Many cities inspire affection, and a few inspire reverence, but Prague must be unique in prompting both sentiments, usually in equal measure. The reverence is easy to understand. Even the casual stroller in the Old City encounters within one small, walkable area a concentration of architectural splendor probably unparalleled in Europe. And yet, for all of Prague’s built magnificence, there is something gritty in its goldenness. The city, or at least the older historical city, is intimate in a way in which, say, Paris or Rome or Jerusalem cannot be, and this intense, almost cozy feeling of familiarity binds its inhabitants uneasily together. Perhaps it is the oddity of the amalgam, the inherent and palpable tension between otherwordly majesty and this-worldly earthiness—between, as it were, the Prague of Mozart and the Prague of the Good Soldier Svejk—which excites other, less attractive reactions. Of the bitter sectarian fury which tormented Ireland, William Butler Yeats could write, with unsurpassed succinctness, “Great hatred, little room,” and in Prague, too, there may dwell at times such an explosive sense of vehement feeling in a tiny, and savagely contested, space. But beyond obvious historical explanations Prague possesses a certain genius loci (a phrase dear to Prague-dwellers to explain their city’s inimitable hold upon them), which is at once irresistible and fierce. “The little Mother has claws,” Franz Kafka famously wrote of his hometown.

Now, with Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz, an emeritus professor at Yale and a well-known authority on German literature, has taken on the immensely ambitious project of writing the first detailed political and cultural history in English of his native city from its legendary origins to the death of President Thomas Garrigue Masaryk in 1937.[1] It is a groundbreaking work and one that all future historians of Prague will be obliged to consult. Bilingual in Czech and German, the son of Catholic and Jewish parents, Demetz would seem to be singularly well qualified to undertake this task. Though he left Prague as an exile in 1949, Demetz has obviously remained in contact with Czech historical scholarship (such as it was under the Communist regime) and has thought deeply, and sometimes painfully, about the fortunes of his native land. His expertise in German literature from medieval times to the present gives him, as well, a privileged perspective on Czech history and culture, and this shows to good advantage in the present work. Moreover, in writing the history of Prague, he had unavoidably to confront the histories of three fatally intertwined but distinct groups: the Czechs themselves, the Germans (or German-speaking Czechs), and the Jews. To his credit, he handles this difficult feat with great aplomb and never allows himself to indulge in partisan sentiments.

The history of Prague is tortuous. Few European cities can have endured more vicissitudes in such relentless and dizzying succession. For the non-Czech reader, there are special difficulties as well, mostly connected with the formidable Czech language, brambled with dense consonants as it is. (Demetz takes a mischievous pleasure in citing the well-known tongue twister “strc’ prst skrz krk”: “put your finger down your throat.” Saying this is like having a mouth full of thistles.) Then, too, merely to follow the fortunes of Bohemian dynasties and their rulers can be strange and confusing; for example, among the many Václavs (or Wenceslaws), Václav IV was sent by his suspicious father, King John (Jan), to be raised in France where he came to be known as Charles, and later reigned under that name as Charles IV, one of the greatest Czech rulers. (In Czech, of course, he is known as Karel!)

At surmounting these obvious obstacles, Demetz is superb. A firm if somewhat garrulous cicerone, he guides the reader through the many twisting thickets of Bohemian history; en route, he often manages to convey a feeling for the powerful personalities of distant figures such as the formidable thirteenth-century Pr’emyslid ruler Otakar II, “the only Shakespearean character of Czech history,” and yet one oddly neglected by Czech historiographers. He is good, too, at redressing neglects. For example, his chapter 6, “Mozart in Prague,” contains a detailed account of the Italian influence on Prague, an influence usually ignored. Demetz’s range of reference is enormous: there is a meticulous, sixteen-page annotated bibliography of works in English, Czech, German, French, Italian, and Latin. Unfortunately, there are no notes (doubtless a publisher’s “economy”), and so it is sometimes hard to track down references.

