Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (78 page)

BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

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The Czechoslovak Republic recognized Jews as a nation, and as early as September 3, 1918, Masaryk asserted in the United States that Jews would enjoy the same rights as all other citizens; a month later, in
The New York Times,
he declared his respect for Zionism: “not a movement of political chauvinism” but one that “represents the moral rebirth of [the Jewish] people.” Delegates of Jewish organizations in Prague presented a memorandum to the National Committee on October 28, and on December 31, 1918, delegates of the newly established Jewish National Council, one of them being Max Brod (Franz Kafka’s closest friend), were received by the president at Hrad

any Castle; he assured them that he looked with favor on their aims, though he delicately reminded them that Jews who felt close to Czech or German tradition should be free to assert their views. Assimilation, or rather acculturation, had advanced far in the western lands of the Czechoslovak Republic, and there was a significant gap between Jews who defined themselves by religion and those by nationality: in 1921, of all Bohemian Jews, nearly 80,000 in number, only 14.6 percent
felt they belonged to a Jewish
nation,
and nine years later the situation had not much changed—of 76,301 only 16.6 percent declared Jewish
nationality.

On January 6, 1919, a Jewish Party, claiming a right to self-determination based on Wilsonian principles, was established in Prague, but factional and ideological tensions continually ran high; in the elections, it failed to rally sufficient support to enter parliament and later succeeded in sending two delegates to parliament only by agreements with a Polish group in 1928 and in tandem with Socialists in 1935. In Prague, most middle-class Jews acculturated to the German tradition regularly voted for the German Democratic Freedom Party (Deutsche Demokratische Freiheitspartei), ably led by Dr. Bruno Kafka, a cousin of the writer; those closer to the Czechs more often than not voted Social Democratic (the record of the right-wing National Democrats was not inviting to either of them). The elections in the Prague Jewish community, reflecting the many Jewries of the republic, clearly revealed the polarity of options: of 31,751 Jews entitled to the ballot, less than one-third cared to vote at all in 1921, with the Jewish Party polling 1,968 votes, and, among other groups, the German Liberals 2,362, and the Union of Czech Jews nearly as many (2,344). Zionists, active in the Jewish Party and in many other organizations, were deeply divided between those who wanted to help build Eretz Israel here and now and the others, influenced by the theologian Martin Buber, who were committed to studying Jewish history and philosophy to increase Jewish religious and cultural self-consciousness. “Little mother Prague,” as Franz Kafka well knew, did not let go of its people easily, and though Kafka’s friend Hugo Bergmann and others left for Palestine early, Max Brod, personally committed to Jewish affairs, left on the last train from Prague to the Polish border (on March 15, 1939) and saw, through the windows, advance German units occupying Ostrava station. When he died, it is said, the 1939 Prague telephone directory was found on his desk.

The Cultured of Republican Prague

Punctually on October 28, 1918, a new committee, chaired by P

emysl Šámal, chief organizer of Masaryk’s Mafie, took over Prague’s city administration, but the discussion about how to reorganize the new capital of the republic dragged on for years; only on January 1, 1922, was Great Prague legally established. This new city consisted of the five towns that
had been brought together in the mid-nineteenth century (Old Town, New Town, Hrad

any, Vyšehrad, and Josefov), the five suburbs that joined subsequently, and thirty-eight towns and villages; the new metropolitan region incorporated nearly 700,000 citizens and was the sixth-largest city in Europe. At that time, 27.2 percent of all its apartments still consisted of only one room, and 81.3 percent lacked baths; it is not surprising, though patriots were astonished, that one-fifth of all votes in the municipal elections were Communist. Prague was distinctly behind in constructing affordable housing for the less privileged, and while in post-World War I Vienna, a Socialist city government had immediately employed outstanding architects to build apartments and switnming pools for the proletariat (or, rather, for loyal Social Democrats), in Prague funds and energies were invested in public office buildings and the new ministries. Prague architects had already broken with the past by 1911-12 (perhaps a little later than the painters who, after exhibitions of works by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin, formed the Czech-German Group of Eight), and František Kot

ra had trained a remarkable group of disciples; from abroad came the Slovene Jože Ple

nik, who made Hrad

any Castle more habitable for Masaryk. Kot

ra was fortunate to have patrons who did not interfere with his projects; his sternly playful Mozarteum, now a bit grimy and disfigured by a bazaar on the ground floor, the Koruna building on the lower left corner of Wenceslas Square, and, above all, the Lucema complex of elegant shops, restaurants, theaters, and bars, built for Václav Havel’s father, have become attractive elements of the modern cityscape. Younger members of the group tended to a Czech version of Cubism, which was among the most remarkable achievements of the Czech arts—e.g., Josef Go

ár’s house of the black Madonna (now, appropriately, a showplace of modern art) and Josef Chochol’s ingenious apartment houses, hidden from the tourists in the gray streets under the Vyšehrad.

National and political demands have long burdened the free play of the arts in Central Europe and it can be argued that republican independence was a mixed blessing to the new architecture, requiring as it did that architects take on official tasks not necessarily consonant with avant-garde ideas. In Vienna, there was sufficient space for new offices in the old imperial palaces, but the new Czechoslovak Republic wanted its own ministries, not merely old Baroque shells for new files. State-sponsored competitions favored a massively modern tradition, as was evident in the ministries of transport and agriculture, and cubists began patriotically to play with Slavic folklore in which abstract and bright lines were softened in a “Rondocubism,” exemplified by the bank of the Czechoslovak legions on Po

Street, or compromised their radical principles with colorful facades and, possibly, ironic memories of the Italian Renaissance. (An Italian insurance company building on Jungmannova Street was called by visiting Le Corbusier a project of “Assyrian character,” and he thought it showed Czech opposition to recent architecture.) By the end of the 1920s, pure lines and long glass fronts began to dominate in the new projects within the inner city; Josef Fuchs built the impressive Prague Fair Place (its history was spoiled by the Nazi order that Jews gather there to leave for the camps), and on Wenceslas Square constructivist norms determined the sober shape of the Štýblo Passage (now Alpha) and Hotel Juliš, unsure of its function today but in its time elegantly incorporating a cinema popular with chic young couples and a splendid café. Avant-garde architecture and the new film industry were bound to meet: functionalist principles prevailed at the Barrandov site on the south of Prague, incorporating the new film studios, a fashionable restaurant, U-shaped terraces, and a magnificent swimming pool at the bottom of a cliff. It was the meeting place of the
jeunesse dorée—poets
of uncertain income and great talent, starlets of the budding film industry—in the first republic’s best years. Thanks to Václav Havel, Sr., father of the president, a rich and intelligent real estate mogul (perhaps the only one in Czech history), it was a far cry from the dark, self-centered Prague that international travelers nowadays want to discover at almost any price.

Social Topography of Prague 1930