Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

prague palimpsest

prague palimpsest

Writing, Memory, and the City

alfred thomas

the university of chicago press chicago and london

alfred thomas is professor of English and Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the author of five books, most recently of A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007) and The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture (2007). The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2010 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2010 Printed in the United States of America 19╇ 18╇ 17╇ 16╇ 15╇ 14╇ 13╇ 12╇ 11╇ 10â•…â•…â•… 1╇ 2╇ 3╇ 4╇ 5 isbn-13: 978-0-226-79540-9 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-79540-3 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, Alfred, 1958– â•… Prague palimpsest : writing, memory, and the city / Alfred Thomas. â•…â•…â•… p. cm. â•… Includes bibliographical references and index. â•… isbn-13: 978-0-226-79540-9 (cloth : alk. paper) â•… isbn-10: 0-226-79540-3 (cloth : alk. paper)â•… 1. Prague (Czech Republic)—In literature.╇ 2. Legends—Czech Republic—Prague.╇ 3. Libuše (Legendary character).╇ 4. Jewish ghettos—Czech Republic—Legends.╇ 5. Golem.â•… I. Title. â•… pn56.3.p73t46 2010 â•… 809'.9335843712—dc22 2009050626 atThe paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

@ for michael dem einzigen, der mich nach böhmen begleitet hat

It is the narrow, hidden tracks that lead back to our lost homeland; what contains the solution to the last mysteries is not the ugly scar that life’s rasp leaves on us, but the fine, almost invisible writing that is engraved in our body. —Gustav Meyrink Ancient folio of stone parchments, city-book in whose pages there is “still so much to be read, to dream, to understand.” —Angelo Maria Ripellino

contents

Preface A Note on Translations, Quotations, and Names Introduction

xi xv 1

1. Women on the Verge of History: Libuše and the Foundational Legend of Prague

15

2. Deviant Monsters and Wayward Women: The Prague Ghetto and the Legend of the Golem

43

3. The Castle Hill Was Hidden: Franz Kafka and Czech Literature

77

4. A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Nezval, and Camus

109

5. Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing

137

Epilogue: Postmodern Prague?

168

Appendix: Translations of Poems about Prague

177

Bibliography

183

Index

193

ix

preface

T

he completion of the first draft of this book coincided with a highly symbolic anniversary: forty years earlier, on August 21, 1968, the combined armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded the Czechoslovak capital, Prague. I remember watching these momentous and confusing events unfold on British television. Of course, as a child of nine, I did not understand the geopolitical implications of what was happening—that the Soviet Union was cracking down on a satellite state it perceived to be breaking away from its oppressive orbit. And yet I recall being profoundly moved by the blackand-white images of the distraught citizens of a faraway city appealing to the occupying soldiers to go home. Many of these young men did not even understand the broken Russian that was being addressed to them, since they hailed from the non-European regions of the Soviet Union, including those Caucasian regions that, even as I write, are being threatened by a newly assertive Russia. Moreover, the soldiers had been brainwashed into thinking that they were liberating their Communist brothers and sisters from the threat of capitalist annexation; hence, they were as confused as the natives they thought they were liberating. These raw recruits had expected the Czechs to welcome them with flowers and open arms. Imagine their dismay on witnessing instead angry defiance and clenched fists. Today I understand the political context of the traumatic events I witnessed as a child all those years ago. The intriguing thing is that I was affected by them at all. Why did this tragedy move me so much? Why did I remember it so vividly while other political crises were forgotten or overlooked? Why Prague of all places? Ten years later, as a freshman majoring in Slavic studies at Cambridge University, I went to Prague for the first time and saw the place with my own eyes. By now the city was festooned with red banners asserting the xi

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solidarity between the Soviet and Czechoslovak peoples. The defiant protesters had turned into acquiescent and sullen citizens. It was the late 1970s—the so-called Normalization—and there were remarkably few foreign visitors in those days. I would wander alone through the ancient streets of the city like a latter-day flaneur, trying to take in the sheer beauty of its monuments and churches. In identifying with the fate of this city as a child, I realize now that I was simply forming part of a literary tradition that goes back at least a century and a half. As I began to research this book, I discovered numerous writers who had similarly traveled to the city in quest of their own identity. The eponymous protagonist of W. G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2001) hears a British radio broadcast about Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Prague who had come to England on the Kindertransport and settled there. This broadcast triggers his childhood memories—or what he thinks are his memories— and he goes to Prague to rediscover his origins. Sebald does not make it clear whether Austerlitz is really a Czech Jew or just imagines that he is one. Perhaps his protagonist is so alienated by the modern world that he is searching for an alternative homeland that will finally banish his sense of loneliness. What Sebald’s novel ultimately shows is that one’s quest for the truth of origins is always discursive: our only Heimat in a world vacated by God is writing itself. Austerlitz is the author’s fictional surrogate. Just as his protagonist goes to Prague looking for his lost mother and father, so does Sebald “write” Prague in search of the ultimate meaning of things through language. But the novel’s repetitions and citations (mainly of Kafka) succeed only in pointing to another text, another forlorn quest for the truth. The challenge of “writing” Prague is of course a daunting one. So many people have written about the city that it would seem impossible to encompass them all. Given the magnitude of the task, the attempt to include everybody and everything is precisely what one should avoid. Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Magic Prague (1973)—a curious blend of memoir, essay, and literary criticism—gives the impression of exhaustive erudition, yet even this magisterial work is selective and exclusive. What links the diverse writers in Prague Palimpsest is not simply that they wrote about Prague but that they obsessively “rewrote” it. Inevitably, many great writers (Philip Roth, for example) do not feature in my project. In defining Prague both as a European city and as a metaphor for its identity in the twentieth century, I limit my focus to European writers. The first half of chapter 1 on the medieval sources of the foundational legend of Prague was delivered as a paper at the Medieval Academy of America in March 2009 with the title “Myths of Origins and Textual Authority



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in the Medieval Legend of Libuše.” The president of the academy, Patrick J. Geary, was kind enough to attend my panel and made some helpful comments about my paper in the discussion that followed. Part of chapter 2 (on Metropolis and R.U.R.) was given as a paper at a panel organized by Vicki Callahan at the conference “Film and Science: Fictions, Documentaries, and Beyond” in Chicago in November 2008. The second half of chapter 4 was delivered as a lecture on Apollinaire, Kafka, and Camus at the University of Chicago in January 2008; at Queen Mary College, London, in April 2008; and at DePaul University in July 2009. This lecture profited greatly from the insights of John Ireland, James S. Williams, John Malmstad, Paul J. Smith, and Jonathan Romney. A German version of the same lecture was given in Klagenfurt, Austria, in May 2009 with the title “Ein Fremder in Prag: Schreiben und Identitätsreflexion bei Apollinaire, Kafka und Camus.” I would like to thank Vera Pollina for translating the lecture and Primus-Heinz Kucher for inviting me to give it at his home university. Professor Kucher also read an earlier version of the manuscript and made some useful suggestions for its improvement. The second half of chapter 5 (on Sebald’s Austerlitz) provided the basis of my fellowship lecture at the UIC Institute for the Humanities. The lecture owes a great deal to the brilliant insights of my friend and colleague at the University of Chicago, Kathryn Tanner, who made important suggestions for its improvement. Finally, I would like to extend my thanks to those colleagues, students, and friends who helped and inspired my project in all kinds of ways: Tom Bestul, Pietro Bortone, Sara Hall, Kristina Förster, Nora Hampl, Dagmar Lorenz, Ervin Malakaj, Colleen McQuillen, Mary Beth Rose, Astrida Tantillo, Jon Tillotson, Vera Pollina, Julia Vaingurt, and Linda Vavra. Alan Thomas at the University of Chicago Press has been a very gracious and helpful editor, and Randy Petilos, also at the Press, has been a source of immense practical support along the way. Erik Carlson did a brilliant job of editing the manuscript, while the anonymous readers of the manuscript offered valuable insights and suggestions. Last but not least, Marilyn Bliss produced a detailed, exhaustive index for which I am most grateful. Closer to home, Porphyria and Prince have been my constant companions during the lonely process of writing. Porphyria (the cat) kept the manuscript warm by lying on it while my dog Prince lay by my side as I sat at my desk and snored his way through most of the writing. The benevolent spirit of my friend Beryl Satter infused the entire project from beginning to end, while the loving support and patience of my partner Phillip Michael Engles provided the stability I needed to bring it to fruition. I dedicate this book to him.

a note on translations, quotations, and names

A

ll quotations are given in English translation. Where deemed necessary and for purposes of clarification, the original is provided in parentheses or in the footnotes. Unless stated otherwise, these translations are my own, including the two Czech poems in the appendix. For the sake of simplicity, I give the Czech form of places and persons rather than the German names (e.g., Vltava rather than Moldau). Only in the case of established usage do I opt for the English-language versions of Czech names and places (e.g., Saint Wenceslas; Charles Bridge).

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he visitor to Prague, one of the oldest sites in Europe, cannot fail to be impressed by the architectural diversity of this lovely city: Romanesque, Gothic, baroque, Sezession, and cubism succeed each other in a dazzling layering of styles (fig. 1). A major reason for Prague’s miraculous preservation is the fact that it was spared the wartime destruction which reduced to ashes other central European cities like Warsaw, Berlin, and Dresden. In a particularly ironic twist of history, Adolf Hitler deliberately preserved the remains of the city’s ancient Jewish Quarter—including the medieval Old-New Synagogue and the nearby cemetery—as a museum of Europe’s “extinguished race.” The fact that those who transported the Jewish inhabitants of Prague to their deaths also saved the city’s Jewish culture from oblivion constitutes one of the cruelest ironies in modern European history and exemplifies the extraordinary paradox that is Prague. In contrast with other major central European cities, Prague survived World War II virtually unscathed. Combined with its obvious longevity, its apparent immutability camouflages a complex history of discontinuity and disruption. In spite of its physical intactness, Prague is a ghostly city from which many of its citizens have vanished: its long-standing Jewish population, which was transported to the east and murdered in the years 1941–44; its German population, deported after the end of World War II; and many of its leading intellectuals, who were imprisoned and perished during the Stalinist Terror of the early 1950s. This history of trauma may come as a shock to those who have experienced the city as tourists. Unlike Berlin or Warsaw, Prague does not bear the obvious visible scars of its tragic history. It is easy to overlook, therefore, that this is a city that has changed political hands numerous times as a consequence of external invasions and internal upheavals. 



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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 1. Hradčany Castle, seen from the Charles Bridge, Prague, Czech Republic. Photograph: Vanni/Art Resource, New York.

This study departs from most of its predecessors by presenting Prague as a constantly rewritten or revised text in which history and imagination, memory and forgetting have been impossible to disentangle. Most cultural accounts of Prague treat the city either as an unbroken historical continuum or as a site of the imagination tout court. An example of the former is Peter Demetz’s Prague in Black and Gold (1997), in which Prague emerges as a grand historical narrative punctuated by the intervention of great men—Přemysl Otakar II, Charles IV, Jan Hus, Rudolf II, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and T. G. Masaryk. A native of the city and a victim of its political caprices, Demetz left Prague as a young man following the Communist putsch of February 1948 and came to the United States, returning only in 1990 following the fall of Communism. Another victim of the city’s political vicissitudes was the renowned Italian Slavist Angelo Maria Ripellino, who wrote his classic Praga Magica (Magic Prague, 1973) from the distance of enforced exile. Refused a visa to enter Czechoslovakia, the author conceived his book less as a conventional cultural history of the city than as a paean to its magical transcendence. If . Peter Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City (New York: Hill and Wang, 1997).



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Demetz’s book avoids historical gaps and ruptures by glossing over them with an impression of seamless cultural continuity, Ripellino goes in the opposite direction by disrupting all chronological sequence and presenting literature and history as part of an eternal present: “To this day, every evening at five, Franz Kafka returns home to Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse) wearing a bowler hat and black suit. To this day, every evening, Jaroslav Hašek proclaims to his drinking companions in one or another dive that radicalism is harmful and wholesome progress can be achieved only through obedience to authority. To this day Prague lives under the sign of these two writers who better than all others expressed its irrevocable condemnation and therefore its malaise, the ins and outs of its wiles, its duplicity, its grim irony.” Paradoxically enough, Ripellino’s mystification of the city as “Magic Prague” was in part a tendentious reaction to the Soviet invasion of Prague five years before his book was published. Confronted by the effacement of the ancient city on the Vltava from the memory of the West, the author seeks to reinscribe it as a transhistorical and supratemporal phenomeÂ� non. In fact, the epithet “Magic Prague” was itself historically contingent and was coined by André Breton as recently as 1935. Whereas Magic Prague subordinates history to the redemptive power of the artistic process, my book tries to steer clear of any such idealistic agenda. If in Magic Prague cultural memory ultimately triumphs over political oblivion, I interrogate in a less optimistic vein the complex interplay between memory and forgetting in the evolution of the city both as a physical space and as a site of writing. To this extent my study seeks to demystify Prague as a locus magicus in which the truth of art prevails over life. We shall find many instances in this book where the memory of writers is effaced in the interests of a prevailing ideology, a salient example being the Prague-born Franz Kafka, whose works were largely overlooked in interwar Czechoslovakia and banned outright by the Communist state after 1948. If Kafka’s memory is seemingly alive and well in present-day Prague, this is in part a reaction to the Czechs’ own collusion in the effacement of his memory in the decades after his death. There can be no more glaring example of this interplay between rememÂ� bering and forgetting than the fate of the city’s Jewish ghetto, which was largely demolished by the city fathers in the late 1890s as part of an extensive slum clearance and sanitation program. At the height of Czech Francophilia the municipal authorities superimposed on the ruins of the . Angelo Maria Ripellino, Magic Prague, translated by David Newton Marinelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3.

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dilapidated ghetto spacious boulevards and comfortable town houses in the manner of Haussmann’s Paris. The biggest of these boulevards, Nicholas Street (Mikulášká), which extends from the river to the Old Town Square, was later renamed Paris Street (Pařížská) as though the city were attempting to recreate itself in the style of Napoleon III’s capital. A similar mode of reinvention characterizes the city’s place-names. Before the outbreak of World War II Prague had a bilingual German-Czech population. Although the Germans constituted just seven percent of the population, their cultural and political influence was so extensive that each monument and street had a German name. In Franz Kafka’s day, for example, Petřín Hill, which crowns the city, was known to its German-speaking inhabitants as Laurenziberg because of the Church of Saint Lawrence situated there. Hus Street (Husova), located near the Charles Bridge, had been known for generations to the city’s German inhabitants as the Dominikanergasse, because of its medieval Dominican church, and continued to be known as such even after it was officially renamed in 1870. Many of these German topographical names bore witness to the Catholic legacy of the Counter-Reformation. Following the establishment of the First Czechoslovak Republic on October 28, 1918, this past fell victim to a fervent anticlerical mood combined with Czech resentment of three hundred years of Habsburg rule. As Nancy Wingfield has pointed out, these discrete phenomena were sometimes confused. For example, the baroque Marian Column, which had been erected on the Old Town Square in 1650 to mark the end of the Thirty Years’ War, was wrongly identified as a triumphalist memorial to the Battle of the White Mountain and was demolished by an anticlerical crowd on November 3, 1918. During the First Czechoslovak Republic German names gradually disappeared from the city’s physical and psychic landscape. The main train station named for Emperor Franz Josef was rechristened Wilson Station for the American President Woodrow Wilson, who had been one of the architects of the Versailles agreement of 1919 and one of the key supporters of the new democratic republic. Following World War II and the subsequent “transfer” (odsun) of more than three million Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia, the remaining German names were consigned to oblivion. German monuments and graveyards were destroyed, completing a process of effacement that had already begun in 1918 (Wingfield, Flag Wars, 156–69). Czech

. Bernard Michel, Histoire de Prague (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 15–16. . See Nancy M. Wingfield, Flag Wars and Stone Saints: How the Bohemian Lands Became Czech (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 144–47.



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names usurped German names. For example, the town of Německý (German) Brod was renamed Havličkův Brod in honor of the nineteenth-century poet and political activist Karel Havlíček-Borovský. By 1950 only 165,117 Germans remained in Czechoslovakia. This process of effacement continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union, reflecting the ongoing political vicissitudes of the city. After the fall of Communism the metro station named for the Soviet leader V. I. Lenin (Leninova) was renamed Dejvická, as if Communism had never existed. Milan Kundera has famously dubbed Prague a city of forgetting whose past has been constantly erased in the interest of successive political regimes, from the avenging armies of the Catholic Emperor Ferdinand II, which swept into the city in November 1620 and crushed the Protestant rebellion, to the tanks of the Warsaw Pact, which rolled into Prague in August 1968 and brought an end to the reform movement known as the “Prague Spring.” But Prague is equally a city of memory, a case in point being Kundera’s own very Czech obsession with history and the tendentious habit of linking remote events to more recent ones in the interests of a dubious causality: “Prague, as Max Brod said, is the city of evil. When the Jesuits, after the defeat of the Czech reformation in 1621, tried to reeducate the people in the new Catholic faith, they swamped Prague with the splendor of Baroque cathedrals. The thousands of petrified saints gazing at you from all sides and threatening you, hypnotizing you, are the frenzied occupation army that invaded Bohemia three hundred fifty years ago to tear the people’s faith and language out of its soul.” Another striking example of the insistence of the past is the public execution of the city’s Nazi mayor Josef Pfitzner on November 6, 1945. As a contemporary Czech newspaper article pointed out, the public hanging of the Nazi war criminal was intended to evoke the execution of the twentyseven Bohemian rebels by the Habsburg imperial forces in 1621. The gallows were erected on a raised public platform in front of the Pankrác Prison, where so many Czechs had been tortured and killed. Benjamin Frommer has described this location as an exercise in poetic justice, which it surely was. But the raised platform had a more complex function than simply allowing as many people as possible to witness an act of retribution against . Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 250. . Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, translated by Aaron Fisher (New York: Perennial Classics, 1996), 216. . Benjamin Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 98.

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a notorious war criminal. In replicating the scaffolding on which the Protestant noblemen were tortured and beheaded in 1621, Pfitzner’s execution was conceived as an act of revenge for perceived crimes against the Czech people committed more than three centuries earlier and as a deterrent to others tempted to betray the state. The historical significance of the execution of the leaders of the Bohemian Estates in 1621 should be seen in the context of seventeenth-century confessional politics and had little in common with the ethnic hatreds of the twentieth century. In this respect the Czech retributions against the Nazis were not really invoking a distant historical event; rather, they were retrospectively superimposing on the past an interpretation of Czech history as an intractable conflict between Germans and Slavs largely created by the nationalist Czech historian František Palacký in the nineteenth century. The religious circumstances of seventeenth-century politics were conveniently “forgotten” in the interests of modern nationalism. This dialectic between memory and forgetting can be explained in the metaphorical terms of a palimpsest. The word “palimpsest” is derived from the Greek palimpsēstos, meaning literally “rerubbed,” “rewiped,” or “reÂ� scraped.” Analogous to an ancient manuscript difficult to decipher and impossible to read with any certainty, Prague exemplifies the modernist nosÂ�talgia for tradition yet is also the modernist city par excellence: a labyrinth where we seek the absolute truth of history only to discover its semiobscured traces. In Magic Prague Ripellino defines the city as an “ancient folio of stone parchments, city-book in whose pages there is ‘still so much to be read, to dream, to understand’” (6). Like the city-book he excavates with meticulous erudition, Ripellino’s book is itself a kind of palimpsest. Inescapably citational—the footnotes to the previous quotation reveal that the term “city book” was coined by the Czech surrealist poet Vítězslav Nezval and the phrase “still so much to be read” from the poet Josef Hora—Magic Prague exemplifies the impossibility of “writing” or “reading” Prague€without repeating what has already been written and read. As Tony Tanner states with reference to Lord Byron’s literary encounter with Venice long before he actually visited the city in 1816, “Venice is always the already written as well as already seen, the already read.” Whereas most cities have been “imagined” by one or two novelists who made them their own—London by Dickens; Paris by Balzac and Flaubert; Dublin by Joyce; Saint Petersburg by Dostoevsky and Andrei Biely; Vienna . Tony Tanner, Venice Desired (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17.



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by Robert Musil and Arthur Schnitzler; and Berlin by Alfred Döblin—Prague has resisted any such monopolistic appropriation. For sure, it has been frequently identified with Kafka. Yet, as we shall see in chapter 3, Kafka did his utmost not to identify with Prague and created instead what Robert Alter has termed an anonymous “Anycity.” With the exception of his unfinished early story “Beschreibung eines Kampfes” (Description of a struggle, 1904/9), none of Kafka’s major works can be linked to a Prague referent. The only way Kafka could find his own individual voice and escape the straitjacket of a parochial writer was to efface Prague altogether. Kafka felt too close to this claustrophobic, all-encompassing city. In a much-quoted letter to his friend Oskar Pollak, dated December 20, 1902, he writes: “Prague will not let go. Of either of us. This little mother has claws. So one must either conform or . . .”10 The ellipsis at the end of the sentence correlates with Kafka’s conscious decision to escape from Prague—in imagination if not in deed—by effacing it altogether. Like that other venerable city of the literary imagination, Venice, Prague has resisted appropriation by any one single writer. Moreover, Prague and Venice have rarely been made the subject of the novel in the way that London or Paris has. The city has more often inspired poems, stories, and plays. Tony Tanner’s explanation for the unique status of Venice as a literary city that transcends one particular writer or genre also sheds light on the particularity of Prague: “The genre of the city is, supremely, the novel, and Venice was fading out of history during the period in which the novel was evolving its mongrel identity” (Venice Desired, 4). Like Venice’s, Prague’s historical and cultural high point was the premodern period. By the eighteenth century, when the novel began to take shape as the dominant literary genre of the West, Prague was already a backwater and would remain so until the fin de siècle, when it began to rival the capital Vienna as the most decadent of cities. Like Venice, Prague can perhaps be more aptly compared to a multilayered manuscript on which numerous writers have left their trace without completely effacing the presence of their predecessors. Envisaging Prague as a palimpsest allows us to understand the city’s historical as well as cultural ability to efface all evidence of those who have tried to monopolize it. A . See Robert Alter, Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 10. “Prag läßt nicht los. Uns beide nicht. Dieses Mütterchen hat Krallen. Da muß man sich fügen oder—.” Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, in Gesammelte Werke, edited by Max Brod (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), 14.

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brilliant example of this uncanny inclination occurs in the opening section of Milan Kundera’s novel Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1979) in which the leader of the Communist Party, Klement Gottwald, steps onto the balcony of the Černín Palace in February 1948 (3–4). The photographic reproduction of this triumphant moment belies the original scene, in which Gottwald was accompanied by his colleague Vladimír Clementis. Liquidated at the order of the party machine, Clementis was airbrushed from the photograph so that all that remained of him in the subsequent propaganda documentation was his fur hat, which he had deferentially placed on Gottwald’s head to protect him from the falling snow. Like Prague, the photograph of Gottwald on the balcony of the baroque palace exists in the ghostly interstices between history and invention, memory and forgetting. One of the most salient features of Prague’s physical landscape is the enormous role played by its monuments. From the high medieval cult of saints to the post-Communist memorials to the victims of totalitarianism Prague has functioned as a site of collective memory. Yet as in every other respect, these monuments have risen and fallen according to the prevailing ideology. The earliest example of such a memorial is the shrine of the martyred duke Wenceslas I (d. ca. 935), whose remains were translated from Stará Boleslav to Prague in the tenth century and housed in the rotunda of Saint Vitus, which the duke had built just a few years earlier. The translation of the saint’s relics to Prague only three years after his assassination coincided with the city’s growing importance as the economic, religious, and political heart of ducal power.11 A murdered prince was now reinvented as the patron saint of the Bohemian Lands and protector of the Czechs. The cult of Saint Wenceslas reached its culmination in the fourteenth century when a magnificent shrine and chapel in the cathedral of Saint Vitus were commissioned by Emperor Charles IV to house the saint’s remains. Yet within fifty years of this momentous event, the memory of Saint Wenceslas had been eclipsed by the rise of the Hussite movement. After the execution of Jan Hus in Constance in 1415, this movement’s founder replaced Wenceslas as the most venerated martyr in the land, a prominence that was reversed only after the fateful Battle of the White Mountain, in November 1620, when the triumphant Catholic Church effaced all churches and monuments associated with the Hussite heresy and replaced them with statues of Saints Wenceslas, Ludmila, and the Counter-Reformation 11. See Lisa Wolverton, Hastening toward Prague: Power and Society in the Medieval Czech Lands (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 82.



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figure specifically reinvented to oust the memory of Hus, John of Pomuk (d. 1393). Meanwhile, the Hussite church on the main square of the Malá Strana (Lesser Town) was razed to the ground and replaced by the magnificent Baroque Church of Saint Nicholas, designed by Christoph Dientzenhofer, which still remains today as a monumental witness to the triumphant Counter-Reformation as well as a ghostly reminder of the defeated Hussite heresy. However, in the nineteenth century Jan Hus was reinvented as the hero of the National Revival. Although Catholic themselves, the early revivalists identified with Hus’s defiance of the church in their own resistance to Austrian absolutism. The ultimate expression of Hus’s reinvention as a protopatriot is Ladislav Šaloun’s lowering statue of Hus on the Old Town Square in Prague, which was unveiled in 1915 to mark the five hundredth anniversary of his death in Constance. The interplay between remembrance and forgetting exemplified by the lives and afterlives of Saint Wenceslas and Jan Hus was reprised in the modern period in the person of Karel Hynek Mácha (1810–36), the author of the greatest poem in the Czech language, Máj (May, 1835). During his brief lifetime Mácha was disliked by his patriotic compatriots on account of his reluctance to identify with the cause of national independence and his equally objectionable attachment to the international movement known as romanticism. Mácha’s death at the age of twenty-six in the provincial town of Litoměřice was largely ignored, and he was buried there virtually unmourned by his contemporaries. By the end of the century, however, Mácha had been reinvented as the central figure in the Czech literary pantheon, his cosmopolitanism conveniently overlooked in favor of his new canonic status as the Czech Shakespeare. A century later, in May 1939, Mácha’s remains were formally translated to Prague and reburied among the greatest representatives of Czech culture, in Slavín cemetery at Vyšehrad, just south of the city. This mausoleum, erected in 1863 to house the remains of distinguished artists, poets, and comÂ� posers, was a manifestation of the Czech National Revival and paralleled similar nationalist-cultural monuments like the Panthéon in Paris, Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, and Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg.12 The translation of Mácha’s remains from provincial obscurity to their final

12. For the Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg, see Julie Buckler, “The City’s Memory: Texts of Memory and Loss in Imperial St. Petersburg,” in Preserving Petersburg: History, Memory, Nostalgia, edited by Helena Goscilo and Stephen M. Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 43–44.

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resting place at Slavín was more than an act of literary piety; it was the collective protest of an entire nation against the Nazi invasion of the homeland and the illegal creation of a protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. A dead poet who had been completely forgotten a century earlier was now the occasion of collective remembrance and mourning on a national scale.13 More recent examples of the collusion of memory and forgetting are the monuments erected after the Communist coup d’état in February 1948 and destroyed after the fall of Communism in 1989. The most notorious and most hated of these monuments was the colossal statue of Stalin on the embankment of the river Vltava, the largest of its kind in eastern Europe. After 1989 many new monuments were erected to replace what had been removed and bear witness to the memory of the victims of totalitarianism, such as the recent “statue of the disappearing man” and the monument to the memory of Franz Kafka, whose works had been banned by the Communists for forty years. In some ways this new crop of monuments corresponds to what Andreas Huyssen sees to be a universal trend as the West focuses increasingly on its past rather than its future.14 But in other ways the post-1989 proliferation of Prague monuments represents not so much a break with the past as a continuation of the city’s demand to be constantly “rewritten.” Needless to say, the erection of new monuments, like the one to Franz Kafka, is a compensatory reaction to decades of political oblivion which effaced not only the memory of the writer but also removed his works from the shelves of libraries and bookstores. The medieval Jewish ghetto is an eloquent example of how the city can give a deceptive impression of cultural and historical continuity. This ancient quarter, located south of a bend in the river and consisting of a tangled skein of side alleys and narrow lanes, was demolished by the municipal authorities between 1897 and 1917 as part of a slum clearance program. Around three hundred buildings were knocked down and replaced by wide rectilinear streets and respectable bourgeois homes. Ironically, the destruction of the ghetto was made possible by the “emancipation” of the Jews in 1867: they could now settle outside the ghetto, but in realistic terms this freedom of movement was restricted to the wealthier Jews. As a consequence, the houses of the remaining poor Jews became more and more dilapidated and the property neglected. In the words of Milada Vilímková, 13. For an extended account of Mácha’s reburial in Prague, see Peter Demetz, Prague in Danger: The Years of German Occupation, 1939–45 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 48–50. 14. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995).



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“This gradually created the conditions leading to the slum clearance, wiping the Prague ghetto off the map at the turn of the century.”15 As Don LaCoss has pointed out, the Prague authorities were explicitly targeting the intertwined threats of venereal disease and prostitution that were deemed synonymous with the Judenstadt.16 In many ways this association of Judaism with prostitution and syphilis has its roots in late medieval Christian fears of bodily pollution and explains why brothels were often located in the Judengasse of a medieval city like Frankfurt.17 Insofar as the decision to demolish the ghetto recalled vestigial memories of the medieval association of Jews with pollution and prostitution, the slum clearance program was a simultaneous exercise in effacement and preservation, the prejudicial instinct to obliterate what was “unclean” coexisting with the liberal aspiration to preserve the most precious ancient monuments of Jewish culture. So what makes Prague rather different from Second Empire Paris is the fact that the demolition of the Jewish Quarter was not total. The Old-New Synagogue, which dates from the thirteenth century, survived, as did the late medieval cemetery with its lopsided gravestones. Among these is the imposing Renaissance grave of Rabbi Jehudah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague and the legendary inventor of the golem (1520–1609). It is significant that the legend of the Prague golem takes off in the early years of the twentieth century, following the demolition of the Jewish Quarter. Gustav Meyrink’s famous novel Der Golem (The Golem, 1915) treats the golem less as a protagonist in his own right—as he would subsequently become in Paul Wegener’s silent film of 1920—than as a spectral apparition with Mongolian features which stalks the narrow streets of the ghetto. Meyrink’s golem becomes a ghostly incarnation of the city’s Jewish past, his Asiatic features the memory trace of an ancient culture and history effaced by the relentlessly homogenizing march of modernity. Like the golem, Prague has always been haunted by the spirit of its founder, Princess Libuše. Although this ancient legend is often presented as

15. Milada Vilímková, The Prague Ghetto, translated by Iris Irwin (Prague: Aventinum, 1990), 42. 16. Don LaCoss, “Syphilis as Supernatural Urban Pathology in Paul Leppin’s ‘Das Gespenst der Judenstadt’â•›” (paper delivered at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, New Orleans, November 18, 2007). 17. See John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 85. For the connection between Judaism and prostitution in medieval Bohemia, see Alfred Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 67–72.

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timeless and transcendental, it has in fact been rewritten numerous times to accommodate the ideological interests of medieval rulers, Renaissance antiquarians, and nineteenth-century nationalists. Paradoxically, this myth of origins is a narrative without an origin, its teleological prophesies of a glorious future for the city frustrated by the fragmented nature of its telling. Chapter 1 explores this constant reinvention of the legend of Libuše from its earliest shadowy attestation in the tenth-century Legenda Christiani (The legend of Kristián) to the fin de siècle. Like the myth of Libuše, the legend of the golem does not constitute one univocal text but resembles a palimpsest of layers. The story of the chief rabbi of Prague who invents a man of clay has inspired endless versions by many writers and filmmakers. Yet it was only in the modern period that the legend assumed its present familiar form. Some early versions were not even set in Prague at all. Chapter 2 explores the correlation between the mutating legend of the golem and the partial demolition of the ancient Jewish district in the late 1890s. Whereas Jewish writers like Yudl Rosenberg strove to efface the historical association of the ghetto with prostitution by reinventing the golem as an unsullied hero, who defends the Jews against the blood libel, the end-of-the-century generation of Prague-German writers, such as Gustav Meyrink and Paul Leppin, remained nostalgic for the vanished Judenstadt and its reputation for decay, degeneration, and prostitution. Subsequent versions of the golem legend—including Paul Wegener’s famous silent film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (The golem: How he came into the world, 1920), Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1920), and Harry Mulisch’s Dutch novel De Procedure (The Procedure, 1998)—are all highly original reworkings of a story unified only by the figure of the golem itself. Wegener’s classic film, which introduced the legend to a mainstream audience, treats it both as a love story and as a modern parable of the creation myth with the rabbi Loew cast in the role of God and his clay homunculus as Adam. Like the Genesis story, this is also an allegory of primal disobedience in which the golem raises his hand against his master in the same moment as the rabbi’s daughter Miriam transgresses against the paternal prohibition by having an illicit affair with the Christian knight sent to announce the imperial edict expelling the Jews from the city. Here the golem serves a double role as the defender of the Jews and their nemesis when he runs amok in the ghetto, causing murder and mayhem. The theme of female disobedience is also a feature of Harry Mulisch’s brilliant adaptation of the legend. The chief rabbi’s assistant inserts the wrong Hebraic letters in the clay creature’s forehead—misreading “Mother”



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for “Truth”—so that the golem turns out to be a murderous Lilith rather than a second Adam. The scrambling of the Hebrew letters, intended to breathe life into the inert clay figure, aligns the golem’s body with an ancient manuscript in which the letters are wrongly deciphered. Chapter 3 explores Franz Kafka’s complex relation to Czech literature in terms of his ambivalent nostalgia for his father’s maternal language and culture and his skeptical alienation from all constructions of identity. This paradoxical movement between belonging and disavowal is manifested in Kafka’s transformation of key works of Czech literature from the redemptive articulation of the writer’s role as the conscience of the national collective to an antiredemptive reinvention of the writer as a universal figure liberated from all forms of ethnic and religious affiliation. A corollary of Kafka’s need for anonymity is the gradual effacement of Prague as a recognizable setting of his stories and novels. Only by erasing all topographical references to the city of his birth could Kafka achieve his desired goal as the universal chronicler of modern urban life. The second half of chapter 3 examines the equally complex and ambivalent reception of Kafka’s works in postwar Czech literature. Writing in 1934, the prominent Czech critic F. X. Šalda referred to Kafka in passing as an obscure author “with whom the French are very much preoccupied at present.”18 This willful oversight on the part of the interwar Czech intelligentsia translated into unequivocal censorship after the Communist takeover of power in 1948. Kafka’s works were banned in Czechoslovakia for more than forty years and became officially available in Czech translation as late as 2007. However, in reacting to the official ban of Kafka’s works, many Czech writers and filmmakers turned him into a cult figure, identifying deeply with the alienated protagonists of his stories and novels. In the case of certain dissident artists in the 1960s, this identification involved the reinvention of Kafka as a prophet of totalitarianism and his characters as dissidents avant la lettre. Chapter 4 examines the reinvention of Prague as a modernist metropolis, focusing on the seminal influence of Guillaume Apollinaire’s story “Le Passant de Prague” (The stroller through Prague, 1910) on avant-garde Czech writers of the interwar period. The story describes how a French visitor to the city encounters the Eternal Jew as he wanders through Prague. A cosmopolitan bon vivant rather than the tragic protagonist of Christian legend, the Eternal Jew is reinvented as the quintessential modernist flaneur. Inspiring 18. Quoted from J. P. Stern, The Heart of Europe: Essays on Literature and Ideology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 63.