Despite the author’s erudition, Prague in Black and Gold is a curiously uneven book. Eight dense historical chapters, which constitute the bulk of the book, are sandwiched between a quite personal preface and an even more personal, and outspoken, postscript titled “A Difficult Return to Prague.” In the postscript, Demetz describes his return to his native city after forty years of exile, and the account is by turns mordant, wry, and moving. It is incontestably the best-written section in the entire book. Published separately, the postscript has, quite justly, earned a certain celebrity and has drawn attention to the book. The preface, however, with its startling opening admission—“I love and hate my hometown, and my warring sentiments have not been assuaged by recurrent returns to Prague since the takeover of 1989”—promises more than the ensuing book does, or perhaps can, deliver. Alas, the eight intervening chapters, even allowing for occasional successes (such as chapter 4 on Jan Hus and the very complicated Hussite Revolution of 1415–22), are leaden-footed and frequently shambling. Though there are occasional errors of fact, the true problem with the book lies in its English prose.

Only when Demetz draws on his beloved German (or Austrian) literature or when he deals with happenings with which he has been personally involved does his prose lift and become lucent and graceful. Thus, when he describes the funeral of Masaryk on September 21, 1937 (at which he was present as a fifteen-year-old), Demetz gives a splendid and quite moving account which holds the reader’s attention as nothing else does in the hundreds of preceding pages. (Incidentally, the book concludes with this funeral; no explanation is given as to why the Nazi era as well as the forty years of Communist rule are left virtually unmentioned. Perhaps these will form the subject of a later volume.)

Part of Demetz’s difficulty in Prague in Black and Gold, apart from the prose (about which more later), arises from his governing thesis. For Demetz, Prague is not so much “magic Prague,” the city of Cabalists, Lurianic mystics, and the ubiquitous Golem, but instead a city of rationalists. For him, it is the city of Kepler and Tycho Brahe, of David Gans and the physician Johannes Jessenius, of Bernard Bolzano and Masaryk (a philosopher as well as president). Demetz is irritated, and no doubt rightly so, by the clinging Bohemian fog and shadows which insinuate themselves into our usual images of Prague, and he sees this distorting fog as a by-product of a degraded Romanticism, resurrected somewhat paradoxically under the Communist regime. He is especially critical of the 1973 work by the Italian Slavist Angelo Maria Ripellino, recently available in English under the title, appropriately enough, of Magic Prague.

Now Magic Prague is a wonderful book, and fully deserving of the “classic” status it enjoys, for the author was passionately in love both with Prague and with Prague’s poets (he had an incomparable knowledge of Czech poetry). Magic Prague is a kind of rapturous paean to a city which exists, which can only exist, in golden words rather than in golden stones. It is a book of excess, to be sure, and as such, hard to refute with dry anecdotes of rationalists, however illustrious. Demetz does his best, but he has, I think, cut the ground away too severely from under his own feet. By abjuring any interest in the “mystical” aspect of Prague, he banishes all affective, all passionate, notes from his account, and this deadens his book.

Whether we like it or not, and even if it is an aberration, Czechs themselves—and not only sensationalistic German or American novelists, such as Gustav Meyrink or Francis Marion Crawford—nurture, and continue to feast upon, such legends as that of the Golem. I recently opened a 1996 collection of poems (Sve’tlohry) by the fine contemporary Czech poet Jana Stroblová and my eyes fell on the verse “V pozadí vesmír, tak ponuryï jak spící Golem” (“In the background the universe, somber as a sleeping Golem”). And again, in 1997, a large and profusely illustrated scholarly tome titled Magnum Opus appeared in Prague, with the subtitle The Book of Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, Magic, Astrology, the Kabbala, and Secret Societies in Bohemia. The book, it turns out, was the catalog for a very popular exhibition. This tendency may not be laudable (and one understands and sympathizes with Demetz’s sense of frustration in the face of the obdurately irrational), but it is a living tendency and apparently a part of the Czech mentalité which cannot be ignored. I do not suggest that Demetz ought to have oiled his narrative with the chrism of legend, but by eschewing it so resolutely, he has left himself little but dry, and all too often desiccated, fragments. The critic Erich Auerbach remarked in Mimesis that “to write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legend.” I do not think that Auerbach was being wholly censorious in formulating this dictum. Even an ironic recognition of the role of legend in the city’s history would have lightened and animated Demetz’s narrative.

