Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (87 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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My father had a rather low opinion of the pitiful poems and dubious novels of his Prague fellow writers, and it was some time before I realized that all these were famous people who later were the subjects of dissertations. My father thought very highly of Ludwig Winder, loved reciting from Paul Leppin’s poetic collection
Glocken, die im Dunkeln läuten (Bells That Peal in the Dark)
, and enjoyed his friendship with Hans Regina von Nack, who tended to cultivate the lighter muse, and Louis Weinert, who wrote dramas and popular detective novels (the Prague Edgar Wallace). He had no use for the young Rilke, and about Max Brod, of whom he was secretly jealous, he mainly told anecdotes, among them, according to him, about Brod corrupting the driver at the Cedok travel bureau with an annual Christmas goose and a driver always stopping the tourist bus in front of Max’s apartment and calling out through his megaphone, “This is the home of the German poet Max Brod!” They (especially the ladies) “knew all about” Johannes Urzidil, later an ally of Adalbert Stifter, because he had addressed his expressionistic primal screams (published by the well-known Munich publisher Kurt Wolff) to my Aunt Fritta, who had, however, given him the cold shoulder, and later to my mother, who had had her fill of expressionist poetry. (Decades later Urzidil told me this in his apartment in his New York exile.) Live and let live—even when a nationalist mob occupied the old Ständetheater for the Czech nation in November 1920 and threw my father out of his office and down the stairs, he accepted this, as he later told me, as a traffic accident of Bohemian history. I also remember a borrowed frock coat that was ironed at home (to be exact, our Czech servant girl did the pressing and my mother the supervising) when my father was invited to an audience, at Hrad
any Castle, with President T. G. Masaryk, who awarded him a scholarship from his private fund.
Glocken, die im Dunkeln läuten (Bells That Peal in the Dark)
, and enjoyed his friendship with Hans Regina von Nack, who tended to cultivate the lighter muse, and Louis Weinert, who wrote dramas and popular detective novels (the Prague Edgar Wallace). He had no use for the young Rilke, and about Max Brod, of whom he was secretly jealous, he mainly told anecdotes, among them, according to him, about Brod corrupting the driver at the Cedok travel bureau with an annual Christmas goose and a driver always stopping the tourist bus in front of Max’s apartment and calling out through his megaphone, “This is the home of the German poet Max Brod!” They (especially the ladies) “knew all about” Johannes Urzidil, later an ally of Adalbert Stifter, because he had addressed his expressionistic primal screams (published by the well-known Munich publisher Kurt Wolff) to my Aunt Fritta, who had, however, given him the cold shoulder, and later to my mother, who had had her fill of expressionist poetry. (Decades later Urzidil told me this in his apartment in his New York exile.) Live and let live—even when a nationalist mob occupied the old Ständetheater for the Czech nation in November 1920 and threw my father out of his office and down the stairs, he accepted this, as he later told me, as a traffic accident of Bohemian history. I also remember a borrowed frock coat that was ironed at home (to be exact, our Czech servant girl did the pressing and my mother the supervising) when my father was invited to an audience, at Hrad
any Castle, with President T. G. Masaryk, who awarded him a scholarship from his private fund.In my youth Prague did not attract as many tourists as it does today. The city was not particularly chic, and the palaces, churches, gardens, and bridges were open to the strollers, old people, lovers, and poets—all of them, Prague poets who wrote in German and surrealists who wrote in Czech.
Prague … I am the tongue of your bells and your rain
I am the tongue of the grapes and also that of the shelters
I am the tongue of boredom on Sundays and also of the water
over the weirs.
I am the tongue of the grapes and also that of the shelters
I am the tongue of boredom on Sundays and also of the water
over the weirs.
(Vít
zslav Nezval)
zslav Nezval)In the cafés and wine taverns people gossiped about the latest scandals of Milena Jesenská or discussed the latest play of Karel Capek, but today this would no longer be so simple. The Café Unionka, where Prague modernism happened under the care of that mythical headwaiter, long ago gave way to a dull glass palace in which government-approved children’s books were produced, and the Café Slavia, where even dissidents of the 1970s and 1980s had a regular table under police surveillance, was claimed after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 by international tourist groups and European youths with alternative lifestyles, including “punks.” (It is closed today, pending the legal resolution of difficult restitution problems.) In the evening a two-man band that Billy Wilder might have invented played there. The little wine tavern U Šup
, where surrealist poets used to discuss Trotsky, now serves Chinese food, and a waiter takes reservations three days in advance in a leather-bound red book. When I let it be known that I planned to visit the Arco Café, once the headquarters of the so-called Prague Circle, everyone repeatedly warned me that this was now the hangout of pickpockets, swindlers, and purse snatchers whom President Havel amnestied when he assumed office (and who are popularly known as “Havel’s children”). At first they met in the buffet of the Ernest-Denis railroad station, but when the station management closed the buffet, they moved across the street to the venerable Arco. I went there anyway; the new picaresque element was, if anything, petit bourgeois, and the chairs were standard Prague café furniture from the Third Five-Year Plan. Retirees and lovers waiting for trains to the provinces were drinking Red River, the local Bohemian tonic water; I began to develop a taste for it too.