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numerous redactions of his life story and constantly assuming new pseudoÂ� nyms across time, he personifies the city-book and its history. Vítězslav Nezval’s narrative poem “Pražský chodec” (The Prague walker, 1920), in which Prague is personified as a prostitute with whom the narrator falls in love, was directly inspired by Apollinaire’s story. The modernist theme of the city as woman serves as the leitmotif of this and other poems by Nezval. Apollinaire’s foundational story also had a profound impact on French cultural and political responses to Prague. The most prominent French visitor to the city between the wars was André Breton, the founder of French surrealism, who, in March 1935, during a lecture to the Czech Surrealist Group, famously described Prague as the “magical capital of Old Europe.” Breton and his fellow surrealists were enamored of Prague’s twisting narrow lanes and nooks and crannies. Breton’s celebrated visit to Prague has eclipsed the visit of an even more famous French writer, Albert Camus, in the summer of 1936. Unlike Apollinaire and Breton, the twenty-two-year-old Camus felt distinctly out of place and ill at ease in the “magical capital of Old Europe.” But Prague also served as a discursive impediment to his progress as a writer. The second half of chapter 4 explores Camus’s repeated attempts to “unwrite” Prague in order to find his own voice as a writer. Turning from interwar French responses to Prague, chapter 5 examines the elegiac treatment of the city as a site of nostalgia in postwar German and Austrian literature. Writers who represented this treatment include the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan; the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann, who left her native Austria and finally settled in Italy; and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, who spent most of his career in England. Enforced or self-imposed exiles from their origins, all these writers envision Prague as a second Heimat. In part this was a response to the fact that Prague was one of the few central European cities to survive the destruction of World War II. But insofar as its Jewish population did not and its German inhabiÂ� tants were expelled soon afterward, the city also becomes a site of memory and mourning, in particular, for Celan, whose mother had fled to Bohemia from a Russian pogrom in 1915 and who was murdered by the Nazis. The epilogue of the book examines two novels and two films about Prague made after the fall of Communism in 1989. In spite of their apparent break with the modernist treatment of the city, I argue that these “postmodern” narratives share a tendency to recycle literary motifs in a self-conscious manner that makes them a continuation of—rather than a rupture with— the modernist past.

chapter one

Women on the Verge of History: Libuše and the Foundational Legend of Prague

I

n the earliest known mythic account of the foundation of Prague, in the Latin Legenda Christiani attributed to the monk Kristián and dated by most scholars to the late tenth century, the Bohemian Slavs (Sclavi Boemi) are said to be afflicted by a plague, prompting them to seek the advice and help of a seer or prophetess (phitonissa) before establishing a city named Prague. In later versions of the legend this anonymous prophetess would become known as Libuše, and, after her death, her female followers would fight a war against her husband, Přemysl the Plowman, and his men before succumbing to ignominious defeat and violent death. In his discussion of this foundational myth, Patrick Geary opines that “these legends of women at the beginning form a pentimento, an overpainted but still dimly perceptible recollection of an age of matriarchy.” In this chapter I will deploy the textual metaphor of the palimpsest—rather than the painterly image of the pentimento—to explore the constant revision of the foundational legend of Prague from the late tenth to the late nineteenth century. I am concerned less with posing the question whether there really was an age of matriarchy at the threshold of history than exploring how medieval and modern writers reacted to a female myth of origins. In most classical and medieval foundational legends, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniaie (History of the Kings of Britain, 1135), the mythic founder of the city or state is a male hero. The fact that the mythic founder of Prague is a woman complicates the way medieval writers respond to the legend. On the one hand, they must . Patrick J. Geary, Women at the Beginning: Origin Myths from the Amazons to the Virgin Mary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 8.

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acknowledge Libuše’s primacy as the matriarch who prophesies the rise of the city; on the other hand, this authority clearly conflicts with the standard medieval misogynistic perception of women as inferior to men. As a consequence, high and late medieval treatments of the legend of Prague’s founding are characterized by a profound ambivalence toward Libuše and her female followers. At once affirming and denying women’s primacy in the establishment of Prague and the origins of the Czech people, the various versions of the legend come to resemble a palimpsest in which the writers struggle to efface the “memory” of matriarchal primacy in the interests of patriarchy while partially preserving that memory in the interests of asserting their own (ethnic) origins. The foundational legend of Prague raised crucial questions of primacy and textual authority in an age when written sources were deemed central to the legitimacy and sovereignty of aristocratic families and royal dynasties. The very notion of a woman prophesying the foundation of a city that would later become a center of ducal and royal power posed immense difficulties for male writers concerned to legitimize male sovereignty—the sovereignty of the Czech dukes in the case of the twelfth-century Latin chronicler Cosmas and that of the Czech nobility in the case of the anonymous author of the Dalimilova kronika (The Dalimil chronicle, ca. 1314), the earliest Czech-language account of Bohemian history.

From Kristián to Cosmas In his brief account of the foundation of Prague the monk Kristián states that the Bohemian Slavs lived in the forest as free as a horses without reins and without a prince to rule over them before a catastrophic plague forced them to found a city. This transition from the forest to the town culminated in the elevation of a plowman named Přemysl as prince: But the Slavs of Bohemia, who settled under Arcturus and venerated idols, lived like horses unrestrained by a bridle, without law, without a prince or ruler, and without a city. Roaming about sporadically like reckless animals, they inhabited only the open country. Finally, after being overtaken by a disastrous plague, they, as the story goes, turned to a prophetess to request good advice and prophetic pronouncement. And having received it, they founded a city and named it Prague. Afterward, they found a very discerning and prudent man named Přemysl, who merely spent his time ploughing, and in keeping with the pronouncement of the



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prophetess, they appointed him prince or ruler, giving him the abovementioned prophetess for a wife.

There are several details in Kristián’s laconic account of the founding of Prague which differ from subsequent versions. First, the seer is nameless; second, the welfare of the tribe is linked in some mysterious fashion to her prophetic powers; and third, her involvement in the establishment of the city is independent of male power, since the reference to Přemysl the Plowman comes later. Within this highly telescoped account of the prehistory of the Czechs one finds less a seamless narrative than strange omissions and unexplained lacunae. What were the circumstances of the plague that threatened the tribal collective, and what did this have to do with their lack of feudal leadership? Who was the seer they turned to for help, and why did they immediately thereafter decide to found a city? Of course, these are questions to which we can never provide satisfactory answers. More significant is the fact that later writers felt the need to do so by filling in the perceived gaps in the inherited narrative and lending it the aspect of a complete and coherent account. However, this urge to fill in the gaps required a narrative strategy more complex than just joining the elliptical dots; in some cases it necessitated changing or even reversing the sequence of events altogether. For example, in Cosmas of Prague’s highly influential Chronica Boemorum (The Chronicle of the Czechs, 1125) the appointment of a male ruler is said to precede the establishment of Prague, whereas in Kristián’s earlier account Prague is founded before Přemysl’s ascendancy: “One day, at the beginning of the new reign of laws, the aforesaid Libuše, excited by prophecy, with her husband Přemysl present and other elders of the people standing nearby, foretold thus: ‘I see a burg, whose fame touches the stars, situated in a forest, thirty stades distant from the village where the Vltava ends in streams. . . . When you come to that place, you will find a man putting up the doorway of a house in the middle of the forest. From that event—and since even a great lord must duck under a humble threshold—the burg you will build, you shall call “Prague”’ [Praha, from práh, threshold].”

. Quoted from Marvin Kantor, The Origins of Christianity in Bohemia: Sources and Commentary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), 168–69. For the Latin text, see Kristián, Kristiánova legenda, edited by Jaroslav Ludvíkovský (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1978), 16. . Cosmas of Prague, The Chronicle of the Czechs, translated by Lisa Wolverton (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 48–49.

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Writing more than a century later than Kristián, by which time Prague had become the power base of the Přemyslid family, Cosmas, dean of the Prague chapter and spokesman of the ruling dynasty, was concerned above all to emphasize the primacy of the princes over the city they ruled. At stake in his account was the necessity not only of legitimizing Přemyslid sovereignty by tracing its origins back to the dynasty’s mythic founder but also of asserting the primacy of patriarchal power over matriarchal authority. Cosmas was the first writer to invest Libuše with a name, biography, and patrilineal ancestry, elements all lacking in Kristián’s spare account, where, before the founding of Prague, men and women enjoy equal social status in the forest. Libuše’s patrilineal ancestry begins with Čech, the eponymous founder of the Czechs, a figure analogous to the Trojan Brutus, the greatgrandson of Aeneas, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s history of the foundation of Britain. Čech’s successor was Krok, the father of three women, Kazi, Tetka, and Libuše. This paternal ancestry may even have been invented by Cosmas, just as Geoffrey of Monmouth furnished Britain with a mythic founder in the otherwise unattested figure of Brutus. Important in both foundational legends is the need to establish a male founder for a nation and its people. In the case of Bohemia the figures of Čech and Krok were intended not just to fill in a perceived gap in the prehistory of the Czechs but to consolidate Libuše’s status by supplying her with her own patrilineal ancestry. The likelihood that this ancestry was supplemented by Cosmas is reinforced by the absence of any such lineage in Kristián’s chronicle. Cosmas goes on to relate how the female followers of Libuše rise up against the men and wage a war between the sexes. This female rebellion ends with the defeat of the women and the destruction of their castle. The women are raped by the men and married to them, an act of violence which marks the transition from matriarchal myth to patriarchal history: “Since that time, after the death of Prince Libuše, the women of our people are under the power of men” (The Chronicle of the Czechs, 52). In the words of Patrick Geary, “Libuše and the Amazons belong not to the history of the Bohemian lands but to their prehistory. Her death and their defeat are preconditions for the start of history” (Women at the Beginning, 40). And yet, as Geary himself states, Cosmas’s mythic treatment of Libuše is contingent upon the historical role played by certain influential women in the high Middle Ages. In this sense, the apparently smooth and sequential transition from matriarchal myth to patriarchal history is complicated by the tension between historical and mythic elements in the actual treatment of the legend. In contrast to the later Middle Ages, high medieval women



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were able to exercise power and occasionally ruled states, as exemplified by Countess Matilda of Tuscany (ca. 1046–1115). As Geary points out, Matilda’s reputation for prudence and conciliation as witnessed by her role in the Investiture Contest provided Cosmas with a real-life analogue for Libuše’s role as a wise counselor. As a devoted supporter of Pope Gregory VII throughout the contest, Matilda would have served as an exemplary figure to the Bohemian cleric. On the other hand, Cosmas’s clerical training predisposed him to view all women—regardless of rank and status—in a negative, disapproving light. Although he extols Libuše’s wisdom as a counselor, he also denigrates her indolence, softness, and weakness as a woman. This standard misogynistic view of medieval women was complicated by the historical and political circumstances in which Cosmas found himself as the advocate of the ruling Přemyslid dynasty of dukes. In this capacity he was obliged to acknowledge Libuše’s central importance as the ancestor of the dynasty on whose behalf he was writing his chronicle. The only way that Cosmas could resolve this tension was by bringing the entire story to a violent close. As we shall now see, an analogous set of contradictions informs the treatment of Libuše and the Bohemian Amazons in the Dalimil Chronicle.

The Dalimil Chronicle If Cosmas was the spokesman of the reigning dynasty of dukes, the anonymous author of the Dalimil Chronicle was the unapologetic champion of the Czech lower nobility and a fierce opponent of the Czech kings’ traditional favoritism toward Germans and foreigners. He deviates from Cosmas in making Libuše the mouthpiece of his own pro-Czech and antiforeign sentiments. In fact, the author of the Dalimil Chronicle subordinates the treatment of the legend—and indeed his entire work—to the central ideological tenet that Bohemia belongs to the Czechs alone. Underscoring the threat posed by foreigners, the chronicle ends with the election of one such foreigner, Count John of Luxembourg, the fourteen-year-old son of Emperor Henry VII, as king of Bohemia in 1311. As a parting shot, the author warns the new king to keep his nobles in his counsel or leave the realm with dignity while admonishing his audience to heed Libuše’s teaching that the Czech state and its language (â•›jazyk) must take precedence over that of foreigners. In the legend itself this message is accorded more importance than the prophecy concerning the foundation of Prague. Libuše’s male vassals have . Nejstarší česka rýmovaná kronika tak řečeného Dalimila, edited by Jiří Daňhelka, 2nd ed. (Prague: Nakladatelství Československé Akademie Věd, 1958), 169.

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begun to clamor for the appointment of a male ruler, prompting the prophetess to convene a council in which she warns that a foreign prince would mean the end of Czech independence and the ruin of the state. In identifying the appointment of a male prince with the elevation of a foreign ruler, she implicitly equates her gynocracy with native Czech rule: “The community is the bastion of all. Those who neglect it have lost their senses. When you destroy your community, do not put your trust in your castle [i.e., defense]. Without the community conflict will ensue. . . . You should rather endure my judgment than desire to have a strong man as your prince. A woman’s hand will strike you less harshly than the pain inflicted by a man’s wound. You will believe me when you behold your prince behind his plow. If a foreigner rules over you, your state/language [jazyk] will not last long” (chapter 4, lines 7–20 [23–24]). Whereas for Cosmas, Přemysl the Plowman is the legitimate ancestor of the Czech dukes, here he is equated with a foreigner or outsider (cizozemec) who will deprive the nobility of its sovereign rights and privileges. The target audience may have seen in the description of Přemysl as a foreigner an allusion to the new incumbent of the Czech throne, John of Luxembourg (r. 1310–46). If so, it may also have detected a historical prototype for Libuše in John’s bride, Elizabeth Přemyslovna, the last surviving representative of the native Přemyslid dynasty. In 1306 Elizabeth’s brother, Wenceslas III, was assassinated in mysterious circumstances, a crisis which plunged the entire kingdom into chaos. The ensuing interregnum witnessed a struggle in and beyond the kingdom, as foreign rulers staked their claim to the Czech crown. In Bohemia itself the question of the succession centered on the king’s youngest sister, the fourteen-year-old Elizabeth, who became the focus of the Czech nobility’s attempts to control events. Unlike Libuše and her real-life prototype, Matilda of Tuscany, both of whom ruled in their own right, Elizabeth was merely a pawn in a power game fought between men, but her status as the last representative of an extinguished dynasty invited an inverted comparison with Libuše at the matriarchal threshold of history. Following Wenceslas III’s murder, the Czech nobility had chosen Henry of Carinthia as their king; but when it became apparent that he was incompetent, a majority of the leading nobility and clergy resolved to depose him in favor of John of Luxembourg. After some initial resistance to this choice, the emperor, who was reluctant to sacrifice his fourteen-year-old son John to the capricious Czech magnates, gave way to their demands and agreed to his son’s marriage to the Princess Elizabeth. As part of the agreement, Elizabeth,



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by now eighteen years of age, was smuggled out of Prague (still under the control of Henry of Carinthia) and married to John of Luxembourg in a ceremony in Speyer Cathedral on August 31, 1310. Libuše’s function as the mouthpiece of the author’s pro-Czech sentiments in the Dalimil Chronicle provides an intriguing parallel with Princess Elizabeth’s role as the symbolic figurehead of the Czech nobility in its struggle for power during the years 1306–10. Moreover, Libuše’s reluctant marriage to Přemysl the Plowman recalls Elizabeth’s marriage of expediency to John of Luxembourg. Here, as elsewhere in the chronicle, the author uses Libuše as a vehicle for his own fears of foreign domination in the state. It is even tempting to read Libuše’s reluctance to marry an outsider as an expression of the author’s opposition to the candidacy of John of Luxembourg for the throne of Bohemia. Thus, the author faces a conflict of interests between his vision of Libuše’s gynocracy as the symbol of Czech independence and the patriarchal expectation that men—not women—should rule. This conflict of interests becomes especially apparent in the expanded treatment of the War of the Maidens (Dívčí válka), which follows Libuše’s death. The author devotes eight full-length chapters to the female rebellion against the male order, including the previously unrecorded exemplum of the entrapment of the brave knight Ctirad by the devious maiden Šárka. Central to his amplification of the story is the insistence that the maidens have deviated from the patriarchal norm by fleeing from their paternal hearths “like doves from the dovecote.” Based on Cosmas, this detail flatly contradicts Kristián’s earlier Edenic account of men and women living on an equal basis in the forest. In other words, the Czech author turns the entire story of the War of the Maidens into an exemplum or cautionary tale of the dangers inherent in female independence from patriarchal control. The women even found their own castle quite independent of male power. Named Děvín from the Czech word for “maiden” (děva), this castle is not only an alternative power base to Prague; it actually threatens to eclipse it. This effacement of Prague reflects the historical and political situation beÂ�fore and during John of Luxembourg’s reign: during the interregnum (1306–11), Prague itself ceased to be the focus of government; and even after John’s accession, his frequent absences from his capital meant that effective control of the kingdom remained in the hands of the regional nobility until the accession of John’s gifted son, Charles IV, in 1346. . See Jiří Spěváček, Jan Lucemburský a jeho doba 1296–1346 (Prague: Nakladatelství Svoboda, 1994), 133–34.

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Contradicting the treatment of the female rebellion as an exemplum on the danger of female autonomy is Libuše’s earlier association of her gynocracy with native Czech rule (i.e., the political primacy of the native nobility) and Přemysl’s ascendancy with the election of a foreign ruler (i.e., John of Luxembourg). The author attempts to gloss over this conflict of interests by specifying that Libuše died and was buried in the village named for her (chapter 8, 1–2), thereby drawing a clear dividing line between the end of her normative rule and the fraudulent succession of her female followers. The writer immediately adds that the female war which ensued was laughable (k smiechu) (chapter 8, 4). In some ways this sudden shift from empathy to derision can be explained in view of the fact that the rule of gynocracy is no longer perceived as normative and native but as aberrant and alien. And yet the female insurgency, under the leadership of the formidable Vlasta, is treated with a certain degree of sympathy, even respect. The maidens are well organized in contrast to the dissolute, drunken men. In some ways this favorable comparison with the men is intended to reinforce the exemplary nature of the episode: in neglecting their duties as fathers and husbands, the men will forfeit their power and authority to women. At the same time this antifeminine exemplum is congruent with the author’s proCzech and antiforeign message: if the Czechs neglect their jazyk (state/ language), they will relinquish their power to foreigners. This fear of foreign incursion was not merely paranoid. The late medieval demographic trend both in the kingdom at large and in Prague itself confirms that the German and foreign presence was growing, especially in the influential domain of the court and the church. Although the female society described by the author can be seen as partially parodic (even to the extent of the triple division of medieval society), its oppositional function to the male norm underscores the author’s awareness that the identity of the Czech nobility is necessarily defined in terms of its relation to the foreign other. Moreover, women’s secondary status in the medieval social hierarchy, based on the biblical precedent of Eve’s creation after Adam’s, also implied a parallel to the secondary social status of the nobility in relation to the king. However much the author insists that Bohemia belongs to the Czech nobility, he knows perfectly well that this is an inversion of the medieval feudal structure which places the king at the apex. The resulting ambivalence toward Vlasta and her female followers would explain their paradoxical treatment as arbitrarily cruel (as exemplified by their devious entrapment and brutal murder of the knight Ctirad) and as heroic defenders of the rights they inherited from Libuše’s reign.



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The latter function aligns them with the Czech nobility in its time-honored resistance to the centralizing policies of the kings and their German entourage. Indeed, Vlasta’s speech to the maidens (chapter 19, lines 39–76) emphasizes their nobility (šlechtenstvie) and, in comparing them with the Amazons of classical legend, places them in an illustrious lineage of heroic resistance to imperialist invasions. Significantly, Vlasta refers to the Amazons’ defeat of the emperor Cyrus and their brave resistance to Alexander the Great’s incursions into Asia Minor. As I have argued elsewhere, Vlasta’s speech would have reminded the audience of the noble speech by the Persian king Darius in the Czech version of the Alexander romance (Alexandreida) (ca. 1290) when he exhorts his troops to defend their liberties and sovereignty against Alexander the Great’s invading army. Darius’s speech was itself intended by the anonymous Czech author of the Alexandreida as an elegiac commentary on the tragic fate of King Přemysl Otakar II at the battle of the Moravian Field in 1278 and the subsequent chaos in the kingdom of Bohemia. The paradoxical treatment of the maidens qua women and as symbols of Czech sovereignty reflects the Dalimil author’s own conflicted situation as a spokesman of a class attempting to reconcile its de facto primacy in the affairs of state with its de jure secondary status in relation to the king. This secondary status is reinforced by the fact that he is writing his chronicle not in Latin but in Czech at a time when the vernacular had yet to achieve the prestige accorded to it by Dante and Chaucer. Moreover, in Bohemia as elsewhere, the vernacular was still the only way that most female readers had access to textual authority. In short, the Czech author found himself uncomfortably close to the status of the very women he presented as secondary and inferior. This fundamental tension in the depiction of the maidens is drastically resolved through their violent erasure from the narrative. Whereas Cosmas makes the death of Libuše and the defeat of the maidens coterminous with the end of matriarchal myth and the onset of history, the Dalimil author specifies that Libuše died and was buried before the War of the Maidens. This departure from Cosmas is important because it exonerates Libuše of any involvement in the subsequent female rebellion. In the Dalimil Chronicle the consequence of that conflict is far more extreme than in Cosmas: Vlasta is hacked to pieces and her body thrown to the dogs, whereupon her followers are killed and their bodies cut in two before being cast from the ramparts of their castle, Děvín. However, a special punishment is reserved for Šárka, . See Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia, 60.

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the maiden who betrayed Ctirad, and her beautiful sister Darka, who are led out on the order of Ctirad’s vengeful son and buried alive (chapter 15, lines 48–50). Punitive as it is, this grisly denouement of death and dismemberment still betrays traces of the author’s empathy for the maidens, whose bodies are tenderly referred to as “small” and “lovely” (tělcě krásná). This grim ending deviates from Cosmas, where the vanquished maidens are ravished by the men and forced to marry them in what Patrick Geary has seen as an allusion to the Roman rape of the Sabine women. Substituting an alternative classical source at this point, the author of the Dalimil Chronicle draws upon the story of Troy by making the Amazon queen Penthesilea the heroic model for Vlasta. His account of her slaying by seven youths is based on Penthesilea’s death in Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae (History of the destruction of Troy, 1287), where the Greek warrior Pyrrhus severs Penthesilea’s arm and then takes full revenge by hacking her to pieces with his sword. Guido’s Historia was well known in medieval Bohemia and provided the source for the exemplum on Troy in the Alexandreida. As James Simpson has shown with respect to the late medieval English reception of the story of Troy, Guido’s version represents an important anti-imperial counterpart to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia. Guido’s popularity in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Bohemia is consistent with the antiroyal and anti-imperialist posture of the nobility and gentry, the class that constituted the primary audience of the translations of his work into Czech. By basing the end of his account of the War of the Maidens on Guido’s Historia rather than the Roman rape of the Sabine women, the author of the Dalimil Chronicle is not simply rewriting Cosmas’s chronicle; he is above all attempting to undermine its textual authority. Yet, in so doing, he is putting his own authority in question. As a vernacular writer, he must acknowledge the authority of an earlier source text written in Latin, the official language of the church and the conventional medium for the transmission of historical and religious truth. On the other hand, as the spokesman of a class that clearly regards its own rights and privileges as preceding those of the king, he needs to demote Cosmas as the principal chronicler of Bohemian history. Attempting to gloss over the contradictions raised by his coercive rewriting of the legend, the Dalimil author begins his chronicle by providing

. James Simpson, “The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century England,” Speculum 73 (1998): 397–423. For the popuÂ�larity of the story in Bohemia, see Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia, 61.



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an elaborate justification for why his sources are deficient and his own account superior and more truthful. Without mentioning Cosmas by name, he affirms that he—and he alone—can provide a complete meaning to historical events. Taking indirect aim at Cosmas’s ornamental Latin prose, he asserts that he will present the plain, unvarnished truth by cutting through the rhetorical obfuscations of his predecessor: “As far as I am able, I shall shorten empty words and provide the entire meaning [smysl cělý] so that each might learn about and care for his own state/language [jazyk] more completely” (prologue, 45–48). Ironically, the author does not shorten Cosmas’s account of the prehistory of Bohemia, as he promises, but expands it: his own claim to truth is contingent on the amplification—rather than the abbreviation—of what he has found in his sources. The Dalimil author’s drastic solution to his secondary position vis-à-vis Cosmas is to deny that he has even used The Chronicle of the Czechs as his source at all. This act of effacement may be said to provide a discursive analogue to his violent extermination of the maidens. In his programmatic prologue he claims that a priest gave him his source text in the provincial town of Stará Boleslav, adding that this text is superior to all other sources and closest to the truth. The Boleslav Chronicle conveniently provided the author with the information he needed for his expanded account of the War of the Maidens, precisely that part of the story which he probably made up himself. Medieval writers frequently resorted to this kind of subterfuge in order to avoid the accusation that they were simply inventing their own material in an age when auctoritas was deemed more important than originality. As Derek Pearsall has pointed out, medieval writers thought nothing of inventing their sources if such fabrications furthered their interests. The most famous example of this kind of invention is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain: “It supplies the lack of a foundation history for the British nation by tracing its origins to the Brutus who left Troy, founded Britain and gave it his name. The Historia supplies a long lineage of British kings to succeed Brutus, culminating in Arthur, the once and future king who

. A famous example of such a fabrication is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival, whose source the author identifies as a Provençal version of the story by one Kyot. Although some scholars still take Wolfram at face value and believe that a source text existed, the general opinion nowadays is that Kyot and his Arabic and Latin sources are an elaborate fictional construct devised by Wolfram. See Timothy McFarland, “The Emergence of the German Grail Romance: Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival,” in The Arthur of the Germans: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval German and Dutch Literature, edited by W. H. Jackson and S. A. Ranawacke (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), 54–68 (57).

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never was. It was a story that was needed by the emergent Anglo-Norman aristocracy in England.” Analogously, the choice of Stará Boleslav as the place where the author claims to have found his source text may have been determined by his target audience—the Czech-speaking lower nobility—who hailed from the provincial towns and villages of Bohemia and who were generally antagonistic to Prague as the power base of the kings and their German entourage. Stará Boleslav was also the site of the martyrdom of the Bohemian duke Wenceslas I (907–935). Only three years after the duke’s assassination, his brother and successor Boleslav I translated Wenceslas’s relics to Prague and housed them in the large rotunda of Saint Vitus, which the new saint had himself begun. As Lisa Wolverton has pointed out, Prague emerged at this time as the political, religious, and economic heart of the duke’s territory (Hastening toward Prague, 82). In claiming to discover a source that allegedly originated in Stará Boleslav rather than in the capital, the Dalimil author was attempting to reverse the historical and political process whereby Prague had become the center of royal power and authority; that is to say, he postulates a mythic site of origins that was located not in the increasingly Germanized capital, but in the pristine Czech territories of his intended audience. Crucially, the “discovery” of a lost source text allowed the author of the Dalimil Chronicle to create the impression of a tabula rasa on which to inscribe his “truthful” and “straightforward” version of events without apparent recourse to his predecessors. Above all, it allowed him to elide the contradictions inherent in his ideology and to have it both ways by presenting the story of the maidens’ rebellion as a misogynistic fable of female waywardness and as an allegory of Czech resistance to foreign power. As such, the alleged effacement of Cosmas provides a discursive parallel with the violent extirpation of the maidens from his narrative. And yet, as we have seen, the Dalimil author was dependent on both for the assertion of his claims to primacy, sovereignty, and power. His programmatic rewriting of the foundational legend of Prague, in which the “memory” of matriarchal authority is at once partially preserved and partially effaced, was not unique to the author of the Dalimil Chronicle but equally characterized Cosmas’s own rewriting of Kristián’s Edenic account of men and women living equally without a prince to rule them in the primordial forest.

. Derek Pearsall, “Forging Truth in Medieval England,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, edited by Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–27 (9).



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Renaissance Libuše The sudden reemergence of the Libuše legend in the sixteenth century was a reflection in part of a new antiquarian interest in history typical of Renaissance learning as a whole and in part of an ongoing need to rewrite the legend for new audiences. Whereas the fifteenth century in Bohemia had been domiÂ� nated by religious conflict, the sixteenth witnessed an ecumenical desire to reassess the past without resorting to polemics centered round the polarizing figures of Jan Hus and Saint Wenceslas. The pagan prehistory of Bohemia afforded writers on both sides of the confessional divide the opportunity to find common cultural ground in a land torn apart by religious hatred. The lead in this ecumenical enterprise had been provided by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini in his monumental Historica Bohemica (The history of Bohemia). This great work of Latin humanism was completed in the summer of 1458, shortly before Aeneas became pope (as Pius II). The Historica Bohemica is remarkable for its objective and sympathetic account of Bohemian history. The mythic events of pagan Bohemia are presented with clarity and dispassion in stark contrast to the partisan approach of Cosmas and the Dalimil Chronicle. Unlike Cosmas, Aeneas depicts Libuše (Libussa in Latin) as a wise ruler and prudent judge whose loss of popular support is ironically brought about by her impartiality.10 In typical antiquarian fashion Aeneas links the distant events of the past with the present but is often skeptical in doing so. He mentions the tradition that Přemysl the Plowman’s peasant shoes were carried by priests at the coronations of the Czech kings but shrewdly adds that the story was probably invented to legitimize Emperor Charles IV’s own dynastic interests (Historica Bohemica, 1:52). Aeneas was almost certainly correct: the story of Přemysl’s shoes is not attested before Přibík Pulkava of Radenín’s Latin chronicle, which was commissioned by Charles IV and included the emperor’s own life of Saint Wenceslas. Pulkava’s chronicle, which begins with the building of the Tower of Babel and concludes with the death of the emperor’s mother, Elizabeth Přemyslovna, in 1330, reflected his Luxembourg patron’s ambition to appropriate the mythic legend of Libuše for his own ideological and dynastic purposes. Aeneas also displays a humanist’s interest in philology, noting that the Czech word for “threshold” (â•›práh) provided the etymological basis of the

10. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Historia Bohemica, edited by Joseph Hejnic and Hans Rothe, 3 vols. (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2005), 1:44. This edition contains the German version of Peter Eschenloër and the Czech version of Jan Húska as well as the Latin.

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name of Prague. Lacking a sound knowledge of Czech and relying exclusively on Latin sources, Aeneas erroneously concludes that the Latin name of the city, Praga, is a corrupt reading of the original Czech word, a false theory but an interesting example of the textual treatment of the city as palimpsest (Historica Bohemica, 1:54). The Historica Bohemica was translated into German by Peter Eschenloër, the city scribe of Breslau, in 1463 and into Czech by the Catholic priest Jan Húska in 1487. Both these renditions helped to make the Historica Bohemica more familiar to east-central European readers and instill a climate of tolerance into a region scarred by decades of war and conflict. The most important and influential Czech version of the Libuše legend from the Renaissance period is Václav Hájek of Libočany’s Kronika česká (Czech chronicle, 1541).11 Hájek was a Utraquist (moderate Hussite) who converted to Catholicism, entered holy orders, and became the preacher at the Church of Saint Thomas in the Prague Lesser Town. His account of the prehistory of the Czechs is based on Cosmas, the Dalimil Chronicle, and Pulkava of Radenín’s Latin chronicle. However, Hájek does not follow these sources in a derivative fashion but expands them in a lively, inventive manner. Central to Hájek’s amplification of his source material is its antiquarian focus on the past rather than the future. Libuše even employs a personal scribe (â•›pisák) to whom she dictates her prophecies and pronouncements. These—Hájek assures his readers—were transcribed onto the bark of birch trees and preserved for posterity (Kronika česká, 97). Consistent with his desire to create the impression that the mythic events recorded are historically truthful and complete, Hájek often fills in the apparent gaps in the inherited narrative with episodes of his own invention. The anonymous characters in the medieval sources are invested with names, including the two plaintiffs who appeal to Libuše to judge their dispute, and many new characters are added. Libuše and her two older sisters are presented as independent rulers who found their own castles and give them their own names. Libuše even fortifies and renames her father’s burg after his death, replacing it with her own and instructing her followers to forget the previous identification. This deliberate effacement of the burg’s name and history mirrors the unstable and mutable political reality of Prague in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as property and land changed hands as a consequence of religious upheavals. But it also enacted the way the mutating legend mediates between 11. Václav Hájek z Libočan, Kronika Česká, vol. 1, edited by Václav Flajšhans (Prague: Náklad České Akademie, 1918).



