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