Still, there is much of great interest and value in Prague in Black and Gold. Demetz has a nice proclivity for rescuing unjustly neglected figures and works from oblivion, and he does this regularly throughout the book. Thus, in discussing the founding of Prague and its mythic mother, the “soothsayer” Libussa (or Libus’e in Czech), he draws not only on the fascinating Latin chronicle of Cosmas, a twelfth-century Bohemian chronicler, but on some unexpected literary sources such as the unread (and, indeed, unreadable) colossal drama by the German poet Clemens Brentano entitled Die Gründung Prags as well as the verse play Libussa by the dour Austrian playwright of genius Franz Grillparzer. In Demetz’s account, delightfully, Libus’e herself comes through as a striking figure, at once resolute, shrewd and seductive.

Women have played a decisive role in the history of Prague, and it is another of Demetz’s merits to have brought this out, though thankfully without the usual professorial handwringing and meae culpae. In addition to the expected historical figures, such as Maria Theresa, there is a trenchant account of the nineteenth-century novelist Boz’ena Ne’mcová, the founder of all modern Czech literature, and her desperate struggle for personal liberty in the midst of a tormented marriage. Utterly obscure women, such as Marie Holzer, outspoken in her views on women’s rights (and finally murdered by her husband), step briefly from the shadows in Demetz’s telling. Milena Jesenská, whom Demetz rather primly calls “Kafka’s onetime friend,” makes several appearances, as does George Eliot, accompanied by George Henry Lewes (her common-law husband, not merely her “devoted friend,” as Demetz terms him).

Demetz resurrects some neglected personages but he himself manages to neglect perhaps the most significant of all Czech historical figures: Jan Amos Komenskyï, more commonly known as Comenius (1592– 1670). True, Comenius was Moravian and not born in Prague, but his influence has been immense, and not only in his own time: his significance for Masaryk—himself of Moravian and Slovak origins—as a thinker and as a statesman was huge (and well documented). It is puzzling to see only three cursory mentions of him here.

Demetz refreshingly abstains from passing judgment on figures whom, we sense, he must otherwise deplore. One such is the modern poet Vite’zslav Nezval, arguably the most gifted Czech poet of the twentieth century and yet, for much of his later career, a shameless apologist for Stalinism and an effusive panegyrist of Stalin himself. Together with Seifert, Nezval remains the inimitable poet of Prague, and Demetz cites him, often to striking effect:  

Prague of a hundred towers
with the fingers of all the saints
with the fingers of perjury …
with the burning fingers of women

lying on their backs
with the fingers that touch the stars …
with the fingers of a windmill and a lilac bush.

And of modern Czech poetry, a body of work created not only by Nezval but also by such supremely talented writers as Frantisek Halas, Frantisek Hrubín, Vladimír Holan, and, more recently, Jan Skácel, Demetz can write, with long-overdue justice, “Czech poeticist poetry still constitutes one of the most astonishing and wonderful secrets of Prague.”

It is a pity that Demetz did not devote more of his book to Czech poetry or to Czech literature in general. He has a feeling for literature which is perceptible at once to the reader, a feeling which he does not possess for political or military or even cultural history. All too often, his capsule accounts of historical personages lack vividness and specificity. This is particularly evident in what should otherwise have been the most interesting chapter of the book, that on Rudolf II and his court.

It may be that Demetz’s dislike of the irrational and of the fantastic legends surrounding Rudolf colors his view. This is a period, after all, in which not only Rudolf himself but such compelling individuals as Kepler and Brahe; the alchemist John Dee; and Rabbi Judah Loew, the most illustrious scholar in the history of Jewish Prague, flourished. Demetz wades manfully, if disdainfully, into the dark crosscurrents of the Cabala in sixteenth-century Prague but his heart is not in it; his account is indebted heavily to the researches of Moshe Idel (whom he misnames Moshe Edel in the text but gets right in the bibliography) and contains nothing new or surprising. The whole treatment of Rudolf, whose personality and career leave Demetz manifestly baffled, is weak; readers would do better to turn to the classic account by R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and his World: A Study in Intellectual History (Oxford, 1973) or the more recent monograph, published in Prague and distributed by Thames and Hudson, entitled Rudolf II and Prague: The Imperial Court and Residential City as the Cultural and Spiritual Heart of Central Europe (1997).