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inscription and effacement, memory and forgetting: “One day she [Libuše] went up to the highest rock, sat down on it, and prophesied many things about that castle before her maidens; but because on that occasion her scribe was not present, much that was said and could have been recorded was forgotten. Yet so much still lingered in the memory that she ordered that from that day the castle should no longer be named Psáry but Libin after her own name. Her servants Smilka, Duobra, Vlastimila, and Nastavila commanded all the people that it was their lady’s and princess’s will that everyone should forget the name of Psáry and call the castle Libin” (Kronika česká, 92–93). The sisters’ political independence of male authority is less indicative of real female empowerment in the sixteenth century than an allegorical reflection of the decentered nature of the Bohemian polity. Whereas pre-Hussite Bohemia had been subject to increased centralization by the Czech kings, the diminution of royal power during and following the Hussite wars—and the concomitant strengthening of the magnates’ influence—led to a diffusion of political power in the land. This increased concentration of power in the hands of local magnates is mirrored by the bewildering proliferation of castles in Hájek’s account and the fact that Prague loses the unique prominence attached to it by Cosmas. Of course, Prague’s singularity would once more become a key feature of the reinvented legend in the nationalist nineteenth century. But the fact that the establishment of Prague in Hájek’s chronicle is just one of several foundational acts reflects the city’s eclipse between the reigns of Charles IV and Rudolf II, the only two imperial rulers who made the city their capital and their personal residence. The episode of the War of the Maidens provides Hájek with the opportunity to enliven his story in a manner redolent of the Dalimil Chronicle. Like his medieval predecessor, he presents the conflict between the men and the women as a violent battle to the death. And just as the medieval writer adapted the story to reflect his own (conflicted) ideology, so does Hájek align the maidens with the Hussite rebels of the previous century. For example, Vlasta’s refrain “Beat, kill, don’t leave anyone alive!” (Bíte, zabíte, žádného neživte!) can be seen as a veiled parody of the famous Hussite hymn “Ye who are God’s warriors” (Ktož jsú boží bojovníci) (Kronika česká, 133). Hájek’s chronicle met with the disapproval of his Enlightenment successors in the eighteenth century. Seeking to discredit the myth of Libuše on rational grounds, the historian Gelasius Dobner (1719–90) objected to the Renaissance writer’s imaginative reworking of the material and equated its mixture of myth and history with a failed attempt at modern historiography. Dobner’s exhaustive attempts to correct Hájek’s mistakes were often themselves erroneous and, more seriously, based on a fundamental

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misunderstanding of medieval and early modern notions of truth. As we shall see, the early Czech revivalists were no more objective and dispassionate than their medieval and Renaissance precursors in their appropriation of the Libuše legend for their own ideological purposes.

From the Enlightenment to the National Revival By the eighteenth century Prague was a rather sleepy provincial town€ withÂ�in€the Habsburg territories. Its golden age as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and the residential seat of emperors was long a thing of the past. How did Prague’s status as a city of faded glories reflect and shape the€meÂ�dieval legends of its foundation? We might characterize the nascent attempts to revive and reinvent these legends in the last quarter of the eighteenth century as retrospective just as Czech revivalist literature as a whole invoked the glorious history of the Czech nation exemplified by the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and the turbulent career of the religious reformer Jan Hus in the early fifteenth century.12 As far as the treatment of Libuše legend was concerned, writers relied mainly on the Dalimil Chronicle and Hájek’s Czech Chronicle. But the spirit of their versions was quite new, reflecting the prevailing zeitgeist of the Enlightenment and the situation of the Czechs as subjects of the Habsburg monarchy. The late eighteenth century witnessed a major shift in the construction of gender relations that emerged from the Enlightenment investment in reason and the rights of man. With the decline of traditional religion and the authority of the Catholic Church developed a more radical view of gender identity and a breakdown in the male-female hierarchies inherited from the Aristotelian and Judeo-Christian tradition. An analogous shift took place in the understanding of the body from the old Galenic model, which presupposed a metaphysics of hierarchy in the relationship between male and female, to a new model of the “opposite sexes.”13 ParaÂ� digmatic of this transformation of traditional gender and sexual roles was the emergence of the androgyne as an idealized fusion of traditional male and female sexual attributes. In the realm of culture and politics women became more active as writers and agitators for female rights, as exemplified by Mary Wollstonecraft in England and, somewhat later, George Sand in France. Sand

12. See Alfred Thomas, “Forging Czechs: The Reinvention of National Identity in the Bohemian Lands,” in Ryan and Thomas, Cultures of Forgery, 29–52. 13. See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).



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embodied the phenomenon of the new “virile” woman who dressed as a man and smoked cigars in willful defiance of bourgeois convention. This revolution in gender and sexual relations was inevitably reflected in imaginative works which dealt with female protagonists. Heinrich von Kleist’s tragic drama Penthesilea (1806), based on the episode in Homer where the army of Amazons engages with the Greek host led by Achilles, departs radically from the harmonious and classically balanced spirit of Goethe’s Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia on Tauris, 1787) in presenting his Amazonian heroine as a violent disruptor of emotional equilibrium and, in her obsessive martial and sexual pursuit of her archfoe Achilles, a latent embodiment of the author’s own anguished homosexuality. The ecstatic killing and dismemberment of the Greek hero, followed by Penthesilea’s guilt-ridden suicide, acted out in a profoundly desublimated fashion Kleist’s own divided personality and tragic fate. But it also reprised the problem of truth we have glimpsed at the end of the War of the Maidens in the Dalimil Chronicle. Just as the writer of the late medieval chronicle dramatizes in a violent scene of death and dismemberment his own authorial effacement of the dangerous allegory of female insurrection he invented, so too the epistemological crisis of truth in Kleist’s post-Enlightenment world-view— brought about by his seismic (mis)-reading of Kant—is canceled out in the sublime drama of Achilles’ death and Penthesilea’s suicide. If Kleist’s drama was an extreme manifestation of the “gender troubles” that came to the surface in the era of classicism, its fascination with virile women and ambiguous sexuality typified the spirit of the age. Perhaps for this reason the legend of Libuše and the Czech Amazons made a sustained comeback in the last quarter of the eighteenth century after decades of neglect.14 Given the political context of the Czechs’ subordinate role within the Habsburg monarchy, the rebellion of Vlasta and her female followers against Přemysl’s rule now came to embody the political struggle for freedom from Austrian despotism. At the same time the matriarchal figure of Libuše faded into the background—temporarily effaced as it were—to reemerge in early nineteenth century as the personification of the revived nation. In the Enlightenment period Libuše was denied an active role in the plot, while the emphasis was placed on the “democratic” Amazons. Although Libuše could not be dispensed with entirely, the insurgency of

14. For a useful overview of the legends during the National Revival, see Jitka Malečková, “Nationalizing Women and Engendering the Nation: The Czech National Movement,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalism and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 293–310.

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her female followers provided a more effective metaphor for the struggle for freedom from Habsburg absolutism. The revival of interest in the foundational legend of Prague in the late eighteenth century was a shared German and Czech phenomenon: Libuše had not yet become a divisive nationalist figure. Johann Gottfried Herder mentioned the legend as early as 1779, and German prose versions of the material followed in 1791 and 1792.15 Interestingly, the German investment in the legend focused on the figure of Libuše, while the earliest Czech writers of the legend were more interested in her rebellious female followers. Václav Thám’s play Šárka aneb děvčí boj u Prahy (Šárka; or, The maidens’ war near Prague) was performed at the Prague Bouda Theater (1786–89), which was intended for the performance of plays in the Czech language at a time when most Prague theaters were German. Further Czech evidence of popular interest in the medieval legend of the female insurrection is Prokop Šedivý’s chivalric romance České Amazonky aneb Děvčí boj v Čechách pod správou Řekyně Vlasty (The Czech amazons; or, The maidens’ war in Bohemia under the command of the heroine Vlasta, 1792), with its telling appellation of Vlasta as a hero. But the most ambitious treatment of the legend was the narrative poem Děvín (1805), by Šebastián Hněvkovský. In many ways this mock-heroic treatment of the legend exhibits the rococo lightness of touch characteristic of Prague architecture in the eighteenth century. But it is also a sustained attempt to reinvent Vlasta and her maidens as embodiments of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is important to emphasize that the political circumstances in the early revivalist period were rather different from those of the author of the Dalimil Chronicle. The political preeminence of the native nobility had come to a sudden and violent end with its defeat at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The early revivalists were products of the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment ideals flooding Europe following the French and American Revolutions. Catholic by origin and Deist by adoption, the early Czech revivalists reinvented the historical and mythic figures of the past as protopatriots and protodemocrats. In conformity with František Palacký’s massively influential Dějiny národu českého (History of the Czech Nation, 1848), Josef Kajetán Tyl’s drama Jan Hus, written in the same year as Palacký’s monumental history, portrays the famous religious reformer as the spokesman of democratic rights and values. We see the same emphasis in Karl Friedrich Lessing’s monumental painting of a Hussite priest preach15. See Vladimír Macura, Český sen (Prague: Akademie, 1998), 88–89.



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ing a sermon as he holds up the chalice (1836) and Václav Brožík’s revivalist painting of Hus defending truth at his trial (1883). By contrast late medieval and early modern representations of Hus tended to portray him dying for his faith at the stake in Constance. Nineteenth-century depictions of Hus rarely depict him as a religious martyr and far more often as a spokesman of democratic values. This is also true of Šaloun’s statue of a defiant Hus on the Old Town Square in Prague. As Eric Hobsbawm states, such representations of the past depend for their claim to truth not on what is preserved in the popular, collective memory but on “what has been selected, written, pictured, popularized and institutionalized by those whose function it is to do so.”16 Hus’s medieval reputation as a religious martyr was conveniently forgotten in the interests of a new nationalist ideology. Similarly, the National Revival reinvented Libuše’s female followers to embody the revolutionary spirit of the age while Přemysl the Plowman and his male followers were identified with the Habsburg overlords in Vienna. In the episode from Děvín which relates the seduction and fatal entrapment of the knight Ctirad by the cunning maiden Šárka, based on a scene probably invented by the author of the Dalimil Chronicle, the gullible knight is presented as a “brave hero” and as “our oppressor.” This fundamental contradiction reprises the split role of the male followers of Přemysl in the Dalimil Chronicle, where they embody both patriarchal power and monarchical tyranny. However, the ending of Hněvkovský’s poem diverges significantly from the violent culmination of the medieval chronicle: instead of killing their female opponents, Přemysl and his followers are reconciled with them in a scene of rapprochement demonstrating the triumph of the revolutionary values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. By the early nineteenth century the foundational Czech legends were being rewritten yet again, this time to reflect burgeoning nationalism rather than the Enlightenment values of liberty and equality. This was not the modern rewriting of older material but a forgery intended to fill in the perceived gaps in Czech culture. The Zelená Hora and Dvůr Králové manuscripts, allegedly dating from the tenth and thirteenth centuries respectively, were in fact fabrications written around 1817–18. They were principally inspired by James Macpherson’s forgeries of the “Celtic Homer,” Ossian. The “discovery” of Ossian’s texts in 1755 had been inspired in turn by the discovery of the Nibelungenlied, a courtly epic composed around 1200, at the German monastery of Hohenems. Macpherson’s forgeries of Ossian were the product 16. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 13. See also Thomas, “Forging Czechs,” 36.

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of a national inferiority complex and a national obsession with myths reminiscent of the Czechs’ lack of national status and their obsessive attachment to their distant history. Hugh Trevor-Roper could equally be speaking of Bohemia when he states: “Myth, in Scotland, is never driven out by reality, or by reason, but lingers on until another myth has been discovered, or elaborated, to replace it.”17 And yet the creation of the forged manuscripts was not simply a forgery in the crude sense of the word, since they were also inspired by the example of the medieval and Renaissance chronicles. Just as the medieval and early modern authors had provided the “truthful” interpretation of events by supplementing material they perceived to be lacking in the sources, so the modern authors of the forged manuscripts were trying to create something new to fill the perceived gaps within modern Czech culture. In this sense the recording of the past is never a seamless continuum but a series of conscious revisions. The gap that the authors of the forged manuscripts detected within Czech culture was the absence of a national epic which could compete for prestige with the Nibelungenlied. The reinvention of this medieval courtly poem as the German national epic reflected the Germans’ own need to seek glory in their past following the crushing defeat of Prussia by Napoleon’s armies in 1806. A compensatory tone is clearly heard in Friedrich von der Hagen’s introduction to his edition of the Nibelungenlied (1807): “Nothing could be more comforting and truly edifying to a German soul than the immortal ancient heroic poetry that is here rescued from long oblivion and rejuvenated.”18 Just as Siegfried is reinvented as a quintessential German hero by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, so, in the forged manuscripts, Libuše becomes the heroic embodiment of the Czech nation. The fragmentary poem “Libušin soud” (Libuše’s judgment), from the Zelená Hora manuscript, gave new impetus to the Libuše legend while “forgetting” the earlier focus on her rebellious female followers. After suffering a partial eclipse in the first phase of the National Revival, Libuše now reemerged as the central protagonist in the reinvention of Prague as a Czech—rather than a Bohemian—city. But it is important to emphasize that this reinvention 17. Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), xx. 18. Quoted from Maike Oergel, The Return of King Arthur and the Nibelungen: National Myth in Nineteenth-Century English and German Literature, European Cultures: Studies in Literature and the Arts, vol. 10 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1998), 192.



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of the city and its founder is largely symbolic and fraught with internal contradictions. Consistent with the patriarchal structure of nineteenthcentury society, the emphasis is now placed on Libuše’s subordinate role as a spouse.

Grillparzer’s Libussa In some ways, the German reception of the legend offers a rather different interpretation of the material than the Czech recuperation of it for nationalist purposes. Clemens Brentano’s massive historical romantic drama Die Gründung Prags (The founding of Prague, 1815) equates Libuše’s gynocracy with Czech rule and its ultimate collapse with the normative assumption of Habsburg rule and the Catholic religion.19 Invoking Harold Bloom’s term clinamen, Wolfgang Müller-Funk argues that Franz Grillparzer’s drama Libussa (1822–74), which began life in the romantic era and ended as a postÂ� romantic tragedy, “can be read as a very specific form of revision” whereby the later poet “follows his predecessor only to a certain point, from where he then turns in another direction.”20 Although both plays share a fundamental distrust of marriage as the ideal matrix of heterosexual relations, Grillparzer deviates from Brentano in entertaining no illusions about Catholicism as a source of human dignity and offers instead a realistic depiction of the marriage of the seer and Primislaus (Přemysl) as an example of the ultimate incompatibility between the sexes along the lines of Kleist’s tragedy Penthesilea. Grillparzer struggled with his play over many years largely because he was unable to reconcile his idealistic vision of Libuše as the organic spirit of national unity with his tragic view of marriage as a hopelessly doomed institution. On the one hand, he makes Libussa (Libuše) the embodiment of a matriarchal ideal that predated and transcended the nationalism of 1848; on the other hand, he presents her as a divisive figure trapped within an

19. Clemens Brentano, Die Gründung Prags: Ein historisch-romantisches Drama, in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 14, edited by Georg Mayer and Walter Schmitz (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1980). 20. Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “Libussa, Twofold: The Mythical Narrative of Woman Power in Brentano and Grillparzer—an Intertextual Approach,” in Aneignungen, Entfremdungen: The Austrian Playwright Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), edited by Marianne Henn, Clemens Ruthner, and Raleigh Whitinger (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 69–85 (73). For the text of Libussa, see Franz Grillparzer, Werke, edited by Helmut Bachmaier (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987), 3:275–371.

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unhappy marriage. In fact, from the very opening of the play, Grillparzer emphasizes Libuše’s lack of agency when he makes Primislaus save her from drowning in a swift-flowing river. This episode, which is not attested in the medieval versions of the story, is entirely consistent with nineteenthcentury bourgeois notions of femininity and the dominant role of the husband within marriage. The conflict between Libussa and Primislaus is not exclusively the product of bourgeois notions of marriage; these characters also symbolize very different political perspectives. Libussa embodies the prenationalist, organic unity of the Vormärz (the period before the 1848 revolution), while Primislaus stands for the triumph of bourgeois capitalism and the modern nation-state. It is Primislaus who founds the city of Prague, which for Libussa will inaugurate not only the rule of history but also the rise of “use and profit” and the loss of essential humanity. Grillparzer had originally visited Prague in 1826 and entertained ambivalent attitudes to the city. On the one hand, he was alienated by its growing nationalism (Nationalsinn), but on the other, he was deeply impressed by its fusion of the ancient and modern, which he likened to that of Venice and Florence (Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold, 25). The long gestation of the play allowed Grillparzer to observe the increasing polarization of the city into German and Czech ethnic enclaves.

From the National Revival to the Decadence A similar set of tensions between women as historical subjects and symbolic objects characterized Czech treatments of the Libuše legend, especially after the revolutionary year of 1848. But whereas Grillparzer saw Libussa as a universal spirit that transcends nationalism, the adherents of the Czech National Revival went in the opposite direction by turning her into the embodiment of the nation. Yet these writers, too, struggled to reconcile the political prominence they assigned to Libuše with the patriarchal necessity to stress her subordinate role as a woman and wife within marriage. This trend is typified by František Škroup’s significantly titled opera Libušin snatek ˇ (Libuše’s wedding, 1835) and Josef Václav Frič’s Libušin soud (The judgment of Libuše, 1861). Karel Jaromír Erben’s collection of folk ballads Kytice z národních legend (A bouquet of national legends, 1853)—composed in the wake of the 1848 Prague uprising and published during the repressive Bach reaction (after the Austrian foreign minister August Bach)—concludes with Přemysl



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and Libuše as the father and mother of the Czech nation.21 This ballad, titled “Věštkyně” (The fortune-teller), forms a mirror image to the first poem, in which two orphaned children place a bunch of flowers on their mother’s grave. The flowers symbolize the ballads that the poet offers to the nation after its defeat in 1848, while the mother’s grave represents the defeated nation itself. Although the collection culminates in Libuše’s prophecies, the intervening ballads reveal a more ambivalent and paradoxical picture of women as a threat to the integrity of the national collective as well as the biological guarantee of its survival. What is rather unusual about Erben’s Kytice is that the foundational legend of Prague is invoked at the end rather than at the beginning of the collection. This “effacement” of Libuše’s prominence at the threshold of history is significant for several reasons. One likelihood is that the poet felt obligated to obscure the most patriotic—and therefore most controversial—portion of his work in order to get it past the Austrian censor. Placing Libuše at the beginning of the work would have drawn attention to her subversive function as the representative of the defeated nation and its hoped-for triumph over oppression. But there is a more complex reason for placing Libuše at the end, and that is her function as the embodiment of collective memory as well as the harbinger of future greatness. The nameless female speaker of the poem who claims to have seen Přemysl plowing his field and Libuše prophesying the founding of Prague is consistent with the retrospective and nostalgic tenor of the Czech National Revival. In spite of Erben’s ostensibly optimistic use of Libuše to prophesy the renewal of the defeated Czech nation, her real function in the poem is as much elegiac as proleptic. The greatness that she foretells (the reign of Charles IV in the fourteenth century) was already remote history for Erben and his contemporaries, confirmation that the golden age of Bohemia lay in its past rather than its future. The female figure, who claims to have witnessed the events of the primordial past, is the maternal “ghost” of the dead nation whose grave provides the opening scene of the collection and who looks backward and forward in time from the privileged perspective of eternity. Ironically, the legend of Libuše suffered something of an eclipse following the relaxation of the Austrian censorship after Bach left office in 1859. During this period, known as cosmopolitanism, Czech writers aspired to free themselves from the restraints of nationalist ideology and express 21. Karel Jaromír Erben, Kytice (Prague: Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění, 1956).

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themselves in a more realistic and universal vein. (The leading exponent of cosmopolitanism was Jan Neruda, whom we shall encounter again in chapter 3.) The legend came once more to the fore during the neorevivalist movement of the late 1880s and 1890s. Libuše now achieved her apotheosis as the maternal spirit of the revived nation in Bedřich Smetana’s opera, which inaugurated the new Czech National Theater in Prague in 1881. The monumental style of this theater provided an architectonic analogue to the larger-than-life depiction of Libuše and Přemysl in the opera itself. Several years later Alois Jirásek made the legend even more popular in his Staré pověsti české (Old Czech tales, 1893). Along with his historical novels, these stories proved enormously influential in shaping generations of Czech children’s understanding of their history as an intractable struggle between Czechs and Germans. Like Smetana’s operatic heroine, Jirásek’s Libuše is a rather two-dimensional mouthpiece of the prevailing nationalist ideology, with its belief in the Czechs’ innate love of democracy and freedom. Libuše also articulates the Czech martyrdom complex as she predicts the glorious founding of the city of Prague in the same breath as lamenting the plundering of its wealth and natural resources by unscrupulous foreigners. In stark contrast to Libuše’s rather wooden embodiment of neorevivalist values, Jirásek’s reinvention of her female followers is daringly fin de siècle in spirit. Vlasta is imagined as a murderous femme fatale who feeds on the blood of her male victims. This, at least, is how she appears in the prophetic dream Přemysl relates to his complacent male followers: “It was night, the air was full of thick, acrid smoke; in the light of a fire I saw a girl wearing a helmet. From under her helmet flowed long hair; in one hand she held a sword, in the other a goblet. On the ground slaughtered men lay in the dust and the blood. The girl was running around like a rabid creature and trampling on the dead. Then she scooped their blood into the goblet, which she quaffed with terrifying eagerness like a wild beast. Harken, you men, the voice of the gods and take note of their sign. With this vision I warn you, listen to my words and don’t take them lightly!”22 Přemysl’s dream about a woman who gives him a goblet filled with blood is attested in the Dalimil Chronicle and Hájek. Jirásek amplifies this episode to make Vlasta a typical fin de siècle vampire who drinks the blood of her male victims. These male-centered fears and fantasies of vampiric women and their inevitable concomitant—emasculated, passive masculinity—were not peculiar to the Czech lands but characterized the fin de siècle as a whole. 22. Alois Jirásek, Staré pověsti české (Prague: Státní nakladatelství krásné literatury, hudby a umění, 1953), 56.



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Beginning with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857), the motif of the female vampire feeding off her male victims achieved its most notorious expression in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1896). Dracula’s mission to England, which results in the creation of a race of monstrous women, reflected contemporary fears of the New Woman as well as Jewish immigration to Britain from eastern Europe in the 1890s.23 The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a burgeoning feminist movement in the Czech lands, and latent male anxieties about women’s empowerment can be detected in Jirásek’s reinvention of Vlasta as a New Woman. Whereas Libuše represents the ideal of Czech femininity, her identity safely subordinated to the home and the nation, Vlasta and her followers embody the danger of female autonomy from these ideals. The identification of the New Woman with vampirism was also related to fraudulent theories of gynecology. One theory was that the female blood lust derived from her need to replace lost menstrual blood. In Bram Dijkstra’s words, “The female blood lust was thought to be precipitated by her insatiable need to replenish the blood incessantly lost to her system as a result of her degenerative subjection to the reproductive system and its attendant sexual cravings.”24 However, the specter of female vampirism in fin de siècle Bohemia was not just derived from pseudoscientific theories of female physiology; it was also related to the liminal political state of the nation. Like Bram Stoker’s Ireland, nineteenth-century Bohemia was an ancient nation without national independence and, as such, corresponded to the indeterminate figure of the vampire, who belongs nowhere and everywhere, crossing frontiers with impunity in quest of his or her bloodlust. The mother-whore split in the representation of women also represents a tension between the patriotism of Czech neorevivalism and the cosmopolitan allure of the decadence. A visual analogue to this split can be glimpsed in Czech painting and sculpture of the period. The two-dimensional portrayal of Libuše in Smetana’s opera and Jirásek’s stories finds a parallel in the monumental sculptures of Josef Václav Myslbek, who created mythological groupings for the Palacký Bridge in Prague using patriotic themes taken from the forged manuscripts. These included Lumír and Song (1888), Záboj and Slavoj (1895), and Ctirad and Šárka (1897). At the other end of the artistic spectrum, Karel Vítězslav Mašek’s painting The Prophetess

23. For a succinct account of Bram Stoker’s novel, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 179–82. 24. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 334.

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Libuše (1893), now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, reveals a more complex tension between neorevivalist and decadent sensibilities. Dressed in an ornate Slavic costume and holding the Czech national symbol of the lime leaf in her outstretched hand, the princess is depicted with ashen, sepulchral features, reflecting the fin de siècle fascination with vampirism and indeterminate states (see fig. 2). According to the art historian Tomáš Vlček, this Libuše has ceased to function as a symbol of the Czech nation and has been fully transformed into a decadent icon of vampirism, death, and decay.25 However, as the motif of the sprig of lime leaves and the princess’s ornamental Slavic costume make clear, the painter has not entirely repudiated neorevivalist iconography. Rather, we should see his Libuše as an attempt to synthesize the neorevivalist mother of the nation with the female vampire of the decadence. The implication of Mašek’s painting is that Libuše personifies the decadent Czech nation, which, like a vampire, is neither fully dead nor fully alive. A similar fascination with sadistic women characterizes Julius Zeyer’s narrative poem “Ctirad a Šárka” (Ctirad and Šárka, 1887) from the cycle Vyšehrad, which he later turned into a libretto at the request of the composer Antonín Dvořák (1879).26 The latter decided not to adapt the text to music, probably because he deemed Zeyer’s treatment of the material to be too modernist and risqué. Eventually, however, the libretto was set to music by the young Moravian composer Leoš Janáček in his first opera, Šárka (1887). In a curious embellishment of the standard narrative familiar from the Dalimil Chronicle, Zeyer’s Ctirad comes to Libuše’s tomb in order to thwart Šárka’s attempt to steal Libuše’s crown for the maiden leader Vlasta. Libuše’s only appearance in the poem is as a veiled corpse seated on her throne. Anticipating Mašek’s depiction of the mother of the nation as a decorative icon, Zeyer’s Libuše forms a two-dimensional backdrop to the sadomasochistic drama of Šárka and Ctirad. Pretending to be a victim of Vlasta’s jealousy, Šárka is discovered tied up by the unsuspecting knight Ctirad. When he frees the girl, the maidens swoop down from their hiding place and take Ctirad to their castle, where they beat him to death. How-

25. Tomáš Vlček, “National Sensualism: Czech Fin-de-Siècle Art,” in Intellectuals and the Future in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1890–1914, edited by Lászlo Péter and Robert B. Pynsent (London: Macmillan, 1988), 107–28 (112). Mašek’s painting is not untypical of the era. Alphonse Mucha’s celebrated series of paintings titled “The Slavic Epic” similarly combines Slavophile themes with the fin de siècle aesthetic. See Anna Dvořák, “The Slavic Epic,” in Alphonse Mucha: The Spirit of Art Nouveau, edited by Victor Arwas et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 96–105. 26. Julius Zeyer, Vyšehrad (Prague: Militký a Novák, 1885).



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[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 2. Karel Vítězslav Mašek, The Prophetess Libussa (ca. 1893). Oil on canvas, 193 × 193€cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France. Actually Libuše, the legendary Bohemian princess said to have founded the city of Prague. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

ever, Zeyer mitigates the sadomasochistic implications of his poem by making Šárka repent of her treachery at the last moment and fall in love with the hapless Ctirad. This ending, which deviates completely from the medieval source, provides both the poem and the opera with the requisite moral closure of female contrition. Kleist’s Penthesilea ends on a similar note of female repentance and suicide. At the same time the denouement of Zeyer’s libretto serves the ideological expectations of neorevivalism, since the nation is not torn asunder but is united through the spirit of love. In spite of its conventional ending, Zeyer’s libretto-poem marks an audacious modernist departure from the previously established legend of Libuše and the War of the Maidens. His depiction of Šárka as a dangerous

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femme fatale has a certain amount in common with the treatment of the female vamp in other European literatures at the end of the century. When Ctirad defends Libuše’s tomb (and crown) from Šárka’s attempt to plunder it in Zeyer’s libretto-poem, he addresses her as “a monstrous snake” (zmije příšerná), an image commonly associated with sexually threatening women in the art and literature of the nineteenth century. Kleist’s Penthesilea is dressed entirely in snakeskins, and in Edward Burne-Jones’s painting The Beguiling of Merlin, based on Tennyson’s poem “Merlin and Vivien,” Vivien has coiled snakes in her hair, reflecting her symbolic role as a second Eve.27 Yet another version of the episode of Ctirad and Šárka is Zdeněk FibÂ� ich’s opera Šárka (1897), in which the fate of the protagonists is completely inverted: Ctirad is not killed but is rescued by Přemysl’s men, while a repentant Šárka—guilt ridden at her betrayal of Ctirad—commits suicide by jumping from a cliff. The girl’s suicide is, of course, typical of operatic closure, which necessitates that wayward women pay for their transgressive behavior through madness or death or both. The conventional ending of Fibich’s opera highlights the extent to which these stories were not stable but were constantly subject to revision in an effort to make them more palatable to mainstream, middle-class audiences. The mother-vamp split within the image of women in the legend of Libuše at the fin de siècle continued to be recycled well into the twentieth century, most memorably perhaps, in Fritz Lang’s silent film classic Metropolis, with its “good” Maria and her evil robotic counterpart. But, as we have seen, this standard split in the female imago also reflected a deep tension within Czech national identity at the end of the nineteenth century. If Libuše is the personification of the virtuous mother nation, her rebellious followers personify the dangerous temptations of feminism and cosmopolitanism. This tension is beautifully encapsulated in Mašek’s painting of the prophetess Libuše. Working in Paris rather than in Prague, this painter perhaps found it easier to exploit the continuity between nationalism and cosmopolitanism than his compatriots back home in Bohemia. Like the indeterminate figure of Libuše in Mašek’s painting, the foundational legend of Prague had ceased to encode purely national values and had become the subject of a new aesthetic closer to mainstream European trends. As an icon of decadence rather than an embodiment of the Czech nation, Libuše was poised to rise from her grave and be reinvented yet again.

27. Derek Pearsall, Arthurian Romance: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). See also chapter 9 of Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity.

chapter two

Deviant Monsters and Wayward Women: The Prague Ghetto and the Legend of the Golem

I

n many ways the Prague legend of the golem is better known and more influential than the matriarchal myth of Libuše. However, unlike the foundational legend of Libuše, the golem has not always been associated with Prague. In its earliest incarnation the golem was merely an east-central European counterpart to the myth of the sorcerer’s apprentice made famous by Goethe. The earliest narrative of a recalcitrant golem does not even take place in Prague but was attributed to Rabbi Elijah of Polish Chelm (d. 1583). This story of a golem which crushes its creator to death attracted the attention of the German Romantics Jakob Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Achim von Arnim, all of whom were fascinated by the gothic motif of an artificial creature which is brought to life by mystical incantations and magical formulas. In Achim von Arnim’s story “Isabella von Ägypten” (Isabella of Egypt, 1812) the golem legend as we know it today is hardly recognizable. Neither Prague nor the rabbi Loew makes an appearance in this tale of an anonymous Polish rabbi who is recruited to provide a simulacrum of a Gypsy named Bella, the first love of Archduke Charles (later Emperor Charles V). In an uncanny anticipation of Lang’s science fiction film Metropolis, in which the humanitarian Maria is lured by the Master of Metropolis’s mad scientist Rotwang into his laboratory and her image used to create an evil female robot, Bella is lured by the archduke’s tutor Cenrio to look into a peep box (Guckkasten) with a magic mirror at the bottom. When Bella peers into the box, the mirror captures the image needed to create a lifelike golem (508). The golem Bella is referred to as a doll (Puppe) rather than a . Achim von Arnim, “Isabella von Ägypten,” in Sämtliche Romane und Erzählungen (Darmstadt: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1963), 2:452–557.

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creature of clay, thus linking it with other romantic examples of female automata such as Olympia, the mechanical doll in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “Der Sandmann” (The sandman, 1817). The early motif of the female golem anticipated the surrealists’ fascination with mechanical dolls, as André Breton’s introduction to a French translation of Arnim’s tales makes clear (Ripellino, Magic Prague, 138). Arnim’s story is important for our theme because it is not only the first example of a female golem but the first instance of the modernist homology between wayward women and deviant monsters or machines. In fact, this is the only consistent feature of a legend that has been rewritten so many times that it sometimes becomes unrecognizable. But this was the case in the earliest versions too. Only in the eighteenth century did the golem legend become attached to Prague, largely through his alleged creator, Jehudah Loew ben Bezalel (ca. 1520–1609), the chief rabbi of the city during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II and known in traditional Jewish culture by the acronym Maharal. Significant about the anchoring of the golem legend in RuÂ� dÂ�olfine Prague is its historical as well as legendary implications. Loew was associated with the magnificent and brilliant court of Rudolf, who made Prague his capital and its imposing castle (Hradčany) his personal residence. Rudolf’s reign coincided with the golden age of central European Jewry, its affluence and influence reflected in the many synagogues erected in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, including the Meisl (1592), the Munk (1599), and the Cikán synagogues (before 1613). It has been maintained that the “magical” atmosphere of Rudolfine Prague and Rabbi Loew’s posthumous reputation as an alchemist may have provided an appropriate setting and backdrop to the invention of the golem. It is even possible that the growing eastern European Jewish cult which formed around the seventeenth-century grave of the Maharal in the famous cemetery and which reached its high point in the early twentieth century contributed to the immense popularity and diffusion of the golem legend (Kieval, Languages of Community, 103). Important in this connection is the significance of the rabbi’s grave not only as a site of veneration among rabbinical Jews from Poland and Bohemia, but also as a site of memory, a vital link to the golden age of central European Jewry in the sixteenth century. Eventually, folktales about the golem became attached to the rabbi, and between 1837 and 1847 these orally transmitted narratives suddenly emerged in print, both in early Prague travel guides (about the ghetto and the€cemeÂ� . Hillel J. Kieval, Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 101.



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tery) and in novels and novellas by Berthold Auerbach (1837), Franz Klutschak (1838), and Leopold Weisel (1847). For these liberal pre-1848 writers, Rabbi Loew was not a magical exponent of the Cabala, as he subsequently became, but a modern experimental scientist.

