, often with expressionist overtones, but by 1930 he turned around and translated German into Czech. Eisner survived the Nazi occupation
hidden in his room in Prague and, after the liberation, emerged as a Czech writer; in a widely read book he praised the strength and courage of Czech. His Czech translation of Thomas Mann’s
Doktor Faustus
was published in 1948, linguistically congenial to the original text and an irreplaceable monument to the translator’s art.

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