By far the weakest aspect of Prague in Black and Gold, however, is the prose in which it is written. True, the postscript is elegant; but, as Demetz himself informs us, this was composed originally in German and translated into English by “Professor Harry Zohn of Brandeis University.” Would that Professor Zohn had been called in for the remainder of the book! The opening two chapters are merely ponderous and flat, but with chapter 3 (is this where the copyeditor dozed off?), the English language begins a cruel and punishing journey, more in black than in gold, through the byways of Czech history. This is not merely a question of poor English prose style, but of outright solecism, including ungrammatical constructions, run-on sentences, dangling participles, misplaced complements, false accords, and incorrect usage of individual words. For a few dozen pages the reader is inclined to pardon Professor Demetz (after Demetz’s forty years at deconstructionist Yale could his prose not suffer?). Soon, however, the continual accumulation of stylistic and grammatical infelicities begins to gall.

Throughout the book Demetz demonstrates an almost perverse mastery of the dangling participle; for example, on page 187, he can write of the Englishwoman Jane Elizabeth Weston in Rudolfine Prague that she “was buried in the cloister of St. Thomas … where thousands of foreign visitors, among them many English, now quaff the famous dark beer oblivious to historical reminiscences.” I, too, prefer my beer dark and oblivious but this is not, I suspect, what Demetz meant to say. A little later, he indulges in a spectacular run-on sentence (I am tempted to call it a runaway sentence), which I quote in full:

But for a cup of real coffee, Prague connoisseurs had to turn to Georgios Deodatus, from Damascus, who, clad in an Arab burnoose, walked through the streets offering hot coffee, and it is to his never-ending fame that he bought himself a house on Karlova Street in the Old Town and established the first coffee-house there in 1713—exactly at the moment when Prague was visited (for the last time) by the plague, which killed thirteen thousand people.

Oh well, at least they had “a cup of real coffee” before succumbing! This sentence (and far too many others) also illustrates what I would call Demetz’s “rock-slide” style of writing. One fact dislodges another in his mind which he cannot resist inserting, and the two roll downhill together; as they roll, they dislodge further facts which scatter before them, peppering the reader with non sequiturs.

Sometimes Demetz’s careless English leads to comical malentendus. Thus, of Kafka’s birthplace, he can write “Franz Kafka was born there—true, in a purely topographical sense.” Is this opposed to, say, the obstetric sense? Again, to speak of the “fundaments” of a building, an obsolete usage though correct in the purely lexical sense, betrays an insensitivity to the connotations of English.

If the ineptitude of Demetz’s English is surprising, the casual incompetence of his editor is astonishing. In the preface, Demetz acknowledges the well-known editor Elisabeth Sifton, “who spent more time on my text than it ever deserved.” I cannot say what amount of time Demetz’s text deserved, but clearly it required more than it got. This is all the sadder in that Demetz is a genuinely distinguished writer in German. His little book René Rilkes Prager Jahre (1953) is an elegant and witty evocation of the Prague of Rilke’s childhood and is beautifully written. His collection of essays Böhmische Sonne/Mährischer Mond: Essays und Erinnerungen (1996), in which the postscript of the present work first appeared, is equally graceful. What a pity that Professor Demetz did not write the present work in German first and then oversee its translation into English.

Despite the flaws of this book, Peter Demetz has given us a very useful work, and one which both students of Czech history and travelers to Prague will find an invaluable source book. Prague in Black and Gold is a book for the obstinate reader, but such a reader will be more than amply rewarded by the wealth and breadth of learning it contains.

Notes
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Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City, by Peter Demetz; Hill and Wang, 411 pages, $27.50; $15 paper. Go back to the text.

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