The Golem and the Ghetto as Text The main interest of the golem legend for our purposes is not its origins— the usual focus of golem scholarship—but the way it has been obsessively revised and rewritten throughout the modern period. Most versions of the story involve the insertion of a talisman (shem) inscribed with the Hebrew word for “God” or “truth” (emeth) into the lifeless golem’s chest, forehead, or mouth; only with the effacement of the first letter (aleph) and the formation of a new word, “death” (meth), does the golem drop down lifeless. This alternation between inscription and effacement serves as an effective metaphor for the status of the legend as a palimpsest: every time a new version is written, the previous version is partially effaced and partially preserved. In rewriting the legend, the artist is not simply attempting to produce a new story; he is trying to recover some elusive meaning hidden within it. According to Jorge Luis Borges in his poem “El Golem” (“The Golem”), the golem legend serves as a vague memory of the mythic union of the signifier and the signified when God’s sacred name (“sacro nombre”) was still known to Adam in the Garden of Eden. After the Fall this knowledge was lost and God’s holy name effaced like letters in an ancient manuscript: Adam and all the stars had known it, placed There in the Garden. The corrosive rust Of sin (cabalists say) has long effaced The Name that generations since have lost.

Borges identifies this urge not only with the Jewish people in general, but with the Prague legend of the golem in particular: Human innocency and human guile Are boundless: it is known that a day came When the Chosen People pursued the Name Over the wakeful ghetto’s midnight oil. . Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, 1923–1967, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 123 (translation by John Hollander).

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Unlike the way of those who, as in fog, Beam a dim shadow in dim history, Green and alive remains the memory Of Judah, the Hohe Rabbi Löw of Prague.

If the golem legend can be understood as a palimpsest, the Prague ghetto can similarly be seen as a multilayered text of memory and forgetting. A major instigation for the explosion of golem narratives (plays, novels, and stories) in the last decade of the nineteenth and the first two decades of the twentieth century was the demolition of the Prague ghetto in the late 1890s, when the city fathers began an ambitious program of urban renewal. Inspired by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s demolition of medieval Paris in the 1870s, this recreation of Prague in the manner of Napoleon III’s imperial capital was motivated as much by the desire to efface the city’s undesirable past as to forge a glamorous future. The ghetto was targeted specifically on account of its historical reputation as the city’s red-light district and unfortunate associations with prostitution and syphilis. This association had its roots in the medieval Christian taboo against intermarriage and the touching of food by Jews in the marketplace. This taboo was extended to prostitutes, which explains the frequent medieval practice of situating the brothels in the Judengasse (Bossy, Christianity in the West, 85). Not only was this practice deemed witty, as John Bossy points out; it was also a symbolic act of exclusion from the social body (of Christ). Thus, the sanitation law of the 1890s, whereby whole swaths of the ghetto were demolished, was more than a manifestation of bourgeois notions of hygiene; it was also a return of the repressed memory which aligned Jews with pollution and “unclean” women. Significantly, the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a resurgence of anti-Semitism in the Bohemian lands: it was at this time that one of the most notorious cases of the blood libel against the Jews arose in the Czech provinces. Just as their medieval predecessors had located brothels in the Judengasse because prostitutes and Jews were deemed joint sources of pollution and infection, so now the liberal city fathers sought to efface those associations by demolishing entire sections of the ghetto. However, some of the most valuable historical sites were preserved (after all, the city fathers were liberals), including the thirteenth-century OldNew Synagogue and the eighteenth-century Jewish Town Hall (see fig. 3). A few years later nostalgia for the demolished ghetto led to a revival in the legendary reputation of Rabbi Loew and an explosion of literature on the subject. From the early 1890s onward the Jewish ghetto became a source

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 3. The “Altneuschul” (Old-New Synagogue) in Prague, Europe’s oldest synagogue, built around 1270. On the right is the Jewish Town Hall (eighteenth century), with a clock with Hebrew figures showing the time counterclockwise. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

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of romantic nostalgia for “old Prague,” a good example being Jirásek’s Old Czech Tales, in which the story of Rabbi Loew and his golem is accorded the same respect as the Slavic legend of Libuše and Přemysl. The growing interest in the figure of Rabbi Loew and his golem was also reflected in the erection of civic monuments such as Ladislav Šaloun’s statue of a longbearded magus in a niche of the New Town Hall (1908–11; see fig. 4). Less than twenty years after their attempt to forget the ghetto, the city fathers were now seeking a means to memorialize it. A text which expresses the full range of ambivalence toward the vanished ghetto both as a source of nostalgia and of sexual prurience is Paul Leppin’s story “Das Gespenst der Judenstadt” (“The Ghost of the Jewish Quarter,” 1914). This account of a doomed prostitute named Johanna, who is hospitalized for syphilis and released only to discover that the ghetto has been demolished, looks back with lurid fascination to the era before the implementation of the city fathers’ policy of slum clearance and sanitation: Only ten years ago, in the middle of Prague, where today tall, airy apartment blocks form wide boulevards, stood the Jewish quarter: a squint, gloomy jumble of nooks and crannies from which no storm was strong enough to blow away the smell of mould and damp masonry and where, in summer, the open doors exhaled a poisonous miasma. Filth and poverty each outstank the other, and the eyes of the children that grew up there had a dull, cruel glint of depravity. Alleys would sometimes pass under low, vaulted viaducts through the belly of a house, or they would suddenly twist to one side to come to an abrupt end at a blind wall. . . . Girls with painted lips leant against the house entrances, full of coarse laughter, whispering in the men’s ears and lifting up their skirts to show their yellow or lime-green stockings. (131)

A voyeuristic fascination with prostitution is combined with a curious nostalgia for the demolished ghetto: “Fornication had made its home here, and in the evenings its red lamps lured men in. There were streets where every building was a house of ill repute, low dives where vice shared its bed with hunger, where consumptive women carried on a meagre trade with their withered charms, secret chambers where villainy, with whispers and sly winks, violated school-age girls and sold their helpless, bewildered innocence for a few pieces of tarnished silver” (131). The last sentence recalls . Paul Leppin, “The Ghost of the Jewish Quarter,” in The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy, 1890–2000, edited by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 2003), 131–35.

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 4. Ladislav Šaloun, Rabbi Loew (1908–11). This statue of Rabbi Loew (or Jehudah Loew ben Bezalel), who died in 1609, is located in the New Town Hall, Prague. Loew is said to have created the golem. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

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the episode from the New Testament where Judas sells Christ to the authorities for thirty pieces of silver. Although most of the Jewish population had left the ancient ghetto by the late 1880s, the story unconsciously conflates prostitution, usury, and Judaism in a way that recalls medieval Christian polemics against Jews. Johanna becomes the ghostly incarnation of the vanished ghetto but also the conjoined association of Jews with prostitution. A nymphomaniac who cannot sate her body, she inevitably succumbs to the dreaded disease of syphilis. It is implied in the story that the disease enters the girl from the ghetto itself, as if the latter were itself the source of sickness: “Then came the day when disease demanded its penance from her body. It welled up from the decaying walls of the ghetto, from its debauched streets, and poisoned her kisses. It burnt up her blood and made her veins dry and cracked” (133). Long after she has been admitted to hospital for treatment for syphilis, Johanna continues to yearn for male partners and manages to escape from her hospital bed. On returning to the ghetto in search of new lovers, she discovers that it has been demolished at the order of the city fathers. Thus, the “ghost” of Leppin’s title is not so much Johanna herself as the memory of the vanished ghetto, as well as its association with prostitution, which the city fathers sought to efface.

Meyrink’s The Golem (1915) The popularity of the legend of the golem provided the inspiration for the widespread dissemination of the motif in the early twentieth century, most notably in Gustav Meyrink’s occultist novel The Golem. However, the emphasis placed on occultism and mysticism in Meyrink’s novel has sometimes obscured its preoccupation with cultural memory and the changing physical landscape of the Prague ghetto as a manifestation of nostalgia for a lost world. Whereas in most golem texts Prague functions as a shadowy backdrop to the central drama, in Meyrink’s novel this relation is inverted: the ghetto becomes the central, obsessive focus of the story—we might even say its main protagonist—while the golem is reinvented as a ghostly emanation of the destroyed ghetto which returns every thirty-three years to haunt its streets. The demolished Judenstadt becomes a site of memory and nostalgia for Meyrink and his fellow Prague-German writers in the early years of the twentieth century. Its effacement represents a wanton act of destruction . Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, translated by Mike Mitchell (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 1995). For the German text, see Gustav Meyrink, Der Golem (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1995).



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inflicted upon the city’s ancient heritage in the interests of bourgeois sanitation. In effacing the city’s ancient Jewish past, the city fathers had sought to reinvent Prague as a modern, hygienic metropolis, but the price to be paid for this reinvention was the loss of the city’s unique identity and history. As a consequence of the physical transformation of the ghetto, the reinvention of the golem as the embodiment of the past is rewritten as a ghostly incarnation of its absence. Meyrink’s golem is no longer envisaged as a servant or a rebel (as in most versions) but as an elegiac incarnation of a vanished world. Hence, the golem appears and vanishes intermittently, his absence as significant as his presence. With his Mongolian features, he is the exotic other not only of the narrator but also of modern Western liberalism. Like the golem, the ghetto is envisioned as a site of presence and absence, memory and forgetting, a palimpsest of semilegible letters and hieroglyphs. The characters are forced to “read” the ghetto as if it were a faded text: “Now he is feeling his way along the wall, and now, right now, he must be reading my name on the door-plate, laboriously deciphering each letter in the dark” (34). Wherever the narrator goes through the labyrinthine ghetto, he encounters strange, inexplicable signs such as name plates on houses, his own capitalized name in gold letters on the white silk lining of a hat or a piece of cardboard in the window of a red-curtained tavern: “salon loisitchek Grande Conserte Tonight.” (69). The dark, twisting streets of the ghetto become a text in which only certain words can be deciphered: Missing Person 1,000 crowns reward ....................................................... .................... in his mid-sixties...... ............. black frock-coat............... ..................................... face: plump and clean shaven............................................ ......................... hair: white .................... ................................................................. ............. to the Police.............................. Room no............... (97)

Rosenberg’s The Golem (1909) A very different perspective on the golem legend is provided by Yudl Rosenberg’s collection of stories The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the

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Maharal of Prague (1909). As we might expect from a devout Jew concerned to make the story reflect the needs of his religious audience, Rosenberg’s golem is transformed into an unambiguous superman who defends the Jewish people against Christian attacks, in particular, the the blood libel. Rosenberg was an orthodox rabbi from Warsaw who immigrated to Canada at the age of fifty-five. Although the blood libel against the Jews, which reemerged in east-central Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, provided the immediate instigation for the composition of his twenty interlocking stories, Rosenberg’s sanitized version of the legend can also be seen as an attempt to repress the negative memories of the ghetto and its history of persecution. In distinction to Meyrink’s novel, in which the ghetto becomes the dramatic focus of the story, in Rosenberg’s retelling Prague serves as a shadowy backdrop to the heroic deeds of the golem as he relentlessly seeks to undo the damage wreaked by the Christian adversaries of the Jews. In this sense, Rosenberg’s stories can be seen as a tabula rasa on which he inscribes an entirely new—and positive—text about a “good” golem. This desire for a wholly unsullied version of the legend necessitated the effacement of earlier versions, which included a recalcitrant golem spinning out of control and destroying entire sections of the ghetto. In order to realize his ambition to create a positive golem, Rosenberg claimed that his Yiddish stories were a translation of a historical account composed in Hebrew by the Maharal’s son-in-law, Rabbi Isaac Katz, which he had discovered in a library in Metz. As it turns out, the library is as fictitious as the manuscript it purportedly contained, recalling the forged Czech manuscripts allegedly found in 1817–18 but actually dating from the time of their discovery (see chapter 1). The camouflaging of fiction as history was especially important for eastcentral European Jews, who regarded such stories as a vital record of their history. Rosenberg reinvented the golem as a Jewish superman at a moment of intense renewed anti-Semitism in central Europe; but his idealized golem can also be seen as a desire to repress the memory of the “bad” golem so central to earlier versions of the story. Thus, there arises a parallel between the constantly mutating clay golem itself and the palimpsest of narratives which developed around it. This is not to say that there is no historical veracity in Rosenberg’ stories; on the contrary, they were written as a means of bearing witness to authentic Jewish experience. . Yudl Rosenberg, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, edited and translated by Curt Leviant (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).



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Rosenberg draws mainly upon the Hebrew Bible as a palimpsest for his stories. The evil priest Thaddeus, who concocts the blood libel in order to ensnare the Jews, is clearly modeled on the figure of Haman, the enemy of the Jewish people in the book of Esther. At the end of “The Astonishing Tale of the Healer’s Daughter” Thaddeus, who has failed to entrap the Maharal thanks to the timely intervention of the golem, is explicitly compared with Haman: “The priest Thaddeus returned home humiliated and very furious, just as it is written about Haman, ‘his head covered in mourning,’ while the Maharal returned home happy and highly esteemed and the entire city of Prague too rang with joyous cries” (66). Rosenberg’s Thaddeus is reminiscent of the figure of Haman, while the golem recalls the biblical heroine Esther, who intercedes with the Persian king Ahasuerus to save the Jewish people from Haman’s threats. In the Hebrew Bible Esther is not only the savior of the Jews; she is also the antithesis of the sinful Eve. If Esther corresponds to Rosenberg’s “good” golem, the figure of Eve, who disobeys God in the Garden of Eden, finds a parallel in the Maharal’s wife, who defies her husband by ordering the golem to collect water from the well but forgets to rescind the command. As a consequence of the wife’s insubordination the golem spins out of control and floods the rabbi’s house with water. If this episode reprises the folktale of the sorÂ�cerer’s apprentice, it also establishes a parallel between out-of-control golems and unsupervised women. In other words, the presence of the repressed recalcitrant golem in Rosenberg’s stories is revealed only in those episodes which involve the rabbi’s wayward wife. In another story, the daughter of a Jewish wine merchant is abducted by Thaddeus and hidden in his own house. The shameful prospect of the girl’s enforced conversion to Christianity is unconsciously connected to the threat to her virginity. Although the golem becomes the girl’s savior when he liberates the girl and returns her safely to her father’s house, his role as protector of women can be seen as the repressed inverse of his role as the threat to their welfare in other versions of the story, as we shall now see in another Jewish version of the legend.

Leivick’s The Golem (1921) One of the most significant and influential modern Jewish versions of the golem legend is the poetic drama by H. Leivick (1888–1962), published in Yiddish in 1921 but first performed in Hebrew by the Habimah Theater in Moscow in 1923. Leivick’s golem betrays the influence of expressionism fashionable in interwar Europe and particularly in Weimar Germany.

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His tormented and introverted golem is a decidedly Freudian creature, who, early on in the play, betrays the ominous signs of his violent nature. Above all, he is a product of the Freudian repressed, the monstrous inversion of the “good” golem whose principal function is to protect the Jews from Christian persecution. Even before he appears on stage, his phantom warns the rabbi not to proceed with the experiment, and subsequent events anticipate the catastrophe to come. A major omen is provided by the rabbi’s assistants, Yitsak the Cohen and Yankev the Levite, who have a nightmare after falling asleep during the reciting of the psalms in the synagogue. Yitsak describes a strange creature with green eyes and holding a sword who bursts into the synagogue and kills the terrified Jews: The synagogue was mobbed by panicky Jews, Who threw themselves in every single corner, Breathlessly tumbling under every table. . . . As they lay there, a strange man came in, A tall man with a giant head, long hands, With green eyes, piercing eyes, clutching a sword, Jabbing and stabbing and slicing every which way, Up and down and right and left.

If the assistants’ dream is an omen of the violence to come, it also reactivates the repressed memories of past atrocities perpetrated against the Jews: yankev: In the synagogue they talked about bad times, About the past and all the present rumors Now circulating in the city of Prague. About a slaughterer who has murdered Jews, Masses of Jews, major and minor Jews! And that was why I dreamed that dream, Rabbi. (123–24)

When the golem makes his first appearance in the second scene, he is described as having a powerful, gigantic build, thick lips, black curly hair, and huge, childlike eyes. Later in scene 2, the rabbi’s wife, who is startled by the golem’s appearance when she meets him, comments that “he really doesn’t seem to be a Jew” (129). Instead of defending Jewish maidens from Christian abduction, as in Rosenberg’s stories, he seems to represent a . The Golem: A New Translation of the Classic Play and Selected Short Stories, edited and translated by Joachim Neugroschel (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 123.



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threat to their well-being, as his obsession with the rabbi’s granddaughter, Deborah, indicates. In many ways, Leivick’s golem is the demonic other of Rosenberg’s sanitized golem. Inevitably, Leivick’s treatment of the golem as the other recalls the modernist motif of the doppelgänger. In fact, the theme of the double made prominent by Freud and Otto Rank coincided with the emergence of the modernist treatment of the golem. Both the doppelgänger motif and its manifestation in the golem legend were the result of a philosophical and religious crisis brought about by the Enlightenment. It is no coincidence that Freud was a central European Jew whose writings were generated in the context of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its multiethnic and multireligious communities. What characterized this moment in central Europe was the post-Enlightenment crisis of liberal thought. As Hugh Haughton has pointed out, “As the literature of the Gothic developed in the wake of secular Enlightenment liberalism, revealing the haunting persistence of the architecture, religious beliefs and superstitious terrors of the un-Enlightened past, so psychoanalysis after the First World War increasingly conjures up a Gothic closet, an uncanny double, at the heart of modernity.” The modern golem legend can be seen as a vestigial memory of what the Enlightenment sought to repress, just as the ghetto of Prague was partially destroyed in the 1890s as a liberal desire to suppress the ghetto’s conjoined associations of prostitution and disease. The golem’s violent rampages also reprise the traumatic memory of the long tradition of Christian pogroms against the Jews, one of the most notorious of which took place in Prague at Easter 1389 while the king, Wenceslas IV, was absent from the city. According to Christian accounts of the incident, a Jewish boy is said to have thrown a stone at the Host as it was carried aloft during the Holy Week celebrations. In reprisal, angry members of the Christian community broke into the ghetto, destroyed Jewish property, and murdered many members of the Jewish community. The golem’s complaint that he is taunted by the Jewish children provides a vague memory of that pogrom. The Jewish memories of 1389 are preserved in a single written source, which, according to Miri Rubin, served to commemorate the event for generations to come: a heartrending lament named “All the afflictions which have befallen us” (“Et kol ha-tela’a’â•›”) was composed by Rabbi Avigdor

. See the introduction to Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, translated by David McClintock with an introduction by Paul Keegan (London: Penguin, 2003), xlii. . For the 1389 pogrom in Prague, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 135–40.

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Kara of Prague (d. 1439), whose gravestone still survives in the old Jewish cemetery (Rubin, Gentile Tales, 139). This lament was recited according to the liturgical use of Prague during the afternoon prayers of the Day of Atonement. Interweaving an account of the massacres with biblical quotations, the lament is akin to a palimpsest in which history and myth become inseparable.

The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920) The repressed association of the recalcitrant golem with wayward women in Rosenberg’s stories comes once more to the surface in Paul Wegener’s silent film The Golem: How He Came into the World, with its subplot of an illicit affair between the rabbi’s daughter Miriam and the emperor’s messenger, Florian, who has come to the ghetto to inform the Jews that they are to be banished. (Miriam was played by Wegener’s wife, the Czech actress Lydia Šalmonová). In the main plot the rabbi makes a man of clay in order to persuade the emperor not to fulfill his threat to banish the Jews. The rabbi’s attempt to distract the emperor and his court with magical tricks (including a tour-de-force metacinematic screen show depicting the Jewish Exodus from Egypt) provides a parallel to Miriam’s own sexual “sorcery” in seducing the imperial messenger. Failing to enforce the edict, Florian becomes wholly obsessed with the rabbi’s beautiful daughter and loses his life as a result of his liaison with her. In his study of German-Jewish strains in the modernist period, Noah Isenberg explains the subplot of Miriam’s affair with the Christian Florian in terms of the perceived threat posed by the immigrant Ostjuden to Weimar Germany and the concomitant fear of racial mixing in anti-Semitic writings of the 1920s.10 However, Miriam’s dark, Gypsy looks suggests that the Jewish other equally constitutes a source of erotic fantasy in the imagination of the film’s mass audience. Hence, an alternative explanation for the inclusion of the subplot is the equivalency it establishes between independent women, personified by the hypersexual Miriam, and the recalcitrant golem (see fig. 5). Just as the creator fails in his efforts to control the golem, so does the father fail in his attempt to curb his daughter’s sexual appetite. In both cases the paternal inability to provide adequate supervision culminates in the destruction of the ghetto. 10. Noah Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom: The Strains of German-Jewish Modernism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), chapter 3.



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Fig. 5. Still of Miriam and the golem from Paul Wegener’s film The Golem (Germany, 1920) (Paramount, 1921). Academy Foundation, Margaret Herrick Library, Core Collection, Production Photographs. Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Isenberg also points out that the expressionist set of the ghetto as a pile of cramped, overpopulated buildings reflected Germans’ anxieties about JewÂ�ish immigrants from the east flooding their cities and turning them into shtetls. This is undoubtedly true. However, the deliberate decision to set the story in the medieval period rather than in the enlightened seventeenth century (when Loew was chief rabbi of Prague) is also important in reprising the premodern association of the ghetto with prostitution and pollution. Although Wegener would not have known the demolished ghetto, he would have been familiar with it from surviving photographs, which reveal a cramped medieval quarter with buildings leaning in on each other across narrow alleys not unlike the stylized set envisaged in the film. The costumes and pointed hats worn by the Jewish inhabitants of the ghetto are also significant in signaling the return of the medieval repressed. As Sara Lipton has argued in her meticulous study of images of intolerance in the representation of Jews and Judaism in the Bible moralisée, the depiction

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of Jews wearing pointed hats was not mimetic (i.e., a direct reflection of social reality) but an arbitrary signifier devised by Christian iconographers to create certain modes of perception.11 The fact that the male Jewish characters in Wegener’s film wear these pointed hats serves to distinguish them from the Christian characters and, in so doing, helps to reassure the mass audience of the clearly visible difference between Christians and Jews at a time of mass Jewish immigration to the cities of Weimar Germany. If the male Jews in the film are clearly identifiable through their pointed hats and long robes, Miriam is recognizable as the Jewish other through her olive complexion, long dark tresses, and Gypsy features. This association of Jews with Gypsies reprised long-standing European perceptions of the exotic other as exemplified by the Gypsy Isabella of Egypt and the Polish rabbi who makes a golem of her image in Achim’s Romantic tale. The conflation of Jewish women with Gypsies emerges not only in Miriam’s dress and comportment but also in the stylized interiors of her chamber, with their suggestion of an Eastern harem. Crucial in the suggestion of Miriam’s sexual appetite is the vaginal shape of the entrances and alcoves, which reinforces the association of the golem and ghetto with the female body. Miriam’s forceful personality contrasts with those of the ineffectual male characters Florian and the rabbi’s assistant but also parallels the golem’s growing strength and self-confidence. When the golem physically overpowers the rabbi’s assistant as the latter tries unsuccessfully to remove the talisman inserted in his chest, his act of defiance dovetails with the consummation of Miriam’s illicit night of passion with Florian. (In a curious inversion of sexual roles we see the effete Florian’s sleeping head resting on Miriam’s protective bosom). The editing of the film makes clear the parallel between the golem’s defiance and Miriam’s sexual waywardness as it cuts from the golem raising his hand to the rabbi to Miriam’s bedroom the night after sex with Florian. Thus, Miriam’s illicit liaison with Florian is not subordinated to the main plot of the golem’s defiance but is in some ways analogous to it. The theme of failed paternity inherent both in the main plot of the destructive golem and the subplot of Miriam’s affair recalls the similar inability of Frederson to control the female robot he has unleashed on the world and his son’s rebellious nature in Fritz Lang’s science fiction classic Metropolis (1926). Lang’s film about a futuristic city ruled by the capitalist Frederson and undermined by his idealistic son, who sides with the oppressed workers, 11. Sara Lipton, Images of Intolerance: The Representation of Jews and Judaism in the “Bible moralisée” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 16–17.



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perpetuates the split between the obedient and recalcitrant golem in the displaced form of the “good” Maria and her inauthentic robotic counterpart. Another connection between Metropolis and the golem legend is the parallel between the menace posed by technology and the threat embodied by powerful women: the “good” Maria is abducted and turned into a robotvamp by Frederson’s engineer-scientist Rotwang. Maria’s abduction reprises the motif of the Jewish daughter taken in captivity by Thaddeus and forced into apostasy in Rosenberg’s stories. Only after the capture and destruction of the vamp-machine can the “good” Maria prevail in her desire to bring about the reconciliation of the heart and the mind, the workers and the capitalist master of Metropolis.

R.U.R. (1920) The parallel established in Wegener’s and Lang’s films between the female threat to male authority and the destructive potential of technology is also a key component of Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R., written in the same year as Wegener’s film and staged for the first time in Prague in January 1921.12 In conceiving the subject matter of his play, Čapek was conscious of the golem legend of old Prague and drew upon it to develop his preoccupation with the threat of what he termed “mechanical civilization.” However, the golem origins of the play have usually been overlooked in most studies of the play in an attempt to present it as an optimistic allegory of the triumph of human love in an increasingly mechanized world. To be fair to the critics, Čapek appears to have subscribed to the same position and, in this sense, seemed determined to “rewrite” the golem legend to reflect his humanist belief in the power of mankind to transcend its modern predicament. Insofar as most versions of the golem legend are less sanguine about mankind’s ability to overcome nature by demonstrating the disastrous consequences of creating artificial life, R.U.R. may be said to fulfill precisely what it purports to disavow: the fantasy of overcoming nature’s monopoly. As we shall see, the optimistic ending of the play, in which the robots mysteriously and inexplicably attain human subjectivity, contradicts the insight of the golem legend—that human beings must accept the limits of their own mortality. An important component of Čapek’s attempt to rewrite the golem legend to reflect his optimistic investment in mankind’s essential goodness is the effacement of Prague as the setting of his plot. Influenced by the utopian 12. Karel Čapek, R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), translated by Claudia Novack (London: Penguin, 2004).

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(and dystopian) tradition of English literature, Čapek sets his drama of robot insurgency on a remote island. This New World location recalls Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and, more recently, H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr. Moreau (1895), about the forlorn attempt by a demented scientist to transform animals into humans. Like the golem legend, the point of Wells’s searing story of vivisection is to demonstrate the folly inherent in mankind’s desire to subvert nature’s power. On one level, R.U.R. comes to the same conclusion, since the vivisection performed by Alquist on the robot leader Damon at the end of the play fails to yield the secret of robot production. On the other hand, the miraculous transformation of the most advanced robots (Primus and Helena) into humans at the close of the same scene seems to bear out the opposite point, since the robots do not die out but are perpetuated as human beings. The incoherence of Čapek’s play—and especially its ending—has been willfully overlooked by most critics of the play in an attempt to make it what it is manifestly not: a study in optimism. Ironically, the same critics have detected parallels between R.U.R. and Georg Kaiser’s dark, expressionist play about the destructive Great War, Gas (part 1, 1918).13 In highlighting the play’s appeal to human decency and reason and thus repressing its irrational components, traditional critics of R.U.R. seem determined to divorce it from the larger cultural matrix of central European modernism. In fact, the play’s convoluted plot provides many striking parallels with Wegener’s The Golem and Lang’s Metropolis, especially their exploration of the homology between threatening women and out-of-control technology. As Andreas Huyssen has argued, the strange narrative twists and turns of Metropolis can be understood in the psychological terms of male projection and displacement whereby social anxieties of rampant technology become inseparable from the threat posed by female sexuality to the male imaginary.14 In R.U.R. this menace is doubly displaced onto the robots and the beautiful Helena Glory, the domineering daughter of the World President, who, in the opening scene, comes to the island where production is under way in order to advocate the rights of the enslaved robots. Helena’s feminist and socialist beliefs identify her as an example of the recently enfranchised New Woman. As I have argued elsewhere, her campaign on behalf of the robots is tacitly equated with the struggle for women’s right to vote in the lead-up

13. William E. Harkins, Karel Čapek (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 85–86. 14. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 70.



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to universal suffrage.15 Seen in this light, the subsequent rebellion of the robots and their usurpation of humanity dramatize fears not only of the destructive capacity of machines but also of the rising power of independent women. Of course, this fear of the New Woman is deeply repressed. Čapek’s own liberal beliefs, which he shared and to some extent derived from his great friend and mentor, President T. G. Masaryk, inclined him to be sympathetic to women’s rights, and Masaryk himself was a well-known feminist. However, on the level of repression, the play establishes a phantasmatic equivalence between the fate of Helena and of the robots: she becomes mysteriously infertile halfway through the play and destroys the formula of robot production, thus dooming them to extinction. The inexplicable connection between Helena’s subsequent demise and the imminent extinction of the robots reinforces the homology between women and machines and demonstrates the play’s need to neutralize the threat they pose to patriarchal power. If Helena and the rebellious robots conflate the menacing specter of empowered women and unbridled technology, the men in the play, without exception, dramatize the modernist crisis of masculinity. During the course of the action all the male managers of the robot factory come under the sway of the beautiful Helena and fall hopelessly in love with her. In the process they abandon their responsibilities as managers of the robot factory, thereby allowing the increasingly restive machines to plot their insurgency and take over power. By the end of the play, the robots are in total control of the island where the factory is located, and humanity is on the brink of extinction. In a curious twist designed to provide the desired denouement of resurgent humanity, it turns out that Helena had previously destroyed the blueprint for the robot design, making it impossible for the humans to halt their manufacture, just as Rabbi Loew is incapable of controlling the golem’s erratic behavior in Wegener’s film. Helena’s role in destroying the robot formula reprises both the motif of the meddlesome rabbi’s wife familiar from Rosenberg’s stories and the little blonde girl at the end of Wegener’s film who saves Prague from destruction by removing the talisman from the golem’s chest. Thus, Helena performs a split female function in the play corresponding to the functions of the meddlesome rabbi’s wife and the innocent little girl in different versions of the golem legend. If Helena had initially threatened humanity by advocating the rights of the robots, she now fulfills the diametrically opposite function as the savior of humanity 15. Alfred Thomas, The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), chapter 5.

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and nemesis of the robots. This split role also aligns the female with the golem, who performs an equally bifurcated role as the menace to and savior of the Jews. Just as the split female imago in R.U.R. recalls the good-bad split in the golem (legend), so does the mysterious robot formula correspond to the function of the shem which is inserted into the golem’s body. If the magical talisman gives life to the golem when inserted into its body and takes away that life when removed, the formula of robot production provides the key to the robots’ survival and to their extinction. Čapek does not explain why or how a creature made from protoplasm rather than machine parts should need a blueprint in the first place. But this is not really the point: the robot formula does not perform a logical role in the plot but is an irrational component analogous to the magical shem. Helena’s immolation of the formula necessitates Alquist’s operation on the robot leader Damon in an attempt to uncover the mystery of the robots’ creation. When this results only in a violent scene of failed vivisection, a miracle occurs: two of the most sophisticated robots, symbolically named Primus (“first”) and Helena (after her human prototype), fall in love and become the new Adam and Eve. This deus ex machina, in which the robots assume human subjectivity through the “feminine” principle of love, has no causal or logical connection with the preceding events and is devised to bring closure to a plot that (like the robots themselves) appears to be€spinÂ�ning out of control. This coercive conclusion parallels the similarly improbable endings of Wegener’s film, where the threat posed by the golem is neutralized by the innocent little blonde girl outside the walls of the ghetto, and of Lang’s film, in which the Master of Metropolis is reconciled with his son. Čapek appears to have been dissatisfied with the ending of his play. In a letter written to his mistress Olga Scheinpflugová, he blames his inability to bring the drama to a convincing conclusion on a mysterious illness: “I wasn’t feeling well, Olga, which is why towards the end I searched almost frantically for a solution in the spirit of love and compromise. Do you think it is believable, darling?” (quoted from Ripellino, Magic Prague, 145–46). Rather than the cause of his crisis as a dramatist, the mysterious malady seems to have been its symptom. In a desperate attempt to resolve the most troubling questions raised by the play—where do we draw the line between machine and human if the former can so easily mutate into the latter, and how can this possibility be reconciled with the transcendental nature of human love?—Čapek was forced to impose an a priori ending on a plot bristling with contradictions. Čapek intended the humanist conclusion of his play to illustrate the



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relativist values of President Masaryk. Ironically, such a programmatic ending clashed with the relativist values to which Čapek subscribed and which were articulated by the different characters in the play. Thus, the play’s failure as a work of art correlates with its failure as an ideological expression of Masaryk’s humanism. The crisis of interwar German democracy as explored in The Golem and Metropolis also holds true for the crisis of Czechoslovak democracy in R.U.R. If R.U.R. highlights the crisis of liberal democracy within the philosophy of Čapek’s ideological “father,” T. G. Masaryk, it also articulates the crisis of masculinity through the failure of the scientific “fathers” in the play who fail to replicate human life. In fact, the play is unable to answer the central question: who is the real father of the robots? Is it Old Rossum, who pioneered the biological principle of cloning but fails—and goes mad— in his attempt to reproduce human life; Young Rossum, who takes over from his uncle but ends up producing simplified and functional machines rather than human beings; or Domin, the entrepreneurial young managing director of the factory, who subordinates the quality of the machines to the profit motive and the need for mass production? In failing to answer this question, the play not only reprises the gothic theme of the mad inventor but also raises the troubling issue of biology: how can a man create life without a woman? Since the Greeks, men have been obsessed with the biological given that women give birth while men do not. In Euripides’ play Medea, Jason, unable to silence his jilted wife’s recriminations, petulantly gives voice to the male aspiration to sidestep woman’s central role in the procreative process: “There should have been some other means for mankind to reproduce itself, without the need of a female sex; this would rid the world of all troubles.”16 This long-standing male resentment at woman’s biological role as mother receives its most powerful modernist treatment in August Strindberg’s play Fadren (The father, 1887). As he recognizes that he is unable to prove his biological status as the father of his child, the identity of the play’s protagonist begins to unravel and lurches toward madness. In the twentieth century this crisis of masculinity became inseparable from anxieties about the growing power of machines. The male fantasy of usurping woman’s role within the procreative process is recast as the male scientist’s fantasy of controlling nature, including woman as the epitome of nature (Huyssen, After the Great Divide, 70–72). 16. Euripides, Medea and Other Plays, translated by John Davie with an introduction by John Rutherford (London: Penguin, 20003), 65.

