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The Prague-Berlin Express
Language and long memories of a distant era: Prague in Danger
This time I was following the same rail route taken by Czecho-Slovak president Emil Hácha, "a gentleman of the old school" of diplomacy, from Prague to Berlin on March 14th, 1939 to meet with Hitler and his ministers. Despite his intentions to negotiate and keep the Republic independent and from splitting, Hácha fell into a Nazi trap to capture to Czechoslovakia with minimal effort in the President's absence, blackmailing him into bloodless surrender. In the early morning, the Wehrmacht would invade via the occupied Sudetenland, which had been ceded to Germany the previous September – about half of its residents identified as German. (This weekend, the area seemed was a tranquil countryside, with hardly a car visible by the winding Elba river, at least before we arrived in starkly modern Dresden.)
While reading Prague in Danger, by Peter Demetz, who himself was a young Prague resident whose identity was split three ways during the war, I am reminded again of the city's polyglot, not-quite melting-pot past. Demetz's philandering father was a German-speaking playwright and theater producer whose family was of linguistic minority Ladino from the South Tyrolian region of Austria near Italy, and his mother was from a Jewish family originally from a small Bohemian town and came to Prague to escape rural anti-Semitism around 1900. Between the unfolding of events political and military beginning and meticulously researched details on the changes in Prague's culture, Demetz intersperses recollections of his days as a teenager in the Protectorate, dividing his time between his two incompatible families and his spirit between his Czech patriotism and the will towards self-preservation. Before the outbreak of war, Prague had two (even three) parallel societies, and corresponding institutions: the German theater, the Czech theater, the Yiddish theater; German cafes, Czech cafes, Jewish cafes; German Charles University and the Czech division (students fought in the streets over possession of the 600 year old school’s physical insignia) and literary magazines of German poetry nearly entirely separate from their Czech counterparts save for a few students who translated works to be published for each.
Forget the freedoms of the rigorous intellectual hothouse of the Weimar Republic. After that era of German history came to a catastrophic close, and in the weeks following the Anschluss, Prague became a haven for leftists and the avant-garde of all kinds, fleeing the Nazis in Berlin and Vienna and intensifying the conversation in the many cultures of Prague. Many were eventually smuggled out of the Protectorate via Poland once German Facsism arrived in Bohemia. Though there was racial and nationalistic unrest before the invasion, the German presence threw the precarious situation entirely out of balance as Czech newspapers (and liberal German ones, too) as well as theaters were shuttered. Later, in 1941, Demetz worked in a secondhand bookshop in Prague (Cz: Antikvariát/De: Antiquariat) and had to be very careful about the books he recommended and provided for customers. For instance, “every week or so, an elderly man appeared, completely with loden coat and Nazi badge, asked if we had a book by one Franz Kafka, a local Prague writer, and smiled contentedly when I answered that his writings were long vergriffen [out of print] … I think we both enjoyed this Kafka-esque game.” Another patron was a Luftwaffe sergeant who Demetz discovered was fond of Brecht’s 'Threepenny Opera' and in a whisper would relay BBC reports to Demetz that he heard on his forbidden radio by the airfield.
Fast forward sixty years. From the drunk Bavarian gymnasium students we met on Friday night in a bar to the witty bartender, a Brazilian, no one we met in Berlin didn't respond with pleasure upon hearing that we came from Prague. The Brazilian thought Czech beers were the best and though the Bavarians claimed their own Munich brew to be the world's greatest. They had previously spent a particularly raucous night at the cyberpunk-esque club in the formerly industrial neighborhood of our dorm and couldn't wait to go back to Prague (though they can't speak a word of Czech). On the other hand, when the Czech RAs see my German 1 textbook, they have almost always responded negatively. "I'll never learn German. I can't – unless I get a German boyfriend" or "Like the Soviets, they tried to destroy our language." I wonder what it must be like for our charismatic Tyrolian-born German professor, Joe, to have learned Czech only by living here since the 1990s. I’m always a little amused when he speaks the Slavic language to other professors and wonder if they can perceive an accent in Czech as we do in English. Another professor (Czech) believes that the reason for low enrollment in his class on arts journalism is the draw of Berlin's more dynamic contemporary scene over Prague's. But individual Czech disgruntlement with the Germans is perhaps misplaced.
At an event with my internship, Robert Cottrell, a former writer for The Economist and a British expat who now runs an Antiquariat in Riga, Latvia's capital, spoke of Germany's present-day importance. He advises Central European countries to to "[c]ultivate the strongest possible relations with Germany. It happens to be the biggest and strongest and richest country in this part of the map … just get as close to Germany as you can on every front: cultural diplomacy, rhetorical diplomacy, diplomacy diplomacy. Send your best ballet, your best opera, raise your profile, make sure no government minister ever says a rude word and always a nice one, support Germany in the UN, support Germany in the EU" even go as far as rooting for them in the World Cup! We must, however remember that in times of crises even these assurances can be in flux. A remarkable figure from the war era who bridged the divide between the German/Czech cultural divide was Milena Jesenská. Political writer, Trotskyite, Holocaust victim, a brief lover of, but more importantly, a translator and friend of Kafka's, she described the tides of refugees washing into Prague: "people … without documents, no food, with empty hands. Wandering among us is the reflection of many hundreds of appalling human fates, hundreds of thousands of painful partings, suicides and injustices."
[Img: a Czech factory on the Labe/Elbe river that crosses the Czech/German border and runs through the heart of the former Sudetenland.]
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