, where surrealist poets used to discuss Trotsky, now serves Chinese food, and a waiter takes reservations three days in advance in a leather-bound red book. When I let it be known that I planned to visit the Arco Café, once the headquarters of the so-called Prague Circle, everyone repeatedly warned me that this was now the hangout of pickpockets, swindlers, and purse snatchers whom President Havel amnestied when he assumed office (and who are popularly known as “Havel’s children”). At first they met in the buffet of the Ernest-Denis railroad station, but when the station management closed the buffet, they moved across the street to the venerable Arco. I went there anyway; the new picaresque element was, if anything, petit bourgeois, and the chairs were standard Prague café furniture from the Third Five-Year Plan. Retirees and lovers waiting for trains to the provinces were drinking Red River, the local Bohemian tonic water; I began to develop a taste for it too.In my youth even the Charles Bridge was virtually deserted, and I had a trysting place there—on the left bank, under the bridge, down the steps in the direction of the Minor Town. There, near the sloshing old rental boats, was a little bench, and overhead the outlines of the saints’ statues on the bridge and the stars. There it was easy to recite a poem and boldly undo a button on a blouse. My Italian friend Paola, who had read her compatriot Angelo Maria Ripellino’s book about magic Prague, now wanted to sit on the bench with me, but I discovered that it now
abutted a concrete-covered playground and crowds of tourists were passing by overhead. I had to content myself with telling her how I had sat there fifty years ago—with W. (no kisses, for she had a steady boyfriend), R. (Mondays), and C. (Wednesdays), when the Prague May nights with the streets filled with blossoming chestnuts worked their magic; failing that, we went to an outdoor restaurant, the Golden Well (Zlatá Studn
), from which we could see the entire city
(ganz Prag in weiter Runde,
as Rilke put it), and finally we would ascend the Pet
ín Hill to the monument of Karel Hynek Mácha, the first Czech romantic poet, and, as tradition required, place a small bunch of violets on the pedestal as an offering to the spirit of love.
abutted a concrete-covered playground and crowds of tourists were passing by overhead. I had to content myself with telling her how I had sat there fifty years ago—with W. (no kisses, for she had a steady boyfriend), R. (Mondays), and C. (Wednesdays), when the Prague May nights with the streets filled with blossoming chestnuts worked their magic; failing that, we went to an outdoor restaurant, the Golden Well (Zlatá Studn
), from which we could see the entire city(ganz Prag in weiter Runde,
as Rilke put it), and finally we would ascend the Pet
ín Hill to the monument of Karel Hynek Mácha, the first Czech romantic poet, and, as tradition required, place a small bunch of violets on the pedestal as an offering to the spirit of love.It is easy to avoid the international masses that push their way across the bridge; all you have to do is change direction and proceed upstream. After all, Prague has a second castle mountain, the Vyšehrad. For a long time the P
emyslid dynasty was not certain where it should reside, but once it decided on the Hrad
any, the Vyšehrad with its chapels and churches began to lead a shadow existence. Now it is very quiet there, and the strollers are of a different kind: retired women lingering in the sunshine, high school kids smoking their first cigarettes, learned connoisseurs bent on knowing everything exactly. After all, Prague has always been a dual or triple city, and its topography has changed with the language that was spoken and the religion that was espoused. On Sundays, German residents went to the shady Stromovka, on the left bank, near the curve in the river, while the Czechs were more attracted to the old Vyšehrad cemetery, where the most important daughters and sons of the Czech nation are buried. I sat for a long time on a bench over the old bastions, where it was absolutely quiet, and then walked through the rows of crowded graves. Antonín Dvo
ák’s grave is not far from the entrance, and by the other exterior wall is the tomb of Božena N
mcová. In front of her grave were two gangly schoolgirls, who looked as their kind had looked forty years ago, and when one said earnestly to the other, “Here lies our Božena,” I felt melancholy again.
emyslid dynasty was not certain where it should reside, but once it decided on the Hradany, the Vyšehrad with its chapels and churches began to lead a shadow existence. Now it is very quiet there, and the strollers are of a different kind: retired women lingering in the sunshine, high school kids smoking their first cigarettes, learned connoisseurs bent on knowing everything exactly. After all, Prague has always been a dual or triple city, and its topography has changed with the language that was spoken and the religion that was espoused. On Sundays, German residents went to the shady Stromovka, on the left bank, near the curve in the river, while the Czechs were more attracted to the old Vyšehrad cemetery, where the most important daughters and sons of the Czech nation are buried. I sat for a long time on a bench over the old bastions, where it was absolutely quiet, and then walked through the rows of crowded graves. Antonín Dvoák’s grave is not far from the entrance, and by the other exterior wall is the tomb of Božena Nmcová. In front of her grave were two gangly schoolgirls, who looked as their kind had looked forty years ago, and when one said earnestly to the other, “Here lies our Božena,” I felt melancholy again.Other books
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