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Seen in this light, the coercive resolution of R.U.R. belies its putative optimism. By the last act, all the humans have perished, with the sole exception of the optimistic character Alquist. By now there are no men and women left alive to repopulate the planet, Helena having mysteriously become infertile and died earlier in the play. But the imminent end of humanity seems to spell the nemesis of the robots as well. Although there is no logical or causal connection between the operation on Damon and the appearance of the new Adam and Eve, on an irrational level, the robots’ emergence as sentient beings suggests that the operation was indeed successful; that is to say, the male character Alquist realized the ultimate mystery of human reproduction, succeeding where his male predecessors and, above all, Helena had failed. Traditional readings of the play emphasize Alquist’s crucial role as the spokesman of the dramatist’s humanist values. But in terms of the play’s own inexorable logic, its ostensibly happy ending can be read less in terms of the playwright’s optimism about human nature than in terms of the fulfillment of an irrational male fantasy: woman’s terrible power to engender life (Helena) is repressed and reassigned to the man (Alquist), who then appropriates all ownership of reproduction and powers of naming. Needless to say, the fulfillment of such an irrational male fantasy was hardly what Čapek had in mind as the message of his play. And yet in a very real sense that is what his denouement implies. I would conclude that the bizarre ending of R.U.R. was precipitated by the same crisis of masculinity which characterizes the convoluted plot and strained endings of the two Weimar films The Golem and Metropolis. In fact, the ending of R.U.R. is even less plausible than these two films. Although the “feminine” principle of love is what appears to triumph in all three cases, at the end of R.U.R. there is no equivalent to the little blonde girl in The Golem or the good Maria in Metropolis to provide an embodiment of such a principle. Neither can the formula of robot production—the equivalent of the shem in the golem legend—bring closure to the play, since it has been destroyed by Helena. For reasons that have remained unclear— at least in traditional readings of the play—the playwright decided to remove the only female character (Helena) and the only dramatic device (the robot formula) which could have provided him with a resolute ending. But in getting rid of Helena and allowing the only male survivor to usurp her biological role as mother of humanity, Čapek was also realizing a fantasy far darker than he—or any of the critics of his play—have ever been able to acknowledge: the male power to create life without the mother.



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The Makropulos Case (1922) The motif of a lost formula also provides the basis of Čapek’s next play, Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case) first performed at the National Theater of Prague in November of 1922. This play, which is set in Prague, is much closer to the golem legend than R.U.R. In fact, the back story is set during the reign of Rudolf II, the mad ruler who commands Rabbi Loew to create an artificial man of clay in many versions of the legend. The Makropulos Case shares with the golem legend the theme of mankind’s desire to overcome the constraints of its mortality. In the golem legend this desire is manifested through the creation of artificial life; in the play it involves the perpetuating of human life: a Greek physician named Hieronymus Makropulos invents an elixir of eternal life for the use of the emperor. Hieronymus uses his daughter as a guinea pig; but when the elixir appears to have failed, he is imprisoned by the incensed Rudolf, who then goes mad. But the elixir works, for the physician’s daughter, named Elena, lives on for the next three hundred years under a number of different aliases until the early twentieth century, when her secret is exposed and she—by now tired of her immortality—repudiates her desire for eternal life and burns the magic formula.17 The play explores the philosophical and ethical implications of human longevity rendered possible by modern science, a theme made topical by George Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah. But whereas Shaw was in favor of extending human life by scientific means, Čapek allegedly took the opposite position: the denouement of his play, where Elena relinquishes the desire to live forever, is meant to demonstrate the folly of longevity. This, at least, is the way the play is usually interpreted. However, insofar as the golem legend bears out the same moral conclusion—that man must accept the limits of his own mortality—The Makropulos Case can be seen as a “rewriting” of the legend with Emperor Rudolf playing himself (the crazed ruler), the Greek physician cast in the role of a rabbi who performs the imperial will, and the physician’s daughter as the golem. The point of Čapek’s play is not that male scientific hubris fails as such, but that it succeeds in the wrong way, by making a woman immortal instead of a man. As the play begins in the early twentieth century, Elena Makropulos has surfaced as a famous opera singer named Emilia Marty. Her

17. Karel Čapek, The Makropoulos Secret, translated by Yveta Synek Graff and Robert T. Jones, in Toward the Radical Center: A Karel Čapek Reader, edited by Peter Kussi (Highland Park, NJ: Catbird Press, 1990), 110–77.

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assumed name is just the latest in a long line of aliases (all with the initials E. M.) intended to deflect suspicion from her immortality. Eventually, her true identity is exposed, and she is confronted by her male descendants and male lovers. By now tired of her eternal life, she admits that she is the daughter of Hieronymus Makropulos and is more than three hundred years old. Interrogated about the meaning of the formula, she claims not to know what it means and sets it alight. As the document burns, Elena laughs: “Ha, ha, the end of immortality.” With this repudiation of the elixir of life, the curtain falls and the play ends. However, the enigmatic meaning of the Czech word věc in the title of the play (Věc Makropulos) undermines the closure promised by Elena’s rejection of eternal life. This notoriously vague term is variously translated as “case,” “affair,” “business,” “secret,” and “thing.” Like the magical formula which it denotes, it is not clear whether this word is a concrete thing or an abstraction. Like the magical shem inserted into the golem’s body, it mediates oxymoronically between a material object and an immaterial conjuration. And like the shem in relation to the golem, it has a crucial function in the play, since it provides the key to Emilia’s immortality as well as her demise. The indeterminacy of the word also holds the key to the play’s meaning or nonmeaning: just as the characters struggle in vain to define what the word signifies, so does the play seem to revolve around a central absence of meaning and truth. The věc is akin to an indecipherable word in a palimpsest: the reader or spectator simply cannot attach a discernible meaning to it. Grammatically gendered as female in Czech, věc corresponds to the transcendental signifier which cannot be encompassed by language and which evades the male writer-creator’s attempt to decipher and reproduce.

Ganymedes (1925) It is a short step from the motif of the recalcitrant golem or wayward woman to the transgressive theme of homosexuality (Ripellino, Magic Prague, 137–39). In Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic’s novella Ganymedes (1925) a DanishJewish sculptor named Jørgen Møller compensates for his own ugliness by creating a beautiful male golem.18 If Møller is the equivalent of Rabbi Loew in the original legend, the aristocratic Englishman Mr. Adrian Morris is the descendant of the rabbi’s assistant, who aspires to turn the golem into his own assistant. Both men have been drawn to Prague by a secret fascination 18. Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Ganymedes (Prague: Aventinum, 1925).



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for the golem and its creator; in fact, they first encounter each other near Rabbi Loew’s grave in the old Jewish cemetery. Møller is attempting to transcribe the Hebrew letters on the grave, which, he believes, hold the key to the magical formula to bring to life the inert golem. Karásek makes it clear, however, that this common bond is code for a different, if related, connection between the men: their shared homosexuality. Certain lexical indicators in the text—in particular periphrastic locutions like záhadný (“mysterious,” “enigmatic”)—point to this theme, which, as I have argued elsewhere in relation to Richard Weiner’s story “Netečný divák” (The indifferent spectator, 1917), provides a secret code for the initiated gay readership (The Bohemian Body, 97–103). Adrian Morris befriends a beautiful epicene youth named Radovan, who becomes the live model for Møller’s statue. In distinction to most versions of the legend, Møller does not intend the beautiful golem he has created to be his servant, but his lover. (Reinforcing the gay theme is the fact that the shem is not inserted into the creature’s forehead or chest but into his mouth.) But he is initially unsuccessful in transforming the statue into human form. As Adrian Morris points out, this is because the sculptor has “misread” the hieroglyphs on the rabbi’s grave. Only by rescrambling them to create another shem can the statue come alive. Just as Møller is unable to turn art (the statue) into life, so does Karásek struggle to rewrite the golem legend along the lines of a decadent novel. Far from demonstrating the aesthetic principle of art for art’ sake, the golem legend exemplifies the opposite insight: that art must yield to the eternal forces of life and death. The crumbling of the golem into dust after the shem has been removed bears witness to the vanity of all human striving, including art. As I have argued elsewhere in relation to Karásek’s work, life is not subordinated to art in his fiction but exists in an ambiguous state of tension with it. Morality is not trumped by aesthetics but coexists alongside it. An analogous lack of coherence is true on the narrative level: no fewer than three plot strains coexist in Ganymedes. First, there is the narrative implied by the title itself: the classical legend of the beautiful youth Ganymedes who is abducted by Zeus in the form of a rapacious eagle; second, the legend of the golem and its Prague setting; and third, the classical myth of Pygmalion, who falls in love with a beautiful statue he has made and implores Aphrodite to bring it to life. Although this narrative incoherence may seem at first sight to be an artistic failing, it is in fact perfectly consistent with the way the legend resembles a palimpsest: Møller’s failure to decode the hieroglyphs on the rabbi’s grave correlates with the writer’s inability to attach his own meaning

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to the golem legend. In fact, this discursive tension between aesthetics and morality typifies all decadent art. For example, Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which generated such a controversy at the time of its publication, is a highly moral treatment of a familiar theme— the desire for eternal life. The ending of the novel, in which Dorian stabs his painting and exchanges roles with it, becoming ugly and hideous in death as the canvas reverts to its pristine beauty, reinforces the moral that art and beauty must yield to mortality. The ending of Karásek’s novel exemplifes the same theme, as Radovan is found crushed to death under the crumbling figure of the golem made in his lovely image. This unusual variant on the golem legend collapses the fate of Rabbi Elijah of Chelm and the fate of Wilde’s protagonist. Although there is no role switching in Ganymedes, both Wilde and Karásek share the same gay theme of secrecy, since the golem/statue is hidden in a locked room like the painting of Dorian Gray. If Karásek rewrites the golem legend to reflect the decadent principle of art’s superiority to life, the ending of his novel bears out the opposite insight: the triumph of death over art.

Tales from Seven Ghettos (1934) Another unusual variant on the golem legend is Egon Erwin Kisch’s Geschichten aus Sieben Ghettos (Tales from Seven Ghettos, 1934). Here the golem’s traditional function as a servant becomes a metaphor for the soulless routine of the proletariat in modern industrial civilization.19 The metaphor of the robot as the exploited victim of capitalism had already been touched on by Čapek in R.U.R., but Kisch was the first to rewrite the legend of the golem in this way. Although man-made creatures had long been appropriated by the ruling classes as monstrous incarnations of revolutionary insurrections—as the British reception of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein makes clearâ•›20—Kisch sets this tradition on its head by making his “monster” the source of pity rather than fear and opprobrium. Yet Kisch’s socialist theme is developed only toward the end of the narrative and therefore appears to be an afterthought rather than the story’s central theme. In fact, for most of the tale it is the elusive whereabouts of the golem that dominates the plot. As in The Makropulos Case, it is the

19. Egon Erwin Kisch, Tales from Seven Ghettos, translated by Edith Bone (London: Robert Anscombe and Co., 1948), 153–65. 20. See Maurice Hindle’s introduction to Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1992), xxxviii.



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absence of meaning which drives the plot rather than the other way round. The story begins in 1915 when a World War I soldier finds himself stationed in a Carpathian village, where he is billeted in the cottage of a local Jewish resident. This orthodox Jew possesses an impressive collection of books and manuscripts in Hebrew and Yiddish. When the narrator explains that he is a native of Prague, the Jewish host boasts that he knows the city well—but only “from books.” This conceit of Prague as text initiates the convoluted plot of the story, in which the narrator uses a printed book about the golem legend and later a valuable manuscript—both of which he receives from the Jew—to attempt to locate the burial place of the golem. The first third of the story is taken up with a retelling of the legend based on the contents of the book the narrator has received from the Jew. The remainder of the story concerns the narrator’s attempt to find the golem’s remains. Using the documents as a guide-book, or a map, to the ghetto, the narrator finally obtains permission to climb up to the attic of the Old-New Synagogue with the aid of a ladder. But instead of discovering the golem’s remains, he merely uncovers dust and debris. The story abruptly returns to the original legend of the golem and relates the forlorn attempt by the chief rabbi’s assistant to breathe life back into the deactivated golem, thereby providing a parallel with the narrator’s own failed attempt to find the golem. This parallel leads the narrator to conclude—rather unconvincingly—that the real point of the golem legend is the “desire for power and the overcoming of this desire” (163). The story ends with the equation of the buried golem with the fate of the oppressed workers returning from their factories: “At the graveside of the Golem I understand why the robot, unconditionally subject to the will of another, must be buried deep and irretrievably” (165). If this socialist conclusion seems rather forced, this is because the narrator is unable to derive a definitive meaning from the legend, just as he fails in his attempt to locate the whereabouts of the golem itself.

By Night under the Stone Bridge (1975) Leo Perutz’s collection of Prague stories Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (By Night under the Stone Bridge) was begun in 1924 and completed in 1953.21 At first sight it would appear to have little, if any connection, to the golem legend. Alternating between Jewish and Christian narratives, the

21. Leo Perutz, By Night under the Stone Bridge, translated by Eric Mosbacher (London: Harvill, 1991). For the German original see Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1975).

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stories are set in the sixteenth century during the reign of Rudolf II and the golden age of central European Jewry. This turning away from the present to the distant history of Prague reflects the author’s nostalgia for the city of his birth but also his spatial displacement from it. Perutz’s “memory” of Prague is mediated by the old legends of Prague, in particular, those focused around the old Judenstadt before its demolition in the late 1890s. In this sense Perutz’s fiction has more in common with the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez or Borges (an admirer of Perutz) than with Kafka. The stories begin with a plague which is wiping out the children of the Jewish ghetto and which is the consequence of God’s anger over the illicit love affair between Esther, the beautiful wife of the imperial creditor, Mordechai Meisl, and Emperor Rudolf II. The emperor has threatened the Jews with expulsion from the city if the chief rabbi of Prague, Jehudah Loew, does not deliver Esther to him. To placate the emperor, Rabbi Loew plants a red rose and a rosemary bush concealed below the stone bridge so that the hearts of Rudolf and Esther can enter these flowers and be united every night: “And night after night the Emperor dreamt he held the beautiful Jewess in his arms and every night Esther, the wife of Mordechai Meisl, dreamt she lay in the Emperor’s arms” (192). But when two hungry, unemployed entertainers witness the ghosts of Jewish children at the graveyard and report what they have seen to the chief rabbi, Loew realizes that this must be an omen from God. The ghostly children inform the rabbi that God’s anger will not be appeased until the “adultery” of the Jewess Esther has ceased. The rabbi is finally forced to acknowledge his own culpability in the fate of the Jewish children; instead of obeying God’s commandment he has used his own magical powers to bring the emperor and Esther together, at least in spirit. Chastened, he returns to the bridge at night and tears the intertwined flowers from the soil and casts them into the river Vltava. That same night the child plague comes to an end and the lovely Esther dies in her bed. The child plague which visits the ghetto with such devastating consequences can be seen as a metaphor for the disastrous events of World War II and the extermination of European Jewry. But it is also part of a biblical palimpsest. In his attempt to evade God’s will, Rabbi Loew recalls the prophet Jonah, who defies God’s injunction to warn the citizens of Nineveh to abandon their sinful ways. Like Jonah, who thinks that he can escape God’s omnipotence, Rabbi Loew initially chooses to “forget” what God has told him and only later realizes his blindness. If the rabbi’s folly serves as a memory of the book of Jonah, the motif of the child plague itself reprises the book of Exodus, chapter 11, where God punishes the Egyptians



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for failing to release the Israelites from captivity by killing their firstborn sons. Another biblical intertext in Perutz’s novel is the book of Esther, in which Mordecai’s adopted daughter Esther becomes the queen of Ahasuerus, king of the Persians, and saves the people of Israel by interceding for them with her royal husband. In Perutz’s stories Esther performs a role similar to that of her biblical namesake as the savior of the Jews. In this positive capacity she resembles the “good” golem who protects the Jews from Christian vengeance. But insofar as Esther is also the illicit lover of a Christian emperor, she also corresponds to the “bad” golem. When her affair incurs the wrath of God, Rabbi Loew finds himself trapped between two manifestations of vengeance, the romantic desperation of a Christian ruler (Rudolf) and the moral indignation of a Jewish deity. This predicament was also the historical fate of the Prague Jews caught between the Czech and German populations of the city. The stories dramatize these historical tensions but also attempt to resolve them through the imaginary relationship between Rudolf and Esther, the female intercessor between God and humanity. That this attempt is doomed is borne out by the tragic events themselves. Only at the end of the stories does the rabbi acknowledge the omnipotence of God in the affairs of man. Just as Loew finally breaks the spell he has cast on the lovers, so does the author bring his stories to a close. The breaking of the spell corresponds to the final removal of the shem from the mouth of the golem. Yet his denouement reveals that Perutz has actually set his narrative in reverse: the end of the first story witnesses the great rabbi tearing the rosemary out of the ground while the close of the novel shows him planting the rosebush and the rosemary. Just as the great rabbi attempts to avoid the tragic consequences of Esther and Rudolf’s sin by placing the lovers under a spell, so does Perutz aspire to transcend and cancel out the horrors of the twentieth century by reversing the historical sequence of the events themselves.

Utz (1989) Another work of recent fiction that initially seems to have nothing in common with the golem legend is Bruce Chatwin’s novel Utz. The eponymous hero of the novel is an eccentric Czech collector of Meissen porcelain, which he stores and protects through years of political turmoil by moving it from residence to residence.22 This acquisitive character is modeled on various 22. Bruce Chatwin, Utz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989).

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real-life prototypes, among them Chatwin’s former lover, Sam Wagstaff, an American millionaire whose great collection of photography and affair with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe made him a celebrity in New York artistic circles in the 1960s and 1970s. But the compulsive Utz is also reminiscent of Rudolf II, whose vast Kunstkammer of artistic treasures and curiosities has made him synonymous with art collecting and eccentricity. When the narrator arrives in Prague in 1967 on a research trip to write an article about this Habsburg ruler, he is told that he should consult with Utz, since he is “a Rudolf of our time” (16). Utz is brought up in a Bohemian castle by his wealthy Jewish grandmother, who “recognized the pallor of the ghetto—and adored him” (18). Utz’s affinity with the enclosed, claustrophobic world of the Prague ghetto underlines his affinity with Rabbi Loew. Throughout his novel Chatwin draws a series of ingenious parallels between the art collector and the legendary creator of the golem: the urge to create a clay monster is akin to the need to collect porcelain. On a tour of the ghetto, Utz explains to his British visitor the story of the golem and states that Adam was not only the first human: he was also “the first ceramic sculpture” (42). Utz is akin to the traditionally rootless Jew who transcends national or ethnic labels. When it serves his purpose—which is always to augment and collect his precious collection—he will adopt whichever identity will allow him to survive the numerous regime changes that have characterized the history of Czechoslovakia in the twentieth century. Utz complies with the rule of the Nazis and the Communists in order to save his priceless collection for posterity. In this sense these fragile figurines serve as a metaphor for Prague itself, a city that—unlike Dresden, another city famous for its porcelain—has survived war and destruction more or less intact. Utz is also amoral to the point of cynical self-interest: “There was a timid side to his character that would tolerate any ideology providing it left him in peace. There was a stubborn side that refused to be bullied. He detested violence, yet welcomed the cataclysms that flung fresh works of art onto the market. ‘Wars, pogroms, and revolutions,’ he used to say, ‘offer excellent opportunities for the collector’â•›” (21). The novel also explores the continuity between the compulsive desire to collect things and the sexual urge to have anonymous partners. In spite of his impotence, Utz is reminiscent of Johanna in Leppin’s story discussed earlier: just as she is forever in quest of new lovers, so Utz’s entire life is devoted to the acquisition of porcelain figurines. Both are hopelessly compulsive in their craving for novel stimulations. When his mother consults with the family physician to explain her son’s compulsion for collecting



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porcelain, he replies: “A perversion” (20). Chatwin seems to be drawing an implied parallel between promiscuity and art collecting. After all, Wagstaff had typified both of these practices at once, his priceless collection of photographs complementing his need for anonymous sex in the bath houses of New York City.

“Kaddish” (1997) from X-Files Another interesting deviation from the standard legend of the golem is the episode “Kaddish” from the American television show X-Files. This fascinating spin-off conflates two distinct and separate narratives: the myth of artificial creation and the folkloric narrative of the vampire-lover who is brought back to life by his grieving bride. In the X-Files episode the bride who defies the divine prohibition by bringing the dead back to life is the young Hassidic Jewess Ariel, the daughter of a Czech Holocaust survivor named Jacob Weiss. The original twist of the television version, which is set in present-day Brooklyn, is that the golem is not created by the patriarchal figure of Weiss himself—as we might expect—but by his grieving daughter, who wishes to be reunited with her recently murdered betrothed. The victim of a neo-Nazi hate crime, Ariel’s peace-loving fiancé is resurrected as a violent avenger who stalks and murders his three assassins. Having fulfilled his function as avenger of the Jews, the golem reverts to his intended role as Ariel’s betrothed. The dead lover is married to Ariel in the synagogue attic (the traditional locus of the golem’s remains in many versions of the legend). Thus, the marriage scene is also the scene in which the golem must die: as the wedding ring (a family heirloom from Prague) is placed on her finger, Ariel tenderly effaces the aleph from the inscription on the back of the golem’s hand as he crumbles into dust. The reinvention of the golem legend as a love story inevitably recalls Wegener’s silent film version of 1920. In turning the legend into a romantic tale of doomed lovers, both the film and television directors were responding to the needs of a popular mass audience. But there are also important differences as well as similarities between these versions: although both Miriam and Ariel defy their fathers’ wishes—the former in taking a Christian lover, the latter in bringing her Jewish betrothed back to life—Ariel’s transgression is not her choice of husband but her desperate desire to bring him back to life. This new element in the story has nothing to do with the golem legend per se but incorporates the traditional folktale of a deceased lover who is resurrected through the tearful prayers of his grieving bride. This folktale was made famous by Gottfried August Bürger in his popular

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ballad “Lenore” (1773) and was adapted into Czech almost a century later by Karel Jaromír Erben in his poem “Svatební košile” (The wedding shirts, 1853). In both German and Czech versions the bride’s prayer is made to exemplify the dangers of female independence, since it has disastrous consequences for all concerned (see Thomas, The Bohemian Body, 33–36). The motif of the resurrected lover also introduces another extraneous element into the television version of the legend: the theme of mourning and memory (the show’s title “Kaddish” denotes a traditional Jewish lament for the dead). Of course, memory is central to all the versions of the legend we have explored. What makes the function of memory in the television episode unusual is its personal and collective dimension. Ariel, we recall, is the daughter of a Czech Holocaust survivor; hence, her mourning for a fiancé murdered by American neo-Nazis is related to her mourning for her European relatives murdered by the Germans in World War II. The connection between the dead lover from Brooklyn and the dead family members from Prague is signaled by the Hebraic inscription on the golem’s hand, which resembles the serial numbers tattooed onto the arms of concentration camp inmates at Auschwitz and elsewhere. In effacing the aleph at the end of the episode, Ariel is not simply returning her golem-lover to dust; she is attempting to erase the traumatic memory of the Shoah itself.

The Procedure (1998) The equivalency between recalcitrant golems and out-of-control women reemerges in Harry Mulisch’s novel The Procedure, which shifts seismically between sixteenth-century Prague and present-day Amsterdam, where a Dutch scientist attempts to create human life by means of modern science. Instead of creating a flawed male golem—as in the standard versions of the legend—the rabbi mistakenly produces a murderous Lilith.23 This gender mistake results from the false wording inscribed onto the creature’s forehead by the rabbi’s assistant. In place of the Hebrew word for “truth,” the rabbi’s assistant mistakenly inserts the word for “mother.” If this episode serves as a parody of the Genesis story, it also highlights the status of the Hebrew Bible as a palimpsest of textual layering. Just as the book of Genesis combines two competing readings of the Creation myth—one in which Adam and Eve are created at the same time (the Elohist version) and a second in which Adam precedes Eve (the Jahwist version)—so Mulisch’s 23. Harry Mulisch, The Procedure, translated by Paul Vincent (London: Penguin, 2001).



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rewriting of the golem legend posits an alternative to the standard narrative of male creation, one already anticipated in Achim von Arnim’s 1812 novella. Not only does Mulisch’s novel brilliantly reinvent this earlier narrative, it makes explicit the implicit equation of the out-of-control golem with wayward women by envisioning a murderous female golem. The story of the murderous female golem is framed and paralleled by the tragic story of a Dutch biologist named Viktor Werker. Mourning the death of his stillborn baby daughter, Werker creates a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and has a metabolism. As the interpolated retelling of the golem legend makes clear, Werker is conceived as a literary descendant of Rabbi Loew. But as his Christian name implies, he is also descended from the hubristic scientist Dr. Victor Frankenstein. Like Mary Shelley’s scientist-hero, who aspires to usurp God’s role by making a creature in his own image, Werker attempts to recreate life in order to compensate for the death of his baby daughter Aurora. This tragic event recalls the personal circumstances in Mary Shelley’s own life in the years before she wrote Frankenstein. In February 1815 Mary’s first child was born prematurely and died a few days later. Some days after the baby died, she wrote in her journal: “Dream that my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed before the fire, and it lived.”24 As Maurice Hindle points out, “there are many echoes of resemblance here to the dream-inspired Frankenstein Creature, who also ‘came to life’ from the dead” (introduction to Shelley, Frankenstein, xv). Another literary ancestor of Werker is Old Rossum, the mad inventor who tries and fails to create the original protoplasm in R.U.R. Significantly, Werker records in his diary that that he saw a student production of it during an academic stay at the University of California at Berkeley: “The auditorium in the huge labyrinthine building was half filled with pizza-eating and cola-drinking students, their Walkmans pushed scarcely half an inch from their ears. That was probably what struck me most: the contrast between those privileged children in their sunny California and the ancient, misty Prague of three quarters of a century ago” (99). Werker, Frankenstein, and Old Rossum are all similar in their desire not only to usurp the role of God as creator of mankind but also to bypass the procreative function of women as mothers. This masculinist usurpation of the procreative principle is paralleled on the discursive level by the urge to write, as Werker states in his diary addressed to his dead baby daughter: “I wasn’t so much interested in 24. Quoted from Maurice Hindle’s introduction to Shelley, Frankenstein, xv.

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literature, because I virtually never read novels or poems, but in writing. Or, more precisely: in deciphering. I could spend hours making and solving rebuses with Granddad, drawing a house and writing next to it: h = m. I found a book about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls more exciting than a boys’ adventure story. Once I picked up a book on Egyptian hieroglyphics cheap somewhere and for a few months I tried to master them” (88). The young Werker’s fascination with deciphering hieroglyphics anticipates his later scientific obsession with the letters A, G, T, and C, which form the building blocks of DNA. His conversion to science is ostensibly provided by the discovery of James Watson’s book The Double Helix but, as the passage just quoted suggests, the love of deciphering obscure and difficult palimpsests is the real common denominator: “There was suddenly everything I wanted. Talk of deciphering! Here it wasn’t a case of obscure palimpsests from antiquity, but the core of all life, my own included” (92). Thus, what links the subplot of the botched creation of the golem and Werker’s latter-day attempt to create a clay crystal is not just the hubristic attempt of a mad scientist to reproduce life but the writer’s futile attempt to uncover the transcendental signifier within the text.

chapter three

The Castle Hill Was Hidden: Franz Kafka and Czech Literature

M

any years ago, during the Communist period, I was browsing in a shop on the Golden Lane in Prague. Although the fact was never advertised in those days, Franz Kafka had lived in this little house for a short period as a guest of his sister Ottla so that he could have the peace and quiet he needed to write. The Golden Lane consists of a row of small, sixteenthcentury houses which had been used by the famed alchemists of Rudolf II’s reign in their utopian endeavor to turn base metal into gold; hence the street’s name Alchemists’ Lane in German (Alchemistengasse) and Golden Lane in Czech (Zlatá ulička). All of a sudden the woman behind the counter began to repeat over and over again the following bizarre mantra in English, German, and Czech: “Since 1968 Franz Kafka has been passé.” I was taken aback, as were the few other foreign tourists present. I hadn’t been thinking about Kafka before the woman brought up his name. Ironically, this allusion to the Soviet invasion of August 1968 and the ban on Kafka’s works in Communist Czechoslovakia served to undermine the authorities’ obvious intention to efface his memory. In the very attempt to consign Kafka and his work to oblivion, the authorities were tacitly acknowledging his enduring relevance. Thirty years on, the wheel of fortune has turned in Kafka’s favor. Prague’s most famous writer has now become a major celebrity and a major selling point in the city of his birth: coffee mugs and T-shirts emblazoned with his gaunt, tragic features are hawked around the tourist zones on the Old Town Square, Wenceslas Square, and the Charles Bridge. Both of these phenomena—the first a cold war attempt to obliterate Kafka’s memory for political purposes, the second a capitalist appropriation of his memory for profit—exemplify the Czechs’ ambivalent relation to the great writer who had lived in their midst. 77

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For Kafka, the Czechs and their language were a source of similar ambivalence, at once the key to his lost rural origins as a second-generation immigrant to Prague and the reminder of his alienation as a German-speaking Jew in a city dominated by Czechs. Kafka’s father, Hermann, had been born and brought up speaking Czech in the provincial south Bohemian town of Osek. Like many ambitious and hardworking postemancipation Jews, he escaped the poverty of his rural origins for a better life in Prague, where he established a flourishing haberdashery business. At home the Kafka children spoke German, the official language of the Habsburg monarchy and the vehicle of social advancement. But German was not the exclusive language of the Kafka household. Since his wife needed to help him run the family business, Hermann employed a poor Jewish nanny, named Maria Werner, who spoke only Czech. As a consequence the children grew up hearing and speaking Czech as well as German. In spite of his familiarity with the Czech language, Kafka was not perfectly bilingual and did not write in it as a rule. His sense of linguistic alienation would have been reinforced by the profound and bitter ethnic divisions that characterized everyday life in Prague in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. In addition to the anti-German atmosphere that pervaded the city, there was also the serious problem of anti-Semitism among the Germans and Czechs alike. Kafka’s alienation from this beleaguered world has been exhaustively documented by scholars; less well appreciated is the degree to which Kafka, who inevitably felt at home nowhere, even among the Jews of Prague, also felt the urge to belong. It goes without saying that the concomitant of alienation is the yearning to fit in. As Noah Isenberg has pointed out, “Kafka’s . . . yearnings for ‘belonging’ . . . can be considered as much an integral component of his modernist writings as are his portraits of alienation and ‘non-belonging’” (Between Redemption and Doom, 122). As Isenberg has discussed, this tension between the need to belong and the feeling of alienation has not always been appreciated even by those people—like the former dissident and later Czechoslovak president Václav Havel—who have experienced alienation in their own land. As we shall see, dissidents like Havel and Kundera tended to project their own situation of political alienation onto Kafka, overlooking the fact that his situation as a Jew was rather different from theirs. Kafka’s yearning to belong explains his well-known fascination with Jewish and Yiddish culture. As a secular Jew whose father had relinquished . See Ernst Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1984), 17.



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his own orthodox faith, Kafka felt nostalgic for his lost Jewish origins. In an attempt to remedy this lack, he frequented the Yiddish theater and even attended Martin Buber’s celebrated lectures delivered to the Jewish student organization Bar Kochba in 1909–11. Yet Kafka could not identify fully with his Jewish roots. As he confided to his diary on January 6, 1914, “What do I have in common with Jews? I barely have anything in common with myself?” Less than three years before his death, in October 1921, Kafka expressed the regret that he had rarely “crossed the borderland between alienation (Einsamkeit) and community (Gemeinschaft)” (Isenberg, Between Redemption and Doom, 20). This “borderland” was the necessary price to be paid for transcending the narrow particularities of language, race, and creed in the quest for universal relevance as a writer. A similar tension between nostalgia and detachment characterized Kafka’s relation to Czech culture. As a child he would have been exposed to traditional Czech fairy tales from his nanny and, as a pupil at the grammar school, to classical works of Czech literature, including Jan Amos Comenius’s baroque masterpiece Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, 1623) and Božena Němcová’s novel Babička (Granny, 1855), which is set in an idyllic rural world where the relations between the villagers and the local gentry bear no trace of the alienation and antagonism that would become such a marked feature of Kafka’s fictional universe. These childhood texts provided a link to a lost Czech Heimat as well as a source of nostalgia for the innocence of childhood. And yet, unlike some of his more idealistic Jewish friends, Kafka had no illusions about a culture that was frequently anti-German and anti-Semitic. Just as Kafka was unable to identify too closely with Jewish culture, so was he reluctant to identify too intimately with a culture that, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become intensely nationalistic. Even the progressive, cosmopolitan Czech writers sometimes betrayed traces of the bigotry that was so often the concomitant of the small nation. As early as 1869 Jan Neruda had reacted to the emancipation of the Jews in the empire by penning a virulent attack on them in an essay titled “Pro strach židovský” (Concerning the Jewish fear) in which he presents the Jews as the real “insiders” and the Czechs as “outsiders” in their own country. And, as I have argued elsewhere, the important group of decadent writers who espoused cosmopolitanism . “Was habe ich mit Juden gemeinsam? Ich habe kaum etwas mit mir gemeinsam.” Franz Kafka, Tagebücher 1910–1923, in Gesammelte Werke, edited by Max Brod (Fischer: Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 255. . Jan Neruda, “Pro strach židovský,” in Spisy Jana Nerudy (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1958), 6:31–46.

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was not reacting against Czech nationalism as such but against its more recent outgrowth, the neorevivalist movement of the 1880s. I shall argue in this chapter that Kafka’s fiction derives its peculiar power and intensity from the complex tension between alienation and the yearning to belong and that this tension is directly related to Kafka’s “memory” of Czech literature. In particular, it was Kafka’s childhood reading of Granny, with its idealized representation of the harmonious relations between the peasants of a village and the inhabitants of a manor house, which provided the idealized subtext of The Castle, with its bleak depiction of absolute alienation between the individual and the authorities. To this extent Kafka did not write a totally new text but “rewrote” a preexisting one: the bewilderingly disconnected world of The Castle is inconceivable without the harmonious nexus between the village and the manor house in Granny. And yet Kafka’s childhood memories of Czech classics like Granny were partially effaced in an attempt to break out of the parochial carapace of the “Prague writer.” In spite of his desire to transcend this category in order to become a writer of universal relevance, the semieffaced traces of Czech literary texts remain an intrinsic feature of Kafka’s fictional universe. My aim, then, is not to prove or disprove Kafka’s knowledge of Czech literature: that has been amply demonstrated by the sources. Rather, my intention is to explore the complex manner in which Kafka “rewrites” familiar works of Czech literature. The same may be said of Kafka’s relation to Prague. Kundera has famously claimed that Kafka’s Prague is a city without memory. But the truth is actually the other way round: Kafka’s Prague was a city burdened with too many memories. Only by “rewriting” Prague as an anonymous space without a name and without a history was Kafka able to find his own identity as a modernist writer of universal appeal.

Kafka, Rilke, and Prague Modernism Recent scholarship has been concerned to place Kafka’s oeuvre within the context of Prague fin de siècle culture. Inevitably, most of this scholarship has focused on the German-Jewish tensions in Kafka’s Prague. The fact that the period 1890–1914 also represented a vibrant phase in the development of Czech modernism has frequently been overlooked. In fact, German and Jewish writers were more conscious of their Czech counterparts than has

. See Marek Nekula, Franz Kafkas Sprachen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003). . Scott Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).



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sometimes been acknowledged. Characteristic of this desire to overcome the ethnic divide between Germans and Czechs was Franz Werfel’s wellmeaning foreword to the 1917 German translation of Petr Bezruč’s protest ballads, Slezské písně (Silesian songs, 1909), in which Kafka’s Jewish€conÂ� temporary praises the utopian strain in Czech literature extending from Comenius’s The Labyrinth in the seventeenth century to the late nineteenthcentury Symbolist poetry of Otakar Březina (Nekula, Franz Kafkas Sprachen, 228–29). But a good twenty years earlier other Prague German writers had evinced the same enthusiasm for Czech literature. Rainer Maria Rilke’s early collection of verse Larenopfer (Offerings to the Lares, 1896) and his Zwei Prager Geschichten (Two Prague stories, 1899) are fascinating examples of this ecumenical sympathy for the aspirant Czech nation. These texts reveal not only a familiarity with canonic Czech writers such as Josef Kajetán Tyl and Jaroslav Vrchlický but also with writers of the younger generation such as Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic. Some of the poems from Offerings to the Lares even reproduce the fervent patriotism of Czech neorevivalism, such as “Kajetán Tyl,” which is based on a visit to the Bohemian Ethnographic Exhibit, where the little room of the author of the Czech national anthem was on display: So this is where poor K. J. Tyl Composed his song “Kde domov můj.” Those whom the Muses love, it’s true, Are doomed to lead lives down-at-heel. A chamber lacking hearth and rug, Yet for the spirit large enough: A chair, a table plain and rough, A bed, a wooden cross, a jug. But even for a thousand Louis He could not bear to go away. “With all my heart, I’d rather stay,” He would have said, “Kde domov můj.”

In this poem Rilke’s sentiments are filtered through the official discourse of Czech revivalism, so that it becomes difficult for him to find his own voice . My translation. For the German original of Larenopfer, see Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, edited by Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1955), 1:9–69.

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as a writer. The difficulty of “writing” Prague in an unmediated fashion without recourse to established discourses is already hinted at in the opening poem of the collection, “Im alten Hause” (In the old house) where the poet looks down on the Lesser Town from inside an old house but sees only a shimmering impression of it through the glass of the window: An old house, through whose window pane, I witness Prague from end to end; While far below the dusk extend Its soundless steps through every lane. The city shimmers as through glass, Pierced by a copper-greenish tint: The distant, heathen-helmet glint Of cupola’d Saint Nicholas. A brief light flickers now and then Down in the noisy urban gloom. ’Tis though I hear, in this old room, a soft voice murmuring “Amen.”

Even the poem “Der Hradschin” (The Prague castle) with its touching expression of filial devotion to the paternal city and its monuments—the castle, the Saint Vitus Cathedral, and the Charles Bridge and its baroque statues—seems to reproduce official Bohemian patriotism as much as the poet’s nostalgia for his childhood: I love to watch the weathered face Of the ancient burg on high; For even as a child its grace Could captivate my eye. The Moldau’s waves are also keen To greet the castle’s might, While on the Bridge the statues lean To bless the holy site. And city towers, both great and small, Regard Saint Vitus’s spire



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As would the look of children fall Upon their precious sire.

As Judith Ryan has pointed out, many of the poems in Offerings to the Lares are not original at all but are adaptations of familiar German texts. One example is “Auf der Kleinseite” (In the Lesser Town), which—as Ryan states—is a rewriting of Josef von Eichendorff’s frequently anthologized poem “In Danzig” (1842). Significant here is the fact that Rilke’s imagined access to Prague is mediated through an entirely different European city, one which he had never in fact visited: Ancient houses, gabled steep; Tinkling towers on high. Through the narrow courtyards peep Flirtatious chinks of sky. On every staircase, high and low, A smiling cupid dozes; And round the rooftop vases grow Chains of dangling roses. Thickly cobwebbed is the lock Where the furtive sun inclines To read below the Virgin’s frock The secret words and signs.

Some of the poems in Offerings to the Lares suggest a growing detachment from the patriotic discourse Rilke felt obligated to reproduce as a fledgling Prague writer. A good example is the poem “Jaroslav Vrchlický.” Unlike the touching elegy to K. J. Tyl discussed earlier, this poem is oddly ironic in its treatment of the great Czech poet Vrchlický, as if Rilke were already beginning to tire of the reverential attitude to the pantheon of Czech literature. As the speaker of the poem drowses in an armchair over a volume by Vrchlický, it is unclear what has induced the soporific effect in him: the Czech poet’s verse (and there is a lot if it) or the overwhelming fragrance of the chrysanthemums (flowers associated with death and funerals). As Ryan . Judith Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18.

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points out, the effect of this ambiguity suggests a growing detachment from the subject of the poem. In fact, Rilke’s literary models in this volume of verse are not the Czech poets he praises so effusively but standard German texts by Eichendorff and Goethe. Rilke may be paying patriotic lip service to the great men of Czech literature, but his heart is increasingly elsewhere. In spite of his professed devotion to his natal city and its literary representatives, one has the distinct impression that Rilke’s rapid maturation as a poet is already leading him away from Prague—at least on the discursive level. Rilke’s Two Prague Stories also represent a fascinating example of Rilke’s rapid development as a writer. As Peter Zusi has argued, these early works of prose fiction are less juvenilia—as they are often claimed to be— than a maturing writer’s attempt to negotiate between rivalrous and frequently hostile constructions of national identity. In these stories Rilke is clearly struggling to find a third alternative to the polarized binary of Czech versus German national identity which characterized so much of literary production after 1848. For Rilke the embodiment of this congenial alternative is the character of Luisa, the sister of the Czech terrorist Řezek, who mediates between the alienated, younger generation of Czechs (personified by her brother) and the German minority of the city (personified by her tenant Ernst Land). At the end of the second story, “Die Geschwister” (“The Siblings”) Luisa’s gesture of friendship to her lonely German lodger articulates Rilke’s own hope for a more fruitful rapprochement between the German and Czech populations of Prague. But even here Rilke appears to be looking back—rather than forward—to a lost ideal. In this respect his congenial female heroine reprises Grillparzer’s attempt to envisage Libussa as the incarnation of a nation that defines itself through citizenship rather than ethnicity. Notwithstanding his attempts to transcend restrictive national categories, Rilke was ultimately unsuccessful in finding his own voice and identity as a Prague writer. By associating too closely with the city of his birth, . Peter Zusi, “‘Wie ein Kind ist unser Volk’: Hybrid Identity and National Consciousness in Rilke’s Zwei Prager Geschichten,” German Quarterly 79, no. 3 (Summer 2006): 229–346. For the stories in question see Rainer Maria Rilke, Two Stories of Prague, translated by Angela Esterhammer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994). For the German original, see Rainer Maria Rilke, Zwei Prager Geschichten, in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1961), 4:99–220. . This distinction is carefully drawn by R. J. W. Evans in his review of Ripellino’s Magic Prague. See “The Magic of Bohemia,” New York Review of Books 46, no. 16 (October 21, 1999): 61–63 (61). For the political implications of Grillparzer’s play, see Heinz Politzer, Grillparzer oder das abgründige Biedermeier (Vienna: Verlag Fritz Molden, 1972), 322–27.



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he was ironically reflecting a sense of estrangement rather than belonging: the more he tried to “write” Prague, the less he felt at home there. Only by leaving the city altogether could he break out of this discursive prison. It is hardly surprising, then, that the publication of Offerings to the Lares coÂ� incided with the young writer’s departure from Bohemia in 1896.10 Unlike Rilke, Kafka never left his native city except for short trips abroad and to the Bohemian countryside. Yet he left it on a discursive level by effacing all traces of Prague from his mature fiction. In contrast to Rilke’s oversaturated city, with its monuments and poets, Kafka’s Prague is gradually stripped bare of all cultural and historical referents. Paralleling this effacement of Prague as a visible setting is the evolution of Kafka’s German as a medium stripped of local color and stylistic affectation. As Stanley Corngold argues in refuting the “minor literature” thesis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka’s project was not to reproduce the lexical and stylistic peculiarities of Prague German but to go in the opposite direction in the quest for universal relevance and appeal.11

“Description of a Struggle” (1904/9) An early text which reveals Kafka’s transition from a local Prague writer to a universal modernist is the unfinished story “Description of a Struggle.”12 Not only is this the only Kafka text in which Prague is still visible; it is also the most “local” in terms of its style. In this sense style and content complement each other. Kafka had not yet developed the pared-down anonymity for which he is justly famous. This early story still betrays elements of the “perfumed prose” that was such a feature of Prague literature at the fin de siècle and which was practiced by German and Czech writers alike. Important in this connection is the familiarity of Kafka and his GermanJewish literary circle with the members of the Czech avant-garde journal Moderní revue (Modern review), the showcase for the cosmopolitanists Arnošt Procházka, Karel Hlaváček, and Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, all of whom wrote in a style quite inimical to the later Kafka but similar to his early attempts at serious fiction.

10. For Rilke’s early life in Prague, see Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 5–50. 11. Stanley Corngold, Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), chapter 8. 12. The first version seems to have been written in the winter of 1903–4. After publishing various chapters of the story in the literary magazine Hyperion in 1908 and 1909, Kafka set out to rewrite it from scratch in 1909 (Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason, 160).

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Not only does “Description of a Struggle” bear a significant resemblance to the ornamental style of the Czech fin de siècle. The function of Prague in Czech decadent literature as a delirious backdrop to a highly subjective, confessional narrative—such as Vilém Mrštík’s novel Santa Lucia (1893), the story of a dying Moravian student reliving his memories as an immigrant to Prague, and Karásek’s autobiographical Gotická duše (Gothic soul, 1900)—is also characteristic of “Description of a Struggle.” In the work of all three writers Prague mediates between reality and dream. As Czech literature became more cosmopolitan in taste and outlook, their literary treatment of Prague changed accordingly. No longer synonymous with Czech identity, as it had been during the National Revival, Prague was increasingly experienced as a space of alienation and difference. Already anticipating Kafka’s later vision of the city as a site of disorientation, “Description of a Struggle” presents Prague—as the title suggests—as a physical and as a discursive struggle: just as the writer seeks to let go of Prague as a setting but cannot quite do so, his narrator slips on the treacherous icy sidewalk and needs to hold on to the railing of the embankment to keep himself upright. Like Kafka’s first-person narrator, Karásek’s lonely wanderer seems detached from his surroundings as he ascends Petřín Hill and looks down on the city from a great height: “He wandered onto Petřín Hill and looked down at the city. He derived no more from the view than the impression of a vague, tumultuous space. A great weariness ascended from it all. Everything seemed vain and empty. What was colorful merged with the colorless, the clear with the dark, the light with the shadows. He stood there for a long time, without a thought, his eyes transfixed.” Here Prague functions as a subjective projection of the narrator’s melancholy mood rather than an objective entity in its own right. Similarly, in “Description of a Struggle” the icebound city reflects the author’s/narrator’s feelings of emotional distance from the setting of his work. In both texts Petřín Hill/Laurenziberg becomes a site of personal liberation from the constricting contours of the city. Only by going uphill can both protagonists begin to find themselves. And in both cases this Selbst­ findung is inseparable from the characters’ homoerotic impulses. Petřín Hill/Laurenziberg becomes a space of alternative desire, a kind of cruising ground. In Kafka’s story the remote hillside allows the narrator free rein to indulge in his sadomasochistic fantasies about his acquaintance who accompanies him on his nocturnal walk. In fact, we cannot be sure whether the latter’s gesture of exposing his “broad and beautiful” chest to the narrator’s rapt gaze and his self-inflicted wound in the arm are real events or simply emanations of sadomasochistic fantasies. Similarly, the narrator’s highly



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charged encounter with a male stranger in Gothic Soul mediates uncertainly between reality and fantasy, a yearning to belong and a curious sense of detachment: “He was suddenly disturbed by the approach of someone who appeared as reclusive and solitary as he. The stranger sat down on the bench close to him and involuntarily, the two men looked at each other. Something seemed to draw them together at once, yet they did not speak and indeed, they scarcely dared give each other a second glance.”13 Significant here is the correlation between the specificity of the Prague setting and the explicitness of the narrators’ homosexual feelings. However, this male-male desire assumes a more complex form of displacement and transference in Kafka’s text. The two young men begin as rivals for the favor of the young hostess at a party, but as the story unfolds, the narrator proÂ� jects his sublimated desire for the woman onto his companion. The earliest version of “Description of a Struggle” dates from 1904, followed by a revised version in 1909. Moreover, Kafka never completed the story and appears to have abandoned it in favor of other projects.14 The inability to finish the story and the futile attempts to revise it form a striking parallel to Kafka’s well-known unsatisfactory relationships with women. The homoerotic elements in “Description of a Struggle” have already been noted; these were even more pronounced in the 1904 version and were visibly effaced in the later version. The gradual effacement of these personal elements in the story bear witness to Kafka’s growing dissatisfaction with the first-person voice as a viable mode of narration and with Prague as a recognizable setting.

The Trial (1914–15) By the time Kafka came to write his novel Der Prozeß (The Trial) he had successfully relinquished the awkward first-person voice of “Description of a Struggle” in favor of the more satisfactory device of the interior monologue. The opening sentence of the novel foregrounds this narrative breakthrough, in which the subjective voice of the protagonist is subsumed by a universal third-person perspective: “Someone must have slandered Josef K.,

13. Quoted from Prague: A Traveler’s Literary Companion, edited by Paul Wilson (Berkeley: Whereabouts Press, 1995), 11. For the Czech original see Jiří Karásek ze Lvovic, Gotická duše a jiné prózy (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1991), 38. 14. For the two versions of the story, see Judith Ryan, “Die zwei Fassungen der ‘Beschreibung des Kampfes’: Zur Entwicklung von Kafkas Erzähltechnik,” in Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, edited by Fritz Martin, Walter Müller-Seidel, and Bernhard Zeller (Stuttgart: Alfred Körner Verlag, 1970), 546–72.

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for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”15 A corollary of this more impersonal narrative technique is the effacement of Prague as a recognizable setting: the impersonal voice of the narrative meshes with the anonymity of the cityscape. And yet, as critics have often noted, traces of Prague—its architecture, labyrinthine streets, and bureaucratic interiors—remain visible within Kafka’s texts long after the explicit topography of the city has been effaced.16 These traces can be understood not only as topographical references but also as textual allusions to other works of literature. For example, the claustrophobic, introspective world of The Trial with its paranoid feeling of scrutiny and surveillance resembles Jan Neruda’s Povídky malostranské (Lesser Town tales, 1878). Famous for his desire to make Czech literature more cosmopolitan, Neruda injected a strong element of realism into his fiction. Lesser Town Tales is a series of loosely linked stories depicting life in the insular world of Malá Strana, a nexus of narrow streets and picturesque squares located between the river Vltava and the castle.17 These stories mark an important development in Czech literature not only in terms of their naturalistic attention to detail but also in their rejection of nationalism as the dominant discourse of Czech literature. Whereas earlier Czech writers had differentiated people along ethnic lines as Germans or Czechs, Neruda’s stories explore the socially constructed distinction between “insiders” and “outsiders.” In this respect he looks forward to Kafka’s fictional world, with its heavily scored contours of exclusion. As in Kafka’s fiction, Neruda’s stories often involve characters who are deliberately and vindictively excluded from the social collective. For example, in “Jak Pan Vorel si nakouřil pěnovku” (“How Mr. Vorel Broke in His Meerschaum Pipe”) the son of a country miller comes to Prague with the intention of establishing a flour business near the Strahov Gate. But his attempt at making a new life in the city fails after his first customer—a frustrated, snobbish spinster—takes offense at the young man’s “forward”

15. Franz Kafka, The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 3. 16. Judith Ryan compares the mazelike corridors in the bowels of the ship in “Der Heizer” (“The Stoker”) where Karl Rossmann gets lost, to the labyrinthine streets of Prague and sees the protagonist’s suspicion of the Slovak who shares his cabin as reflecting ethnic tensions in the city. See Ryan, “Kafka before Kafka: The Early Stories,” in A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka, edited by James Rolleston (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2002), 61–81 (80–81). 17. Jan Neruda, Prague Tales, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Budapest: Central European University, 1993).



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behavior and spreads the rumor that his flour is contaminated with pipe smoke. The local residents boycott the shop, driving the young Mr. Vorel into bankruptcy and eventual suicide. The grotesque final scene, in which a delegation from the district court arrives to inspect the scene of the suicide, anticipates the absurdist bureaucratic world of The Trial: “A ten o’clock a delegation from the district court arrived and entered the shop through the house. The men took down the suicide with the help of Mr. Uhlmühl, Malá Strana’s commissioner of police, who reached into the pocket of the dead man’s jacket and pulled out a pipe. ‘Look at this,’ he said, holding it up to the light. ‘Never have I seen a pipe so expertly broken in’â•›” (Neruda, Prague Tales, 33). Mr. Vorel’s exclusion from the enclosed community of the Lesser Town and his tragic death at the end of the story find a parallel in K.’s inability to gain access to the castle and Josef K.’s arbitrary trial and punishment at the close of The Trial. Although the cityscape of The Trial is anonymous, it resembles Neruda’s Prague in its unbearable feeling of claustrophobia and entrapment. Like Kafka’s protagonists, Neruda’s characters are often lodgers in other people’s houses who feel trapped by their circumstances. As in Kafka’s world of contiguous interior spaces, there is simply no “outside” in Neruda’s Lesser Town. The whole quarter feels like a series of interconnected interiors from which the characters can find respite and fresh air only by going onto the roof. For example, in the story “Týden v tichém domě” (“A Week in a Quiet House”) the clerk Josef Loukota sublets a room from a local family but is granted no privacy and has to pass through their kitchen to reach his own room. Loukota’s proximity to his overbearing landlady, who enters his room without notice, foreshadows the rooming house where Josef K. sublets a room in The Trial: The front section looks out over the grocer’s on the left and the inn on the right. There is no staircase to the upper storeys off the passageway leading from the street; the only way to reach them is to take the steps leading down to the courtyard, turn right, follow the short balcony to a winding staircase, climb to another short balcony and proceed to a small corridor. This floor, from the street to the courtyard, consists of a single flat occupied by a retired agricultural official and his wife and daughter. Josef Loukota, the man whom everyone calls “the Doctor” and who is in fact no medical doctor or even doctor of law but merely a clerk, sublets a room from them and must pass through the kitchen to reach his quarters. (Neruda, Prague Tales, 19)

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Another feature of Neruda’s Prague is the blurred distinction between public and private spaces; for example, Mr. Vorel’s flour shop is located in a private house known as the Green Angel. Kafka takes this ambiguity further by effacing the distinction between business and home to create a nightmarishly paranoid world in which friendship is precluded and everyone becomes a rival. In the ironically titled story “Der Nachbar” (The neighbor) the first-person narrator’s business abuts the rented space of a menacing double named Harras: “At the beginning of the year a young man snapped up the empty premises next to mine, which very foolishly I had hesitated to rent until it was too late. They also consist of a room and an anteroom, with a kitchen, however, thrown in—the room and the anteroom, I would certainly have found some use for, my two girl clerks feel somewhat overdriven as it is—but what use would a kitchen have been to me?”18 This sense of people living too close to each other in mutually hostile circumstances was not just a projection of Kafka’s imagination but was a feature of everyday life in Prague. We first encounter this claustrophobic world of cramped cohabitation and mutual surveillance at the beginning of The Trial, where Josef K. suddenly becomes aware of being scrutinized by his neighbors: “K. waited a while longer, watching from his pillow the old woman who lived across the way, who was peering at him with curiosity quite unusual for her” (The Trial, 3). There is a similar scene of people looking out of the window when Josef K. is searching for the courthouse in the suburbs of the city: “But Juliussstrasse, where it was supposedly located and at the top of which K. paused for a moment, was flanked on both sides by almost completely identical buildings, tall gray apartment houses inhabited by the poor. On this Sunday morning most of the windows were occupied; men in shirtsleeves leaned there smoking, or held small children with tender care at the windowsill. Other windows were piled high with bedding, above which the disheveled head of a woman briefly appeared. People called across the street to each other; one such exchange directly over K.’s head aroused loud laughter” (The Trial, 38). We might compare this not unpleasant scene of workingclass life with Neruda’s story “A Week in a Quiet House,” where the waking occupants of the house begin to appear at the window and greet each other: Gradually things grew livelier. White curtains vanished from windows; a window opened here and there. Figures appeared, looking up at the sky 18. Franz Kafka, Collected Stories, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 392–93.



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and Petřín Hill and turning back to comment on the lovely day to other members of the household. People greeted one another on stairways and balconies with a “Good morning.” A tall man with a blotchy red face and unruly grey hair appeared in the first-floor window of the front part of the house near the street. Resting his weight on the window ledge, he leaned out so far that his shirt opened to reveal a powerful chest still wrapped in flannel despite the June sun. He glanced over at the window next door, but found its curtains drawn. Then he leaned back and said into the room, “It’s not yet seven.” (Prague Tales, 7–8)

In both of the examples just cited, one senses the intense proximity of urban cohabitation, the difference being that in Neruda’s story the inhabitants acknowledge each other’s existence, whereas in Kafka’s novel the locals are totally indifferent to—even oblivious of—K.’s presence among them. In other words, close habitation with others can work both as a reassuring feature of modern urban life and as an index of exclusion. Kafka simply emphasizes the alienating elements already present in Neruda’s fiction, highlighting the extent to which many of his characters are outsiders in their own city. If Mr. Vorel comes to Prague from the provinces, the nameless narrator of the story “U tří lilií” (At the sign of the three lilies) is a local who gives the impression of being an outsider in the manner of Kafka’s protagonists Georg Bendemann or Gregor Samsa. As the story begins, he sits apart from the habitués of an inn near the Strahov Gate in a curiously liminal location between life and death, the lively dancing couples and a dug-up graveyard: “Now I would gaze in through an open window at the happy, twirling couples, now out at the dark garden” (Prague Tales, 184). At regular intervals he gets up from his table to watch a beautiful girl dancing inside. Although the setting of the story identifies it as Prague, the isolation of the narrator and his voyeuristic interest in the girl make the story more universal than any other in the collection. Kafka simply went one step further by creating an anonymous city which effaces all topographical references and reduces all its inhabitants to a status of exclusion.

The Castle (1921–22) On the face of it, Kafka’s next great novel, Das Schloss (The Castle), with its rural setting of a village overshadowed by a mysterious and inaccessible castle, would seem to have little to do with Prague. However, on closer inspection, Kafka’s novel skillfully deconstructs the city-country binary central to

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nineteenth-century Czech literature to demonstrate that there is no refuge from the alienation of modern urban life. The interchangeable nature of village and town is encapsulated in the first detailed description of the castle as a series of interconnected buildings akin to a “small town” (Städtchen): “It was neither an old stronghold nor a new mansion, but a rambling pile consisting of innumerable small buildings closely packed together and of one or two storeys; if K. had not known that it was a castle he might have taken it for a little town. There was only one tower as far as he could see, whether it belonged to a dwelling-house or a church he could not determine. Swarms of crows were circling round it.”19 If Kafka’s castle has the characteristics of a small town, in Comenius’s The Labyrinth of the World, the city—described by the allegorical Pilgrim in quest of the truth—resembles a castle: “Looking down from there, I saw on earth a certain city, beautiful and splendid in appearance and spread over an extremely wide expanse. Nevertheless, I was always able to distinguish its boundaries and limits on all sides. The city was constructed in a circle, arranged with walls and ramparts, but instead of moats there was a certain dark abyss that seemed to be without sides or bottom. There was light only above the city; beyond the walls it was pitch dark.”20 Kafka inverts this allegorical description of the city to suggest that the castle has no redeeming features. Whereas Comenius’s city is “beautiful and splendid in appearance,” Kafka’s castle is a “rambling pile” of outhouses with a swarm of crows circling around it. And yet Kafka does not simply negate Comenius’s ideal of the “paradise of the heart.” Exemplary of Kafka’s own yearning to belong, his protagonist K. never gives up his quest for access to the castle and the authority it represents. Like the Pilgrim who goes through the world in the search for truth, K.’s function is largely peripatetic, as he moves toward the castle in quest of recognition. But in distinction to The Labyrinth, this quest is not linear but circular. In fact, as the beginning of the novel makes clear, K. is always-already in the castle from the moment he arrives at the village and is confronted by the first representative of the count’s authority in the figure of Schwarzer, who brusquely awakens him and insists that he leaves the count’s territory. Josef K. and K. are constantly in quest of a just resolution to their predicament, the former seeking to clear his name of a mysterious crime at-

19. Franz Kafka, The Castle, translated by Willa and Edwin Muir (London: Minerva, 1992), 15. 20. John Amos Comenius, The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart, translated and introduced by Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk (New York: Paulist Press, 1998), 67.



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tributed to him by the authorities, the latter attempting to gain access to an inhospitable castle. As Ripellino has pointed out, the two companions Ubiquitous and Delusion who lead the Pilgrim through the depraved world in The Labyrinth foreshadow K.’s twinlike assistants in The Castle and the two actors in The Trial who accompany Josef K. to his execution. The Pilgrim is also led to the Queen’s throne as if he were appearing before a court (Ripellino, Magic Prague, 42). But Kafka does not simply reproduce Comenius’s Christian teleology: he inverts it to demonstrate that there is no possibility of escape from the constrictions of modern existence. In this respect the circular experience of his protagonists in The Trial and The Castle has much more in common with the nightmarish experience of the denigrated city in the first half of Comenius’s work than the resolution of the Pilgrim’s predicament in the second part. In spite of its tragic subject matter —the loss of man’s moral compass in a world torn apart by violence and religious hatred—The Laby­ rinth was intended to teach a moral lesson by showing the reader how he can achieve union with Christ in the paradise of the heart. This utopian ideal complemented the great Moravian’s pedagogical passions. Anticipating his later language textbooks Janua linguarum reserata (The gates of languages unlocked) and Orbis pictus (The world in pictures), The Labyrinth was conceived not to induce despair but to inspire hope through learning and education. It has even been described by Howard Louthan and Andrea Sterk as “an early Bildungsroman, an extended lesson of perception, a journey through the world of the seventeenth century designed to help the reader uncover falsehood and discover truth” (Comenius, The Labyrinth, 19). The Labyrinth was composed at a low point in the life of its author. Written in 1623, it reflected the young Comenius’s anguish following the collapse of the Protestant cause in the Czech lands and the victory of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The army of the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand had defeated the Protestant Estates at the Battle of the White Mountain in November 1620 and had entered Prague in triumph. Comenius composed The Labyrinth as a work of comfort or consolation for his coreligionists, who were faced with the prospect of enforced conversion or exile. The grim reality of exclusion and exile informs the first half of The Labyrinth, with its devastating depiction of a corrupt society and a world stripped of meaning and truth: “Looking at the building of the castle itself, I saw its gleaming white walls, which they told me were of alabaster. But examining them more carefully and touching them with my hands, I saw that they were made of nothing but paper, the cracks revealing occasional patches of tow. From this I judged that the walls were partly hollow and filled with stuffing.

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I was amazed at this deception and laughed aloud” (165–66). Kafka highlights this sense of baroque vanitas by suggesting from the outset that the castle glimpsed by K. is illusory: “It was late in the evening when K. arrived. The village was deep in snow. The Castle hill was hidden, veiled in mist and darkness, nor was there even a glimmer of light to show that a castle was there. On the wooden bridge leading from the main road to the village K. stood for a long time gazing into the illusory emptiness above him” (The Castle, 9). But from this moment of convergence The Labyrinth and The Castle diverge. Both protagonists take very different paths, the Pilgrim away from the city toward the gradual resolution of his predicament in the “paradise of the heart,” K. forever mired in the petty power relations of the castle. Typical of their divergent fates is the function of their companions. In the course of the Pilgrim’s access to self-understanding, his guide Delusion (Mámeníâ•›) is found wanting and dismissed so that the Pilgrim can progress to the next stage of his journey. By contrast, in The Castle there is no such development, since the two assistants remain constantly at K.’s side and even interrupt his most intimate conversations with Frieda and the hostess of the inn. Their ubiquity is not merely a feature of K.’s inability to transcend his predicament but equally a parodic inversion of what happens to the allegorical figure of Delusion. Another textual trace of The Labyrinth in The Castle is the elusive and powerful figure of Klamm, the official to whom K. constantly attempts to obtain access. “Klamm” encrypts the Czech word klam (“deceit,” “deception” “delusion”). But whereas the authority of “Delusion” is demystified as the Pilgrim rejects the world and discovers the truth of the heart, Klamm’s authority remains unassailable from beginning to end. Even after K. steals Klamm’s mistress Frieda, the former feels compelled to explain his behavior in the form of a letter addressed to the latter. In this sense Klamm represents the culmination of the castle’s authority rather than the negation of truth in the figure of Delusion. In distinction to The Labyrinth, where the Pilgrim gradually sheds his negative companions until he remains alone on the brink of access to the truth, K. is never liberated from the power relations represented by the castle and its denizens. The implication of Kafka’s novel is that not only the castle but also its utopian underpinning—truth— must forever remain out of reach. If the doomed K. does not correspond to the triumphant Pilgrim, who is he and what does he represent? In his treatise Siet’ viery (The net of faith, early 1440s) Comenius’s spiritual predecessor and founder of the movement



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known as the Bohemian Brethren, Peter Chelčický (1390–ca. 1458), interprets the foundation of the first city as the consequence of human pride and identifies the founder of this city as the biblical character Cain, the murderer of his brother Abel and the instigator of the violence which would become synonymous with urban life: “Therefore it is to Cain that the origin of cities and castles is attributed, and this because of murder, brigandage and violence, for Cain killed his brother Abel from hatred and thus became a fugitive and vagabond roaming over the earth, fearing for his life.”21 Chelčický also attributes to Cain the invention of weights and measures: “The true father of the city folk is Cain, for he transformed crude existence into a subtle art through the invention of weights and measures; hitherto the simple folk bartered things for one another without weighing or measuring, until Cain determined, for the profit of the wicked, that things should be sold according to weight and measure” (Czech Prose, 45). As his initial implies, K. can be understood as the descendant of the biblical Cain (Kain in German). Like Cain, K. is an outcast from his home and is forced to wander across the earth without access to God’s grace and forgiveness. Moreover, his profession of land surveyor (Landvermesser) recalls Cain’s role as the inventor of weights and measures. Significantly, the land surveyor features in the list of denigrated human professions in The Labyrinth: From there we went on to another hall where they sold fingers, spans, ells, fathoms, scales, measures, levers, windlasses, pulleys, and similar tools and which was full of people measuring and weighing. Some were measuring the hall itself, and almost everyone measured differÂ� ently.€Then they quarrelled and measured once again. Some measured the length, width, and depth of a shadow; others weighed it on a scale. In sum, they said that there was nothing in or out of the world that they could not measure. After observing their trade for some time, I recognized that there was more boasting than practicality in all this activity. Shaking my head, I left. (108–9)

If the count is the modern successor of God—absent and arbitrary rather than immanent and just—K. can be seen as the modern successor of Cain. Whereas in Christian eschatology Cain’s primal disobedience is ultimately 21. Czech Prose: An Anthology, translated and edited by William E. Harkins (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1983), 42.

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redeemed by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, in Kafka’s modernist universe there is no redemptive resolution to K.’s exile. The profession of land surveyor functions simply as an empty signifier in a world devoid of religious transcendence and social justice. In this respect, the land surveyor also recalls the Jewish religious tradition, with its similarity between the Hebrew word for Messiah (mashiah) and the Hebrew word for land surveyor (mashoah). Another Czech writer whom Kafka greatly admired was Božena Němcová (1820–62), author of the classic children’s novel Granny.22 This idyllic portrayal of Czech village life would seem to be an unlikely source for a chronicle of modern alienation. But Kafka drew upon this sunny nineteenthcentury novel to produce his own grim depiction of life in the twentieth€century. Just as The Castle effaces the distinction between the “labyrinth of the world” and “the paradise of the heart” to create a nightmarish vision of modern life, so does it blur the distinction between the village and the manor house in Granny to highlight the ubiquitous presence of power and authority in Němcová’s novel. Granny represents the apotheosis of the nineteenth-century cult of Czech country life, the antithesis of the denigrated city as it evolved in the religious writings of Chelčický and Comenius. As in Kafka’s The Castle, the novel begins with a transition from the city to a village: Granny’s older daughter has moved with her family from Vienna, where her husband is in service with a princess, to a village near the lady’s great estate in Bohemia, not far from Granny’s home. She writes to her mother to invite her to move in with the family and spend the rest of her days with the grandchildren she has never seen. Granny acquiesces, moves in with her daughter, and becomes the symbol of the village community. Her arrival in the village provides a curiously inverted parallel to K.’s arrival in The Castle. Whereas K. is immediately branded as an outsider, Granny soon becomes the organic incarnation of village life. If K. remains a liminal figure, who belongs neither in the village nor to the castle, Granny is the harmonious link between the peasants and the local gentry. Although this matriarchal ideal is absent from Kafka’s novel, traces of Granny’s authority can be glimpsed in the role played by powerful women in

22. In a letter to Felix Weltsch, written in Zürau on September 22, 1917, Kafka states that he is reading autobiographies and correspondences in Czech and French, the best of which is Božena Němcová’s correspondence. See Franz Kafka, Briefe 1902–1924, in Gesammelte Werke, edited by Max Brod (Fischer Verlag: Frankfurt am Main, 1975), 169–70.



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the village he describes.23 As in Granny, this feminine principle symbolizes the harmonious community (Gemeinschaft) that has been usurped by modern, mechanistic society (Gesellschaft). In Němcová’s novel an essential ingredient of this female-connoted harmony is the lack of ethnic tensions between Germans and Czechs. In contrast to the hierarchical world of midnineteenth-century Prague, where German was the official language and Czech newspapers banned during the oppressive Bach reaction of the 1850s, Czech enjoys parity with German in Němcová’s ideal village. Granny’s sonin-law, Mr. Prošek, is a German speaker and her daughter a native speaker of Czech, so that the grandchildren grow up speaking both languages with equal fluency. This easy commerce between languages and cultures contrasts with the strained linguistic and ethnic relations in Němcová’s and Kafka’s Prague. While K. and the villagers are denied meaningful contact with the representatives of the castle, in Granny all classes, regardless of rank and status, live in visible harmony with each other. When Granny and her grandchildren are invited to the manor house by the princess, the peasant children play amicably with the princess’s ward, Countess Hortensia, while Granny regales the princess with the story of her long life. The occupants of the manor house are not invisible and inscrutable like Klamm but are integral members of rural society. In distinction to Kafka’s invisible count, the princess is an accessible presence and source of harmony, an aristocratic counterpart to Granny herself: “In summer, when the nobility were at the manor house, the children often saw the beautiful Princess riding out on horseback, and her retinue in procession after her. Seeing her pass like this, the miller once said to Granny: ‘It always reminds me of a comet trailing its tail behind it.’”24 In spite of the obvious differences between Granny and The Castle, both novels reflect significant similarities in the lives of their authors. Both Kafka and Němcová knew Prague as a city of alienation, the former as a German-speaking Jew at a time of heightened anti-Semitism, the latter as a Czech-speaking woman during the repressive Bach reaction. Like Kafka, Němcová was born into a German-speaking household and even had a German name before she married the Czech patriot Josef Němec: Barbora Pankl

23. Elizabeth Boa, “The Castle,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, edited by Julian Preece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61–79 (65). 24. Božena Němcová, Granny: Scenes from Country Life, translated by Edith Pargeter (London: Greenwood Press, 1962), 33.

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spent her earliest years in a German-speaking family in Vienna, where her mother worked as a maid and her father as a groom in an aristocratic household. But she spent most of her childhood in Ratibořice (Ratiboritz) in eastern Bohemia, where her parents settled soon after her birth and where her father was in service with Princess Katharina Wilhelmina von Sagan. Young Barbora was exposed to the rich world of Czech fairy tales by her maternal grandmother Magdalena Novotná, just as Kafka heard stories from his Czech-speaking nanny. Although Němcová came from a more€humÂ� ble€background than Kafka, her transition from an exclusively Germanspeaking milieu in Vienna to her grandmother’s Czech-speaking home in Ratibořice provides a reverse parallel to the Kafka family’s transition from the Czech-speaking countryside to the middle-class world of Prague. Granny was written in 1855 at the height of the Bach reaction. After the failure of the 1848 uprising Němcová’s husband Josef, a fervent supporter of the revolution, was sent by the authorities to work in Hungary while his wife and four children were left to fend for themselves in the city. At this time Němcová’s eldest son, Hynek, died; and the grieving mother began to compose her best-known and most popular work of fiction based on her own childhood memories of growing up in the Bohemian countryside under the care of her beloved grandmother, the prototype for the matriarchal figure of Granny. Thus, the writing of Granny can be seen not just as an attempt to recreate the world of her childhood in the Czech countryside; it can also be understood as an attempt to efface the writer’s unhappy memories of her life in Prague after the 1848 uprising. To this extent, the idealized Czech village depicted in Granny is an inverted reflection of the oppressive, alienating conditions of life in Prague itself. In The Castle Kafka inverts—and subverts—the idealized relations between the village and the manor house that obtain in Němcová’s novel. For example, when K. settles down for the night in the parlor of the inn soon after arriving at the village, he is awoken by an official of the castle who is described as a “townsman” (Bürger). The apparent harmony of the village collective is suddenly shattered by the rigid hierarchies of city life: “At this the young man flew into a passion. ‘None of your guttersnipe manners!’ he cried, ‘I insist on respect for the Count’s authority! I woke you up to inform you that you must quit the Count’s territory at once’” (The Castle, 10). We glimpse a similar status-conscious world among the servants of the manor house in Granny: “There was no such welcome there. Here hurried a frogged footman, there a chambermaid in silk, yonder a gentleman-in-waiting, and then another, and everyone of them with nose in the air, mincing along like peacocks which alone had the right to walk on the grass here” (Granny,



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110). Whereas Němcová effaces her unhappy memory of Prague by creating its idealized inverse in the form of the Czech village, Kafka inverts this rural idyll to expose the original memory trace of the city in Němcová’s novel. To this extent Kafka was not writing a new novel but “rewriting” a familiar one. Lurking below the surface of both texts—one a classic of nineteenthcentury Czech literature, the other a classic of European modernism—are the indelible traces of Prague as a city of political repression and personal alienation.

“The City Coat of Arms” (1920) One of the few works by Kafka to reference Prague in a recognizable fashion is the allegorical fable “Die Stadtwappen” (“The City Coat of Arms”). Although the city is never identified by name, the story reflects Kafka’s preoccupation with its history and mythology at a crucial moment in its political reinvention as the capital of a newly independent nation-state.25 Just two years earlier, in 1918, Czechoslovakia had been established on the ruins of the Habsburg Empire. Kafka’s fable may be read as a sardonic commentary on the origins and fate of this new state. The fable is based on the myth of the Tower of Babel in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 11:19). However, Kafka’s rewriting of the biblical myth can also be read as a meditation on the ethnic and linguistic tensions inherent in Prague itself. As Nancy Wingfield has shown in Flag Wars, within a few days of the establishment of the interwar First Republic on October 28, 1918, Prague had become the flash point of major ethnic conflicts between Germans and Czechs as control of the new state passed from the former to the latter. The most shockingly visible manifestation of these conflicts was the felling of the Marian Column on the Old Town Square by a crowd of anticlerical fanatics on November 3, 1918. Kafka’s fable can be understood as a reaction to these internecine tensions within his own city; he would most probably have witnessed some of them in person or at least have read the reports in the newspapers. However, Kafka’s writing betrays no overt or explicit reaction to the political events being played out in his midst. Rather, “The City Coat of Arms” exposes a memory trace of a long-standing textual tradition of the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for ethnic tensions and rivalries between Czechs and Germans. Medieval chronicles usually begin with the construction of the Tower of Babel, and premodern histories of Bohemia are no exception. For 25. Franz Kafka, “The City Coat of Arms,” in Collected Stories, 400–401.

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example, the Dalimil Chronicle opens with a typical account of humanity’s attempt to build a tower which would reach to heaven. But in marked distinction to the original account in the Hebrew Bible, here the desire to build the tower is not motivated by human pride but as a defensive reaction to the preceding biblical account of the Flood. In the book of Genesis these two episodes are treated separately, whereas in the Dalimil Chronicle the traumatic experience of the earth’s inundation and the virtual extinction of humanity merges with the later attempt of eight survivors of the Flood— Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their spouses—to construct a defensive tower against future catastrophes. In the book of Genesis it is the hubris of human civilization rather than human fear of extinction which provides the instigation for the building of the Tower of Babel, the biblical writers seeing it as a sign of the separation from God that followed the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In the Da­ limil Chronicle the motivation for building the tower is not the desire to regain man’s primal innocence but the desperate need to erase the memory of his fall and the catastrophe that followed it. This emphasis is peculiar to the Czech author, but it is reflective of the collective anxiety of his audience, faced with the growing influence of German immigrants and the German language in the affairs of state. Thus, for the Czech author and his audience the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel served as a metaphor for their own defensive position vis-à-vis their German neighbors. Halfway through the narrator’s disquisition, Kafka’s story suddenly shifts from the building of the tower to the apparently unrelated foundation of a city and the ethnic squabbles which accompany it. This unexpected switch from the biblical myth of lost innocence to a fable of ethnic strife inverts the chronology of the original fable by making linguistic disharmony precede rather than follow the building of the tower: “Too much thought was given to guides, interpreters, accommodations for the workmen, and roads of communication” (Kafka, Collected Stories, 400). Moreover, in Kafka’s version, the discord between ethnic groups is the principal reason for their inability to complete the tower rather than God’s anger at human pride. Thus, Kafka “rewrites” the biblical myth as an allegory of ethnic discord which stymies all attempts at progress. Instead of moving forward, humanity is hopelessly mired in its petty conflicts from the very outset: “Every nationality wanted the finest quarter for itself, and this gave rise to disputes, which developed into bloody conflicts. These conflicts never came to an end; to the leaders they were a new proof that, in the absence of the necessary unity, the building of the tower must be done very slowly, or indeed preferably postponed until universal peace was declared” (Collected Stories, 401).



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The leaders’ insistence on slow progress in the absence of unity reflects the response of the new ruling elite to the divisive situation in Prague following the establishment of the First Republic. In fact, the reference to incremental progress may be a satirical allusion to President T. G. Masaryk’s philosophy of humanita, with its emphasis on building the future in a gradualist fashion. A key component of Masaryk’s humanist system was the rejection of revolutionary upheavals in favor of “small-scale work” (drobná prace). The president of the newly constituted state, which comprised Czechs, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, and others, faced a formidable challenge in holding together such an artificial patchwork of distinct cultures and languages. Masaryk’s solution to this challenge was the abandonment of established nationalist myths (which would only exacerbate the situation) in favor of a reinvented myth based on the rational assumption that humans are inherently fair and willing to live together in a peaceful manner.26 As events twenty years later demonstrated, this myth was inadequate as a means of inducing supranational cohesion. A myth based on Enlightenment principles could not efface within the space of a few years ethnic tensions which had bedeviled Czech-German relations for centuries. We have already seen evidence of these tensions in the fourteenth-century Dalimil Chronicle (chapter 1). But they continued to fester well into the next century, culminating in the Hussite Wars. Although not created by ethnic discord, the Hussite disturbances fed off ethnic hatreds. The leader of the reform movement, Jan Hus, encouraged the use of the Czech language in sermons and prayers and systematically replaced German loanwords with their Slavic counterparts. When, in 1420, Czech peasants came from the countryside to defend Prague from the anti-Hussite league, they stripped the rich clothing from the German burghers, since they regarded their fine array as sinful manifestations of pride (Thomas, Anne’s Bohemia, 87). In The Net of Faith Chelčický interprets the foundation of the first city by Cain as the consequence of pride: “Pride trapped them in all things like a net, for they are the race which is adorned with coats-of-arms” (Czech Prose, 44). The city coat of arms emblematized the arrogance of the nobility and the urban patriciate. The just punishment for such arrogance was the destruction of the city. It is this apocalyptic fantasy, which is such a marked feature of Czech writing, that Kafka invokes at the end of “The City Coat of Arms”: “All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are filled 26. For Masaryk’s notion of “small-scale work,” see Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Humanist Ideals, translated by W. Preston Warren (Lewisburg, PA, 1971).

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with longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by five successive blows from a gigantic fist” (Collected Stories, 401).

Kafka and Postwar Czech Literature Following the rise to power of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in February 1948, Kafka’s works were not only ignored; they were banned outright. The new state could not tolerate a writer who described so accurately and wittily the all-pervading presence of bureaucracy in the modern world and the eclipsing of the individual by the totalitarian state. As a consequence the complete works of Kafka in Czech translation became available only in the fall of 2007, almost a decade after the fall of Communism in central Europe.27 Following the post-Stalinist “thaw” in the 1960s the official forgetting of Kafka gave way to a fascination with—even a desperate need for—this prescient chronicler of totalitarianism. Following the rehabilitation of his work at the famous Liblice conference in 1963, Kafka’s works were partially made available to a Czech readership. More significant was the reinvention of Kafka as a dissident avant la lettre, a prophet who predicted the plight of the intellectual in the Communist state. His work became a source of inspiration and hope for many Czech writers and filmmakers, who saw their own political fate reflected in that of the doomed protagonists of The Trial and The Castle. Perhaps the most famous cinematic reinvention of Kafka was the film Josef Kilián (1963) directed by Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt and released in the same year as the Liblice conference. Although Kafka’s memory was officially effaced in Communist Czechoslovakia, the grim picture of the modern world he depicts in his stories and novels resonated with the experience of those who suffered imprisonment and torture under Stalin. Hence, the official “forgetting” of Kafka was to some extent negated by those who identified with the fate of Kafka’s protagonists. These dissident writers and intellectuals tended to insert Kafka back into a familiar Prague setting. For example, the narrator’s journey through a bureaucratic labyrinth in Josef Kilián ends with the absent statue of Stalin at the embankment of the river Vltava. But traces of Kafka’s influence on Czech literature can be detected even in the prethaw period. One of the earliest Czech writers to reveal familiar27. Louis Begley, The Tremendous World I Have inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographi­ cal Essay (New York: Atlas and Co., 2008), 4.



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ity and empathy with Kafka’s work was Jiří Weil (1900–1951), author of the Holocaust novel Život s hvězdou (Life with a Star, 1948).28 This book was banned by the Communist authorities almost as soon as it was published on account of its alleged “cowardice” and “pernicious existentialism.” Just a few years after World War II, the events of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia were already being “rewritten” to reflect the national myth of Czech heroism. In its stark realism and honesty about everyday life during the protectorate Weil’s novel could only cause offense to this national mythologizing, while its emphasis on the suffering of the Jews released an antiSemitic backlash, culminating three years later in the notorious show trial of Rudolf Slánský, one of eleven leading Jewish members of the Czechoslovak Communist Party convicted and hanged in 1952 on trumped-up charges of spying for the Western powers.29 Life with a Star describes the experience of a humble Jewish bank clerk named Josef Roubíček who mysteriously avoids transportation to the concentration camps due to a bureaucratic error. While his family and fellow Jews are sent to their deaths, he survives through a mixture of luck and determination. Throughout the novel the Nazi aggressors are referred to as “they,” as if the narrator were intent on effacing their identity. By the end of the novel the protagonist pretends that he has committed suicide and goes into hiding for the duration of the war. Loosely based on Weil’s own feigned suicide and survival in Prague during the protectorate, the novel owes a great debt to Kafka’s vision of the anonymous city. Josef’s alienated experience of life in his native city recalls the fate of Josef K. in The Trial, while his “disappearance” at the end of the novel echoes the mysterious fate of Karl Rossmann during the final episode of Der Verschollene (The Missing Person). Although Life with a Star is clearly set in occupied Prague, Weil rarely identifies the city by name. Living on the faceless outskirts of the city, Weil’s protagonist is reduced to a modern Everyman. Even Josef’s Jewish

28. Jiří Weil, Life with a Star, translated by Rita Klimová (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). For the Czech original, see Jiří Weil, Život s hvězdou (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1999). 29. Communist anti-Semitism would help to explain the careful avoidance of Jewish references in Jan Němec’s New Wave film Diamonds of the Night (1964), based on Arnošt Lustig’s story “Darkness Casts No Shadow” (1958). Here too we see an interplay between preservation and effacement: the film represents the plight of two Jewish boys on the run from a transport train during World War II without referencing their Jewish identity or experience. For a discussion of the film, see Thomas, The Bohemian Body, 182ff.

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identity remains unspecified, and the word “Jude” sewn onto his yellow badge is dismissed as a “foreign” word, as if the protagonist were determined to efface the memory of the German language. Working as a sweeper in the cemetery, Roubíček has trouble making out the names—presumably Hebraic letters—“written on small tablets in foreign letters” (72). Prague has become a palimpsest of alien symbols and hieroglyphs even to its own inhabitants. In its deliberate avoidance of specificity Josef’s experience of Prague as a site of alienation recalls Josef K.’s exclusion from his own city. Even his first name (Josef) recalls Kafka’s doomed protagonist.30 Like Josef K., Roubíček is summoned to appear before the authorities at nine in the morning. This appears to have been the standard time of bureaucratic appointments even in Kafka’s Prague, although in The Trial the practice is parodied when Josef K. infers that he should appear at the first proceedings of the court at nine o’clock on Sunday morning. But it is important to emphasize that Weil’s imagined Prague differs from Kafka’s fictional world in allowing some of the city’s landmarks to remain visible. For example, the Commission Building, to which the Jews are ordered to report, is located in the Prague suburb of Střešovice. And though the infamous transit camp of Terezín (Theresienstadt) is not identified by name, but as “the fortress town,” this is enough to identify it as Terezín. This combination of specific and oblique allusions to Prague’s landmarks can be understood in terms of a palimpsest in which the urge to remember the horrific events of the Holocaust and the desire to efface them coexist in the same text. A similar tension between the imperative to keep the memory of the past alive and the desperate desire to repress the humiliating memory of the Nazi occupation characterized the Czech people as a whole during World War II. As Benjamin Frommer has pointed out, this act of repression resulted in a frenzy of revenge when the war finally came to an end.31 A writer of the next generation who also reveals considerable empathy with Kafka is Bohumil Hrabal. Written just two year after the Liblice

30. Compare the final scene of Jan Švankmajer’s short film Byt (The Apartment) (1968), where the protagonist, trapped in an apartment inimical to his well-being and full of malevoÂ� lent€objects, tries to escape, only to discover an impenetrable wall engraved with the names of the previous inhabitants of the prisonlike space. Highly reminiscent of Kafka’s story “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”), this final scene ends with the protagonist forlornly etching his name, Josef, on the wall. 31. As Frommer points out, a major reason for the deep sense of humiliation felt by the Czechs, and their correspondingly powerful desire for revenge against the Germans, was the fact that Czechoslovakia was occupied for more years than any other European nation.



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conference, the novella Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains, 1965) is about an alienated young train dispatcher named Miloš Hrma who resembles many of Kafka’s disaffected heroes. In rejecting the socialist realist expectation that literature should prescribe rather than describe reality, Hrabal’s novella looks back for inspiration to the interwar period of literary experimentation. Its concern with surveillance and scrutiny reflects both the contemporary conditions of everyday life under socialism and the fictional example of Kafka’s novels. The opening passage, in which Hrma feels that he is being watched as he walks to work, recalls Josef K.’s experience of surveillance at the beginning of The Trial: “I always had the impression— and I still have and always shall have—that behind every window there was at the very least one pair of eyes watching me.”32 Hrabal’s later novel Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude, 1976) is similarly indebted to Kafka. It relates the lonely experience of an elderly waste-paper compacter named Haňt’a whose “official” role is to destroy books, which he selectively saves from the jaws of the hydraulic press and stores in his tiny Prague apartment. Haňt’a’s ambiguous role as a destroyer and preserver of the printed word inevitably reflects Hrabal’s own indeterminate status as a writer trapped between compliance and dissidence. But its tension between preservation and effacement also reflects the status of writing itself in the city of memory and forgetting. Too Loud a Solitude was completed in 1976, during the period of political repression known as the Normalization and was not published in Czechoslovakia until the fall of Communism in 1989. Yet Hrabal was never a dissident writer like Václav Havel and did not leave the country like Milan Kundera. Rather, like Kafka, he remained in his native land. In many ways Haňt’a’s wanderings through Prague recall Hrabal’s and Kafka’s strolls through the alien city: “Ten times a day, every day, I wonder at having wandered so far, and then, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, I go home, walking the streets silently and in deep meditation, passing trams and cars and pedestrians in a cloud of books, the books I found that day and am carrying home in my briefcase.”33 Haňt’a’s job as a compacter of waste paper can be read not only as a metaphor for the writer’s collusive role in a society of rigid censorship but 32. Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Watched Trains, translated by Edith Pargeter (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1981), 28–29. For the original Czech, see Bohumil Hrabal, Tři novely (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1989), 11–71. 33. Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, translated by Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), 7. For the original Czech, see Bohumil Hrabal, Příliš hlučná samota (Prague: Odeon, 1989).

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also for his artistic fate in a culture obsessed with the preservation—and fetishization—of the written word: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting old paper and books, living as I do in a land that has known how to read and write for fifteen generations; living in a onetime kingdom where it was and still is a custom, an obsession, to compact thoughts and images patiently in the heads of the population, thereby bringing them ineffable joy and even greater woe” (Too Loud a Solitude, 2–3). It was precisely this small-nation function of the writer as the guardian of the written word that motivated Kafka to efface all traces of Czech literature from his work. Not only is Haňt’a a compacter of books; he is a bale of compacted books himself: the embalmed embodiment of cultural memory. It is this loss of autonomy that haunted Kafka and which characterizes Haňt’a’s/Hrabal’s dolorous fate: “On I go through the noisy streets, never crossing at the red; I walk subconsciously unconscious, half-asleep, subliminally inspired, with every bale I’ve compacted that day fading softly and quietly inside me. I have a physical sense of myself as a bale of compacted books (Too Loud a Solitude, 7). The inevitable price to be paid for the writer’s function as the representative of the national collective is his collusion in its most oppressive practices. In chapter 2, Haňt’a’s reluctant involvement in the shipping of foreign books to their place of origin after hundreds of years in Bohemian libraries evokes the traumatic memory of the deportation of millions of Bohemian Germans after World War II: “A few more years of the same, though, and I got used to it: I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morocco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars, off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown in convertible currency, and nobody blinked an eye, nobody shed a tear, not even I myself, no, all I did was stand there smiling as I watched the train hauling those priceless libraries off to Switzerland and Austria for one crown in convertible currency a kilo” (Too Loud a Solitude, 11–12). In the face of such passivity the writer is reduced to a machinelike function, repeating over and over again the same meaningless phrases and sentences: “For thirty-five years now I’ve been compacting waste-paper.” Another work of fiction which recalls Kafka is Hrabal’s picaresque novel Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England, 1986).34 In some ways this anti-bildungsroman would appear to have little in com34. Bohumil Hrabal, I Served the King of England, translated by Paul Wilson (New York: New Directions Books, 2007). For the original Czech, see Hrabal, Tři novely, 133–319.



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mon with Kafka. The protagonist of the novel, named Dítě (“child”), begins his professional life as busboy in a grand Prague hotel during the interwar years of the First Republic. During the protectorate he espouses Nazism and marries a Sudetenländerin from Cheb (Eger). With the rise to power of the Communists in 1948 he finds himself sidelined by political events. Dítě’s rise and fall can be read as a metaphor for the fate of the Czech nation from its beginnings in 1918 to its tragic nadir under Communism. But in his inability to learn any lessons from his experience the protagonist also has much in common with Karl Rossmann, the hapless hero of Kafka’s first novel, The Missing Person. In contrast to the hero of the classical bildungsÂ� roman, both Karl and Dítě fail to derive valuable lessons from their failures and merely regress to a state of infantilism. It is interesting that Hrabal’s last great novel follows the example of Kafka’s first unfinished novel in its humorous depiction of a failed hero’s attempts to make a success of his life. Hrabal transposes Kafka’s imagined Amerika to the familiar terrain of Prague, thereby exposing the traces of the city in the original novel. If Hrabal emulates Kafka without naming him, his contemporaries Milan Kundera and Václav Havel name Kafka without emulating him. As Noah Isenberg has pointed out in his analysis of President Havel’s 1990 speech delivered at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, “Kafka is still largely recognized for his angst-ridden portraits of modern life, for his tales of familial and communal crisis, and for his depictions of the contingent horrors of a brutally administered society. . . . Yet it fails to acknowledge the flipside—the side that conveyed his unfulfilled yearnings for ‘belonging’ and the acutely felt exigencies of community” (Between Redemption and Doom, 19–20). In this sense Havel does not simply describe Kafka’s predicament as a Jew; he “rewrites” him by turning him into an alienated Czech intellectual for whom the need to belong is no longer an issue. Similarly, for Milan Kundera, Kafka is reinvented as the prophet of a city of political forgetting: “Gottwald, Clementis, and all the others were unaware even that Kafka had existed, but Kafka had been aware of their ignorance. In his novel, Prague is a city without memory. The city has even forgotten its name. No one there remembers or recalls anything, and Josef K. even seems not to know anything of his own life previously” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 215–16). In fact, the very opposite is true: the Communist leadership was acutely aware of Kafka’s existence, which was why they banned his works in the first place. The point is that Kundera is not analyzing Kafka as an artist but recuperating him as a dissident intellectual, ironically, an extension of the tradition of the committed smallnation writer which Kafka sought to escape by effacing Prague from his

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work. The next step in this process of reinvention is to turn Kafka back into a Prague writer: “Neither Gottwald nor Clementis knew that every day for eight years Franz Kafka had climbed the same stairs they had just climbed to the historic balcony, because under Austria-Hungary the palace had housed a German school. Nor did they know that that on the ground floor of the same building Hermann Kafka, Franz’s father, had a shop whose sign showed a jackdaw painted next to his name, kafka meaning jackdaw in Czech” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 215). Far from demystifying this reinvention of Kafka as a Prague writer, Ripellino perpetuates it: “To this day, every evening at five, Franz Kafka returns home to Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse) wearing a bowler hat and black suit” (Magic Prague, 3). At the same time, Kafka’s characters are “rewritten” as protagonists in a novel set in Prague: “To this day, two pallid, plump, thirdrate actors, two waxwork dummies, two automatons in frock coats and top hats accompany Josef K. across the same bridge in the opposite direction by moonlight to Strahov and his execution” (Magic Prague, 3). In reinventing Kafka as a Prague writer—that is to say, by negating Kafka’s avowed artistic project to escape the city altogether—Ripellino invokes his memory to make visible a city that the West seems to have forgotten after the Soviet invasion. Published just five years after the tragic events of August 1968, Magic Prague strategically reinvents the city’s most famous writer in order to counteract the political amnesia induced by its aggressors: “[Prague] was too often subjugated and afflicted by theft and acts of tyranny, too often the scene of contumely on the part of haughty foreigners, brutal swarms of mercenaries and blusterers who tore it apart, making off with whatever they could” (Magic Prague, 3–4). Notwithstanding his heroic efforts to memorialize Prague through its greatest writer, it would take another thirty years or more before Kafka’s works were eventually published in the city of his birth.

chapter four

A Stranger in Prague: Writing and the Politics of Identity in Apollinaire, Nezval, and Camus

I

â•›n 1922 the twenty-one-year-old Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert published his â•›poem “Paříž” (Paris) in the first major anthology of the Czech avant-garde movement, known as Devětsil. A working-class member of the so-called Proletarian group of writers, Seifert had never actually seen the French capital. For all its apparent spontaneity, the city he depicts is less a real place than a textual space mediated by earlier texts. Like most of his artistic compatriots, Seifert had fallen under the spell of Karel Čapek’s Czech translations of modern French poetry, in particular, Guillaume Apollinaire’s groundbreaking “Zone” (1913). And yet Seifert’s charmingly naive portrait of Paris is quite different from Apollinaire’s jaundiced treatment of it. What seems to have inspired Seifert was not so much Apollinaire’s image of Paris in itself as the way “Zone” opens up the possibilities for modernist poetry in terms of its loose syntax and its liberating sense of Europe as the capacious playground of the bohemian artist. Although “Zone” begins and ends in Paris, the poem takes the reader on a vertiginous tour through Europe via the Mediterranean, Marseilles, Coblenz, Leyden, and Prague. Accompanying Seifert’s poem in the 1922 Devětsil anthology are reproductions of three faded postcards, one of La Grande Roue de Paris and two of the Eiffel Tower. At first glance it seems curious to find these old postcards in an avant-garde publication, but in a sense their inclusion is very significant. The first of the three postcards is located immediately above the line midway through the poem which introduces its subject: “But there in the

. Jaroslav Seifert, “Paříž,” in Revoluční sborník Devětsil (Prague: Večernice V. Vortel, 1922), 168–71. See the appendix for my translation of this poem. . For the Czech translation of “Zone” see Karel Čapek, Francouzská poezie nové doby (Prague: Českoslovenký spisovatel, 1981), 151–57.

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West by the Seine is Paris.” The implication is that the poet has experienced the city secondhand by looking at photographs of it. These images of Paris underscore the fact that a literary city can never be imagined for the first time but is always an incarnation of previous perspectives. Such has been the fate of the writer since at least the eighteenth century. Arriving in Venice in 1786, Goethe complains that there is nothing new to say about the Mistress of the Adriatic: “So many people have written (and ‘published’) about Venice that instead of a detailed description I shall just give my personal impressions.” The notion of the city as a site of overdetermined discursivity has also characterized Paris since the eighteenth century. In the words of Charles-Lewis, Baron de Pöllnitz, writing in 1732, “Paris has been described so much, and one has heard it talked about so much, that most people know what the city looks like without ever having seen it.” The late nineteenth-century Italian writer and tourist Edmondo De Amicis reinforced this idea of Paris as discursively oversaturated: “One never sees Paris for the first time; one always sees it again.” As the icon of modernity, Paris served as the principal point of departure for many central European writers like Seifert. But by the beginning of the twentieth century Prague had come to assume a similar role within the French imaginary. In the interwar years Prague achieved an iconic status for many French writers and artists. The dramatist and lyric poet Paul Claudel (1868–1955) lived in Prague from 1909 to 1911, where he as served general consul of France and met many local writers, including the young Franz Kafka. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s there was a steady flow of French visitors to the city, culminating in André Breton’s celebrated arrival in March 1935, when he made a series of euphoric speeches in the following days in which he paid flattering homage to the Czech Surrealist Group and famously referred to Prague as “la capitale magique de la vieille Europe” (the magical capital of old Europe). Breton was impressed by the excellent relations that existed between the Czech surrealists and the Czechoslovak Communist Party. In fact, these relations were not as harmonious as it appeared to outsiders and would, in any case, be fatally damaged by Breton’s attack on Stalinism later in the same year. But more important than the

. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, translated by Robert R. Heitner (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 58. . Colin Jones, Paris: The Biography of a City (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), xv. . For Ripellino’s miscitation of Breton’s speech, see Demetz, Prague in Black and Gold, 351. For Breton’s visit to Prague in 1935, see Derek Sayer, “Surrealities,” in Central European AvantGardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930, edited by Timothy O. Benson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 90–107 (90).



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reality on the ground was Breton’s vision of Prague as a utopia where aesthetics and ideology, Paris and Moscow, could be reconciled. For the French surrealists Prague would serve—in the words of Paul Éluard—as “our gateway to Moscow.” The political implications of Breton’s visit to Czechoslovakia in 1935 have been largely obscured by his mythologizing pronouncements about the city. But the fascination of Prague for Breton did not consist simply in its magical quality; it was also reflective of a particular moment in the history of the avant-garde which linked Paris to Prague in an axis of shared political as well as aesthetic values. Breton found in his Czech counterparts confirmation of his own revolutionary, left-wing project in which art becomes a tool of radical societal transformation. Apollinaire’s highly influential story “The Stroller through Prague” transÂ�formed Prague from a repository of old myths and legends into the spiritual home of the cosmopolitan artist. This reinvention of Prague as a modernist center coincided with its newfound political prominence as the capital of an independent nation-state following the Versailles agreement of 1919. Although strong cultural and political relations between France and Bohemia had existed before that, the rapprochement between the two countries was intensified as a consequence of the western allies’ recognition of Czechoslovak independence. The immense influence of Apollinaire’s story on modernist Czech literature bears witness to this love affair. Breton’s reinvention of Prague shares some affinities with Apollinaire, but his emphasis is political and collective rather than simply personal and hedonistic. In his lecture “The Political Position of Today’s Art,” delivered on April 1, 1935, Breton tried to steer a middle ground in which art was neither totally apolitical nor totally subservient to external political control. If this was a pipe dream, it was one reflective of the Czech as well as the French surrealist movement; and Prague seemed to incarnate this utopian accommodation of personal artistic freedom to political conformity. Signaling the end of the Franco-Czech love affair, Albert Camus’s essay “La Mort dans l’âme” (“Death in the Soul,” 1937) was not simply based on an unhappy personal encounter with the city; it was a programmatic attempt to demythologize the city’s reputation as a utopian refuge for the left-wing artist. If Apollinaire’s bucolic depiction of Prague anticipated the Treaty of Versailles, the treaty that created the new Europe on the ruins of old empires, Camus’s negative picture of the city foreshadowed the Munich . Quoted in Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 1995), 414.

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agreement of 1938, the treaty that presaged the dissolution of interwar Europe. Although Camus’s Prague revises the avant-garde myth inaugurated by Apollinaire and consolidated by Breton, it too is akin to a palimpsest that can never be definitively written or read. In an essay titled “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka,” Camus may well be speaking of Prague when he states that “the whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.”

Guillaume Apollinaire Seifert’s yoking together of Paris and Prague as contrasting yet symbiotic spaces of the imagination was by no means new to European modernism. Ten years earlier Apollinaire had published his experimental poem “Zone,” in which Paris assumes the same negative valence as Prague does for Seifert. Just as the young Czech poet evokes his native city as a claustrophobic prison, so does Apollinaire depict Paris as an emblem of decayed European civilization. Half way through “Zone”—at the equivalent point where Seifert introduces Paris in his poem—Apollinaire presents Prague as a bucolic idyll and an antidote to the burden of writing. Yet this utopian vision of Prague as an extradiscursive space is undermined by its poetic form, thereby reinforcing the city’s status as a palimpsest of endless revision and citation: You are in the garden of an inn on the outskirts of Prague You feel completely happy a rose is on the table And instead of writing your story you watch The rosebug which is sleeping in the heart of the rose

The story alluded to here—“The Stroller through Prague”—in effect reinvented the city as the spiritual home of the cosmopolitan artist as personified by Apollinaire himself, né Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky (1880–1918).

. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 124. . Guillaume Apollinaire, Selected Writings, translated by Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions Books, 1971), 122–23. . Guillaume Apollinaire, L’hérésiarque et Cie (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1967), 9–25. The story has been translated with the title “The Wandering Jew” in The Heresiarch + Co., translated by Rémy Inglis Hall (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1991), 1–12. All subsequent citations refer to this translation. For a masterly discussion of the story’s impact on the Czech interwar generation, see Ripellino, Magic Prague, 254–57.



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The story begins with the laconic, matter-of-fact statement of a tourist: “In March, 1902, I was in Prague. I had arrived there from Dresden” (The Heresiarch, 1). The narrator is astonished to discover a vibrant Francophile metropolis in the midst of celebrating the centenary of Balzac’s birth. When the visitor tries to communicate with the inhabitants in German he finds no one who is able—or willing—to speak that language. The sixth stranger he asks for help replies in French that he should speak French rather than German, since the former is the language of a beloved ally and the latter the language of the traditional enemy. The local goes on to tell the visitor how the Germans have exploited the land and plundered it of its rich supply of minerals, an assertion which recalls Libuše’s prophecy in Jirásek’s Old Czech Tales that foreigners will come and rob Bohemia of its natural resources. Here the speaker is merely recycling a myth that has its origins in literature rather than in life. In this way “The Stroller through Prague” introduces a metaliterary theme: the history of Prague, like that of Paris and Venice, is a history of texts. The stranger directs the narrator to a hotel on Na Poříčí, a street near the Powder Tower in the Old Town, which the latter mistranscribes “Porjitz,” as if attempting to decipher a semieffaced word in a old manuscript. This motif provides the cue for the appearance of the story’s real hero: the Eternal Jew Ahasuerus, who, according to Christian legend, denied Christ’s divinity and was destined to roam the earth until his Second Coming. But this is not the doomed protagonist of Christian myth; he is a modernist bon vivant, in short, a reincarnation of the cosmopolitan Apollinaire himself: “I walk without ceasing, and will still be walking when the fifteen signs of the last judgment are manifesting themselves. But I do not follow roads to Calvary; mine are happy. Immortal and unique witness to the fact that Christ was once on earth, I prove to mankind the reality of the redeeming and divine drama which unfolded itself at Golgotha. What a glory! What a joy! But I am also, and have been for nineteen centuries, the spectator of Humanity, which procures for me wonderful diversions. My sin, sir, was a sin of genius, and I ceased to repent of it a very long time ago” (The Heresiarch, 7). Ahasuerus—or Laquedem, as he prefers to name himself—is the incarnation of the Baudelairean flaneur. Even when eating or having sexual intercourse, he is in perpetuum mobile: He chose a big-breasted, broad-bottomed Hungarian girl, and soon halfnaked, carried her off. She was clearly frightened of the old man. His circumcised penis reminded me of a knotty tree trunk, or a redskin’s totem pole, striped with burnt sienna, scarlet and the dark violet of stormy

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skies. They returned after a quarter of an hour. The girl, tired and roused by love, but also frightened, kept crying out in German: “He walked about all the time! He walked about all the time!” (The Heresiarch, 10)

As Laquedem leads the narrator through the ancient streets of Prague, the latter silently observes the stranger’s appearance as if attempting to read an ancient text. With his multilingual longevity, Laquedem is a living embodiment of the city-book. Just as the names of Prague’s monuments have changed numerous times in its history, so is “Laquedem” just the latest in a long list of aliases: “Poets and chroniclers have often recorded the places through which I passed, naming me Ahasver, Ahasvérus or Ahasvère, in the different towns. The Italians call me Buttadio—in Latin Buttadeus—the BretÂ� ons, Boudedeo; the Spaniards, Juan Espéra-Dios. I myself prefer the name of Isaac Laquedem, under which I have often appeared in Holland” (The Heresiarch, 5–6). Like Prague, Laquedem is akin to an ancient book that has undergone numerous redactions. As if to reinforce the affinity between his own antiquarian pedigree and the historical sedimentation of Prague, Laquedem points out, en passant, the landmarks of the city: “But look! Here is the Ring or Place de Grève. The tomb of the astronomer Tycho Brahe is in the church over there. Jan Hus preached there, and its walls still bear the bullet marks of the Seven and the Thirty Years’ Wars” (The Heresiarch, 6). During a visit to the Saint Vitus’s Cathedral the narrator sees his own image etched in the semiprecious stones of the shrine of Saint Wenceslas: “But it is my own face!” I cried. “My own face, with its somber jealous eyes!” And it is true. My portrait, painfully outlined, is there, by the bronze door on which hangs the ring that supported St. Wenceslas when he was martyred. I had to leave the chapel. I was pale and distressed to have seen myself as a madman, I, who am so afraid of becoming one. (The Heresiarch, 7–8)

This moment recalls the similar passage in “Zone” where the poet sees his image etched in the agates of the chapel of Saint Wenceslas: Astonished you see yourself outlined in the agates of St. Vitus You were sad enough to die the day you saw yourself in them You looked like Lazarus bewildered by the light The hands of the clock in the Jewish quarter turn backwards



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And you go slowly backwards in your life Climbing up to Hradchin and listening at night In taverns to the singing of Czech songs (Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 122–23)

Just as the poem “Zone” references the story “The Stroller through Prague” in the passage cited earlier, so does the story allude to an identical episode in the poem. Not only is this a moment of reflection in a monumental mirror; it is also an example of Prague’s self-reflexive function as a palimpsest of endless citation.

Vítězslav Nezval and the Czech Avant-Garde The hedonistic vision of Prague evinced in “The Stroller through Prague” completely transformed the Czechs’ perception of their own city. Until Apollinaire came along, Prague was merely—according to Ripellino—a “subject of Old Prague tales” (Magic Prague, 262). This is not entirely true, since Czech writers as far back as the 1890s had begun to explore the phenomenon of the anonymous, lonely metropolis in a modernist, subjective vein. But it is impossible to underestimate the importance of Apollinaire’s story in reinventing Prague as a space of pleasure and hedonism rather than of ghosts and golems. It would be no exaggeration to claim that Apollinaire “rewrote” Prague for the Czech avant-garde. The artistic movement known as Poetism heralded a completely new and hedonistic response to everyday life, and this sense of joie de vivre transformed Prague from the gloomy, introspective habitat of the traditional artist into the playground of the avant-garde. But as we shall see, the Poetist reinvention of the city as a pleasure ground of the artist created a split in the identity of the Czech artist. In spite of their eagerness to reinvent Prague as an exciting and anonymous modern metropolis, shorn of its familiar landmarks and monuments, the Czech poets of the avant-garde could not entirely repudiate their debt to tradition. In the early 1920s the Czech avant-garde was still aligned with the newly forged Czechoslovak Communist Party, thereby creating another source of tension between the Poetists’ newfound freedom from the time-honored tendentious role of the Czech writer as a spokesman of a political (usually nationalist) cause and the imperative to subordinate art to a political principle. This split would explain the prevalence of the double motif in many works of interwar Czech literature and film; but it also explains why Prague seems to be simultaneously present and absent, remembered and forgotten, in many avant-garde texts and films of the period.

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Vítězslav Nezval’s poem “The Prague Walker” (1920) which was later included in his first surrealist collection, Praha s prsty deště (Prague with fingers of rain, 1936), was directly inspired by Apollinaire’s “Zone” and “The Stroller through Prague.”10 As in “Zone,” Nezval’s narrator alternates between the second-person voice and the first-person “I” narration. The effect of this unstable, shifting perspective is to create a split in the identity of the speaker: One day in April 1920 I arrived in Prague for the first Time At the station as sad as ashes huddled a dejected crowd They were emigrants. . . . You don’t understand why they’ve shut you up in the Morgue Where you can smell boiled cabbage and the stench of The railway The smell of my suitcase is making me cry (Nezval, Bartušek, and Hanzlík, Three Czech Poets, 28)

Like the French visitor to Prague in “The Stroller through Prague,” Nezval’s narrator is a stranger who comes to the city for the first time and who falls in love with the woman-city just as Laquedem has sex with a Prague prostitute. Even the approximate date of his arrival and the mundane setting of the train station recall the opening of Apollinaire’s story. Like Apollinaire’s narrator, Nezval’s poetic persona wanders aimlessly through the city feeling like a stranger or foreigner (cizinec). Prague becomes a subjective emanation of his mood, a collage of fragmented memories: “Like a practical joke the Castle suddenly stands before me / I shut my eyes it was a mirage / A fragment of memory the tears are welling we are in / Prague” (Three Czech Poets, 28). After days and nights of walking through the alien city, the narrator has a mysterious encounter which—as in “The Stroller through Prague”—transforms his perception of the city from anguish to pleasure. In Apollinaire’s story this other is the Eternal Jew Laquedem, who introduces the narrator to the gustatory and sexual delights of old Prague. In “The Prague Walker” 10. Translated by Ewald Osers in Vítězslav Nezval, Antonín Bartušek, and Josef Hanzlík, Three Czech Poets: Vítězslav Nezval, Antonín Bartušek, Josef Hanzlík, translated by Ewald Osers and George Theiner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 28–31; hereafter cited in the text as Three Czech Poets. For the original Czech see Vítězslav Nezval, Praha s prsty deště (Prague: Akropolis, 1936; reprint, 2000), 10–12 (10).



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the stranger is referred to as a “friend”—perhaps an intertextual reference to Apollinaire—who leads him to a brothel: “Sitting on the embankment / It’s past midnight we’ve come from a terrible cell / It was beautiful with a naked woman on a leather sofa” (Three Czech Poets, 29). The narrator’s presumed loss of virginity in the brothel corresponds to his literary coming-of-age. Ceasing to be the timorous teenager from the provinces, Nezval has found his voice as a metropolitan poet. Now he is able to love Prague as a woman: Thus I learned to love Prague Thus I first heard the bird singing under an art-nouveau Cornice of a shabby square Thus the pain of your inconsolable sadness faded away Thus in the sickly suburbs I found my Cinderella Thus I became a walker in Prague Thus I learned to have dates in your streets with Adventure and love Prague of my dreams (Three Czech Poets, 30)

The confessional tone of these lines and the unpunctuated free-verse form recall the similar evocation of Paris in “Zone,” where the city becomes the aimless locus of anguished love: Now you walk through Paris all alone in the crowd Herds of bellowing busses roll by near you The agony of love tightens your throat As if you could never be loved again (Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 120–21)

What is so novel about Nezval’s “The Prague Walker” is not the motif of the woman-city per se (which was a nineteenth-century topos common to European literature as whole), but the positive treatment of the city as a sexually mature woman. Whereas earlier Prague writers had pathologized the city-woman as a nymphomaniac (Neruda, Leppin) or as a tenacious old hag (Kafka, Karásek), Nezval treats her in a romantic fashion: “The magnolia blossoms are bursting now they are / dresses / They are dresses they are bonnets / They are your eyes they are your lips” (Three Czech Poets, 30). Under the transformative influence of Apollinaire, Prague has been “rewritten” as the poet’s lover.

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By the late 1920s Nezval had once more fallen under a foreign spell, this time of the French surrealists, whose first manifesto had been published by Breton in 1924. In Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris (The peasant of Paris, 1926) and Breton’s Nadja (1928) Baron Haussmann’s grandiose and expansive boulevards of the Second Empire are largely irrelevant, as Colin Jones points out: “Rather, its meanings [are] linked to a kind of collective unconscious which had to be intuited from the odd traces and signs of the past. Aragon’s ‘Paris peasant’ (himself) haunts the relics and vestiges of the still labyrinthine city like a mystical and psychoanalytic flâneur seeking commonplace mysteries and epiphanies. Paris for the Surrealists was not the old ‘City of Light’ but a more dangerous and exciting zone of twilight states, refracted surfaces and looming shadows” (The Biography of a City, 403). We first glimpse the impact of surrealist Paris as a twilight zone situated far away from the leisure spots of the bourgeoisie in Nezval’s poem “Podivuhodný kouzelník” (“The Wondrous Magician,” 1924), where Prague has ceased to be the sunlit playground of Poetism and has become a phantasmagorical city of night, melancholy, and alienation: One evening I was walking by the river In the gloom like a shimmering mirage, Following the lead of the street-lamps That twisted through alleys Opened like jaws in a beast. Night came rushing upon me.11

In the course of the poem the setting of the city and the identity of the poet undergoes a series of startling transformations. The magician of the title is born from the crystal belly of a mysterious nun who was fertilized by the fragrance of a sick anemone blossom. He goes through many metamorphoses: water jet, statue of Buddha, stalagmite, and the moon. In parallel fashion Prague undergoes a change of identity from the gloomy city evoked at the opening of the poem into an extension of the poet’s constantly evolving subjectivity. Prague thus becomes an extension of the modernist poet’s unstable and protean identity. Whereas nineteenth-century writers had traditionally restricted their movements to the historic center of the city, with its familiar monuments

11. Vítězslav Nezval, “Podivuhodný kouzelník,” in Revoluční sborník Devětsil, 32–50 (32). Translated by Alfred French in The Poets of Prague: Czech Poets between the Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 32.



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and landmarks such as the Paris arcade passages celebrated by Baudelaire, the French surrealists turned their attention to the unfamiliar and uncanny world of the everyday: louche bars, mundane brothels, and, above all, the city outskirts (périphérie), which served as a metaphor for the workings of the unconscious itself. Czech avant-garde writers and filmmakers were quick to respond to this new fascination with the “unreal city” of the surrealists. A fascinating example of the transition from Poetism to surrealism is Nezval’s narrative poem Edison (1927), which was included in the collection Básně noci (Poems of night). Gone are the hedonistic pleasures and carefree distractions of Poetism (cafés, ice creams, and Sunday strolls). Prague is now remythologized as the city of night, mystery, and death. In the opening passage of the first canto an inebriated gambler stumbles home from a bar through an urban landscape akin to a collage of memories and fragmented associations: Our mournful lives are full of woe. One night a gambler left his casino. Monstrancelike bars shone through the sleet In the moist air where spring and winter meet. But the night still rumbled like a buffalo Beneath the pounding of the stars and snow, Overheard by drinkers at their glass, Heads inclined as at a sodden mass; Half-naked girls in peacock plumes, Melancholics of late afternoons.12

Like Aragon’s Paris, Nezval’s Prague is linked to a collective unconscious which can no longer be taken for granted but has to be intuited from traces and signs of the past. The startling comparison of garish, brightly lit bars with monstrances (a receptacle used to display the Host often richly decorated with jewels and rays extending outward to suggest sun beams) indicates the pervasive and lingering memory of a Counter-Reformation heritage still visible in Prague’s numerous Catholic churches. Such traditional imagery of old Prague alternates with imagery associative of the New World

12. My translation. For the original, see Vítězslav Nezval, Dílo, vol. 2, Básně noci 1921–1929 (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1951), 83. In the original the mythic American landscape is evoked through the word “prérie” (prairie) for which I have substituted the similarly suggestive “buffalo” for the sake of the rhyme.

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(“prairie”), which would become the setting of cantos 2, 3, and 4 until the poem finally returns to Prague. The city has ceased to constitute a unified and coherent space and has become a montage—and here innovations in avant-garde Czech photography and film come to mind—of diverse cultural fragments and memories. As he crosses the Bridge of Legions on his way home, the gambler sees a shadowy figure leaping into the water. If this is an imagined encounter with the gambler’s alter ego (anticipating the melancholy inventor-scientist Edison introduced at the end of the canto), it is also a discursive encounter with a new kind of surrealist text from which the familiar city landmarks have been effaced. Now Prague merges with the universal “unreal city” of modernism, indistinguishable from Eliot’s London or Biely’s Saint Petersburg: Leaning from the bridge, I saw a shadow leap, A suicidal shadow plunging to the deep. Some sadness there that every soul could rent, A gambler’s shadow and his sad lament. I asked him who he was and whence he came; He answered, just a gambler from his game. Some sadness there beyond the realm of hope, A shadow upright as a hangman’s rope, A shadow falling from the bridge; I cried: “You’re not a gambler but a suicide!”

Following the encounter, the gambler leads his double toward the city limits: Hand in hand we strolled through the night, Hand in hand, as dreaming lovers might, Beyond the town where Košíře began. From far away a bright nocturnal fan Waved to us its alcoholic dance; But on we went as in a silent trance.

Once at home, however, the double dissolves, prompting the intoxicated gambler to wonder whether he was just a figment of his imagination: I climbed the stairs and opened up the door, And showed my shade a mattress on the floor. “I trust,” I said, “we’ll both be happy there,”



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And turned to see him vanish into air. Was he a vision, trick, or simply self-deceit?

The motif of the double is brilliantly exploited in Alexander Hackenschmied’s film Bezúčelná procházka (Aimless walk, 1930). In this thirteenminute short, filmed with a handheld camera, Prague has become the “Anycity” of modernism, its familiar landmarks no longer visible as a nameless individual rides a tram and gets off at the last stop, where he takes an “aimless walk” through a derelict landscape of poor housing tenements and grimy factories. In its fast-cutting shots of a puddle on the street, crisscrossing tramlines, and high buildings seen from below the film brilliantly captures the breathless speed of modern urban life while the handheld camera reinforces the subjective nature of perception. Instead of the traditional flaneur, or walker through the city landscape, we now have a twentieth-century commuter who experiences the city as a series of visual fragments. At the end of the film the protagonist splits into two: one half remains supine while the other half gets up and walks back to the stop to take the tram back to the city. As the latter does so, he glances backward, and the camera backtracks with him to see his other half still seated on the grass. This splitting of the man into two had already been anticipated on the tram, where we saw the passenger both from an objective point of view and from his subjective perspective in the fragmented shots of the city as glimpsed from a high-speed vehicle. Of course, the theme of the “double” was hardly original, having already become part of the stock-in-trade of modernism. But the motif of doubling is important in the Czech context in representing the split within the avant-garde artist. By leaving his protagonist in the city limits, the artist reveals his newfound fascination with modern urban life, while his alter ego’s return to the city center suggests an equally strong pull toward tradition. The motif of the doppelgänger also articulates an ideological crisis in the identity of the Czech avant-garde artist, with his double allegiance to Paris and Moscow, the first the source of aesthetic inspiration, the latter the teacher of ideological conformity. The socialist realist shots of factory workers shoveling coal are not incidental to the narrative but affirm the left-wing artist’s commitment to the plight of the working class and the cause of revolution. At the same time, the well-dressed, middle-class protagonist of the film is an interloper in this proletarian landscape. The film highlights this contrast between proletarian labor and bourgeois leisure in its deliberate editing, in which the supine protagonist smokes a cigarette

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against the backdrop of a factory chimney churning out smoke. Another point of contrast is the shot of the protagonist’s polished shoes juxtaposed with the grimy boots of a factory worker. This discrepancy between political engagement and aesthetic temperament was true of most of the Czech interwar poets and artists, including Karel Teige and Jaroslav Seifert, who left the Communist Party in 1929. But it is especially true of Nezval, who failed to do so although his aesthetic sympathies lay much closer to Paris and the French surrealists than to Moscow. We glimpse something of this split identity in Nezval’s major surrealist collection, Prague with Fingers of Rain. The tension within the poet’s conflicted allegiance to Paris and Moscow is reflected in the highly differentiated treatment of the city. In some poems Prague is still recognizable as the ancient city on the Vltava; in others, it seems to merge with the universal, anonymous city of modernism. The poem “Václavské náměstí k večeru” (Saint Wenceslas Square at evening) closes with the recognition that crepuscular Prague is increasingly indistinguishable from other cities: “Prague is blending with all other cities / As you blend with all women / Each having its own subtly different illusive perfume” (Nezval, Bartušek, and Hanzlík, Three Czech Poets, 32). Prefiguring this tension between visibility and effacement, memory and forgetting, the opening poem of the collection, “Město věží” (City of spires) consists of a litany of highly subjective images in which the familiar city landmarks alternate with random associations: With the fingers of a cemetery in May . . . With the fingers of the Castle and old women with Harps With fingers of gold With fingers through which the blackbird and the storm Whistle (Three Czech Poets, 25)

In Karel Teige’s surrealist frontispiece to the collection, a familiar Prague house facade is shown with an enormous hand emerging from a window and holding a violin. This typical juxtaposition of random images—one identifying Prague, the others seemingly unrelated to it—corresponds to Nezval’s collage technique in his poems, where Prague seems to fade in and out of the picture. Also significant in the opening poem and elsewhere in the collection is the rhetorical effect of anaphora, or the repetition of certain words in the same syntactic position (“With . . .”). The effect of this technique is



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to raise the question whether it is ever possible to “write” Prague for the first time without repeating what has already been written. Thus, “City of Spires” refers to its own medium as writing as suggested by the last line of the poem: “With the fingers with which I am writing this poem” (Three Czech Poets, 27). The collection alternates between poems which reference Prague in a recognizable fashion and those from which it has been effaced to create an anonymous city in the manner of Kafka. An example of the latter is “Předměstí” (The suburb) with its graphic snapshot of working-class life on the outskirts of the city reminiscent of Aimless Walk: The suburb is a bright straw hat With an unfinished card game The suburb is a removal van Everything’s in it chairs and wickerwork The buildings are badly wrapped cheese And also a cheap cloth cap The suburb is smoking like a youth with a tatty Whodunnit (Three Czech Poets, 42)

In other poems traditional landmarks are still visible such as “Hodiny v ghetu” (the clock in the old Jewish ghetto), which contrasts the hectic linearity of modern life on main street (Na Příkopě) with the timeless monument of the clock, whose fingers move backward, on the Jewish Town Hall: While time is running away on Příkopy Street Like a racing cyclist who thinks that he can overtake death’s Machine You are like the clock in the ghetto whose hands go Backwards If death surprised me I would die a six-year-old boy (Three Czech Poets, 38)

Not only does this poem postulate two models of time—one modern and futurist in its frantic forward movement, the other premodern and backward; it also juxtaposes two distinctive visions of Prague: the anonymous, bustling modern city, increasingly favored by Czech avant-garde photographers and filmmakers, and the traditional Old Town of the ghetto with its iconic monuments and landmarks.

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In others poems Prague’s well-known landmarks are notably absent. For example, in “Tržnice” (“Covered Market”) a humdrum market is transformed into a torture chamber, where a female vendor becomes a sinister dominatrix: “Stylishly like an executioner a woman peels off her glove / Her hair-do trembles / Like some dreadful paper / A pheasant stares with desperate eyes” (Three Czech Poets, 43). Here Prague is “rewritten” as a text of the surrealist unconscious, a subjective projection of the prurient male imaginary: “I feel as if I had stepped into a spectral dance-hall / Men don’t know / What’s happening in the world when they’re locked / Away in their offices” (Three Czech Poets, 44). This reinvention of the city as a space of sexual alienation and anonymity is brilliantly evoked in “Obskurní hotely” (“Obscure Hotels”) with its suggestion of casual, sordid sex and dehumanized automata: An ageless gentleman With light luggage Steps into A cupboard In a rainy street Out of which stepped An ageless lady Without luggage Into the muddy day They’ve never met (Three Czech Poets, 48)

The split representation of the city as both familiar and strange in Prague with Fingers of Rain signaled a deep division within the identity of the Czech avant-garde as a whole. Torn between an ideological commitment to a new Communist future, which would sweep away the old world, and a nostalgic attachment to that world, Nezval’s poems at once preserve and efface the memory of Prague. This ambivalent textual treatment of the city reflected the political reality on the ground. As the prospect of revolution receded and the storm clouds of fascism were gathering over Europe, the gulf between the Czech Surrealist Group and the socialist realists within the Czechoslovak Communist Party reached critical proportions. Not only was the hoped-for political transformation of society a pipe dream of an idealistic generation created by the optimism of the Treaty of Versailles, it actually represented the opposite of what was happening: the emergence of a continent lurching toward political extremism and total war. Follow-



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ing Breton’s celebrated attack on Stalin in March 1935 and under increased pressure to conform from the socialist realist wing, Nezval disbanded the Czech Surrealist Group in 1937, ironically the same year in which he published his most surrealist collection of poetry, Absolutní hrobář (The absolute gravedigger).

Albert Camus By 1936 the avant-garde assumption that Europe could be the playground of the bohemian artist and society transformed through revolutionary art was beginning to appear somewhat naive. Hitler had come to power in 1933, and by 1929 Stalin was the undisputed leader of the Soviet Union. Camus’s autobiographical essay “La Mort dans l’âme” (“Death in the Soul”) from L’Envers et l’endroit (The wrong side and the right side, 1937), reflects this polarization and accordingly seeks to revise Prague’s hallowed reputation as its “magical capital.”13 If Prague had been the triumphant symbol of postVersailles European democracy, it was now, in the months leading up to the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland, the symptom of its crisis. Accompanied by his first wife, Simone Hié, and his friend Yves Bourgeois, Camus had come to central Europe with the intention of kayaking through the lakes of southern Bohemia. But the vacation went sour when Camus discovered that Simone had been having an affair back home in Algeria. In Salzburg the couple had a terrible row that led to the end of their marriage. In the midst of this personal crisis Camus left and spent a few lonely days in Prague. Clearly, the author’s unhappy state of mind colored his impression of the city. But “Death in the Soul” is more than a personal account of an unhappy stranger in Prague. It is also a young writer’s attempt to find his own voice by challenging the utopian assumptions about Prague (and Europe) that had hitherto characterized the avant-garde’s vision of the city. It is within Prague—both as a physical place and as a site of writing— that Camus seeks to lose and find himself. Of course, there is nothing inherently original or new about the discursive theme of lost-and-found. Goethe had experienced Venice in this way, and so had Flaubert in Cairo. What is different about Camus’s unflattering encounter with Prague is that in order to discover his identity he must not only leave the city (and travel south to Italy) but efface it from his writing altogether. In this respect his project is 13. Albert Camus, “Death in the Soul,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970), 40–51.

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more reminiscent of Kafka than Goethe or Flaubert. As we saw in the previous chapter, Kafka’s status as the writer most closely identified with Prague is based on a paradox: nowhere in his mature fiction is the city named or identified. The only way that Kafka could avoid the parochial straitjacket of the “Prague writer” was by erasing the city from his work. According to Edward Hughes, in the preface to The Wrong Side and the Right Side Camus set himself the long-term goal of creating a language and a set of myths that would enable him to rewrite his essays.14 But in order to create new myths, Camus first had to repudiate old ones. An essential ingredient of this process of revision is the literary motif of the stranger who comes to Prague and undergoes an epiphany of self-discovery. In Apollinaire’s story, the narrator encounters his alter ego through the cosmopolitan, life-affirming figure of Laquedem. But there is no magical encounter and no transformative experience in Camus’s essay. On the contrary, from its opening staccato sentences, we sense the narrator’s anguish and isolation. He arrives late in the day and is anxious to find a place to stay: “I arrived at Prague at six in the evening. Right away, I took my bags to the checkroom. I still had two hours to look for a hotel” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 40). Like Apollinaire’s narrator, Camus deposits his suitcases in the left-luggage office at the station before venturing into the city to look for a cheap hotel. In contrast to Apollinaire’s narrator, who quickly feels at home among the locals, Camus remains alone and isolated. From the moment he leaves the train station and enters Wenceslas Square, he is conscious of a people ignorant of and indifferent to his existence and with whom he cannot communicate in a meaningful way. The experience of being alone in a foreign city becomes a poignant metaphor for existence in the modern world: “Around me were a million human beings who had been alive all this time whose existence had never concerned me. They were alive. I was thousands of kilometers from home. I could not understand their language” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 40). This sense of isolation induced by travel is inseparable from writing. In the refuge of his hotel room Camus acknowledges this connection: “What other profit can one seek to draw from travel? Here I am, stripped bare, in a town where the signs are strange, unfamiliar hieroglyphics, where I have no friends to talk to, in short, without any distraction” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 44). Whereas for Apollinaire the city-book is a source of endless

14. Edward J. Hughes, “Autobiographical Soundings in L’Envers et L’Endroit,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, edited Edward J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 39–49 (44).



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pleaÂ�sure and fascination, for Camus it constitutes a set of alienating and random signs. After checking in at his hotel, Camus seeks out a cheap restaurant. Unlike Laquedem, who fits right in, Camus cannot make himself understood: “The waiter asks a question in Czech. I reply with what little German I know. He does not know German. I’m at a loss” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 42). The waiter calls over one of the prostitutes to help. Whereas Laquedem has sex with a prostitute on the street, Camus is repelled by the woman: She sits down at my table and asks questions in a German I judge as bad as my own. Everything becomes clear. The waiter was pushing the plat du jour. Game for anything, I order it. The girl talks to me but I can’t understand her anymore. Naturally, I say yes in my most sincere tone of voice. But I am not with it. Everything annoys me, I hesitate, I don’t feel hungry. I feel a twinge of pain and a tightness in my stomach. I buy the girl a glass of beer because I know my manners. The plat du jour having arrived, I start to eat: a mixture of porridge and meat, ruined by an unbelievable amount of cumin. But I think about something else, or rather of nothing at all, staring at the fat, laughing mouth of the woman in front of me. (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 42)

Camus’s description of the restaurant and its unappetizing fare provides a stark contrast to Apollinaire’s idyllic scene of Laquedem savoring the Bohemian food and drink: “These three musicians were making a noise fit for the devil himself, and provided a good accompaniment for the goulash with paprika, fried potatoes sprinkled with caraway seeds, bread with poppy seeds, and the bitter Pilsen which they served us. Laquedem ate standing up, walking around the room as he did so” (The Heresiarch, 9). Camus has come to Prague in quest of his true homeland (patrie). But instead of finding it, he is confronted with the awareness that writing cannot provide the transcendence promised by traditional travel literature: I lost myself in the sumptuous baroque churches, looking for a homeland in them, emerging emptier and more depressed after a disappointing confrontation with myself. I wandered along the Vltava and saw the water swirling and foaming at its dams. I spent endless hours in the immense, silent, and empty Hradchin district. At sunset, in the shadow of its cathedral and palaces, my lonely footsteps echoed in the streets. . . . I visited churches, palaces, and museums, tried to soften my distress in

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every work of art. A classic dodge: I wanted my rebellion to melt into melancholy. But in vain. As soon as I came out, I was a stranger again. (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 43)

On the brink of despair Camus recalls his hometown on the shores of the Mediterranean and the summer evenings he spent there in his youth, evenings full of light and beautiful girls. The reference to the lovely women of Algeria contrasts with the unattractive prostitutes encountered in Prague. In this highly symbolic repudiation of Prague as the spiritual home of the bohemian artist, Camus initiates a major departure from the avant-garde’s love affair not only with the city but with the values of Western civilization it enshrines. At the end of the story Camus leaves Prague for the light and freedom of Italy. But he is unable to escape from it as a site of writing. A lyrical essay written by Camus at this time, entitled “L’Été à Alger” (“Summer in Algiers,” 1936, published 1938), begins by setting up a contrast between “old walled towns” which are “closed in upon themselves” (Prague, Paris, Florence), and Algiers, which “opens into the sky like a mouth or a wound” (Lyrical and Critical Essays, 80). In fact, Prague was not a walled town in Camus’s time, but this is not really the point: he experiences the city as a claustrophobic space in which he feels physically and discursively immured. Camus’s demystification of Prague in “Death in the Soul” and “Summer in Algiers” paved the way for a public lecture he gave at the Algiers Cultural Center on February 8, 1937, shortly after his return from central Europe. Here he contrasts the instinctual life of Mediterranean man with the lifedenying aspect of his northern (and central) European counterpart. By this time the myth of Prague as the spiritual homeland of the bohemian artist had become so influential that Camus was obliged to dismantle it before he could proceed to construct his own utopian vision. This explains why, in the course of a lecture ostensibly concerned with the idealization of the Mediterranean, central Europe still has to be invoked: “I spent two months in central Europe, from Austria to Germany, wondering where that strange discomfort weighing me down, the muffled anxiety I felt in my bones, came from.”15 Significantly, however, Camus does not identify Prague by name, but merely records the effect of anxiety it induced in him, as if the city must be effaced before it can be “written” over by a new myth. 15. Albert Camus, “The New Mediterranean Culture,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays, 189–98 (191).



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Equally programmatic—not to say problematic—is Camus’s celebration of the tradition of Hispano-Arabic Al-Andalus as the antithesis of Italian Fascism. In presenting Mediterranean culture as an alternative to right-wing Rome and left-wing Prague, Camus is attempting nothing less than a political remapping of Europe. Just as Apollinaire and Breton had shifted the cultural and political epicenter eastward toward Prague, so Camus is now relocating it southward toward Algiers. But this was easier said than done. The utopian ideas expressed in the lecture have been described by Jean Sarocchi as “a hornets’ nest of errors and imprecision” and Camus’s exaltation of the Mediterranean—in Peter Dunwoodie’s succinct formulation—a “problematic dream marred by ethnocentricity.”16 Paradoxically, Camus is struggling to produce a coherent and viable alternative to the European crisis by using Prague as his point of departure. Camus’s demystification of Prague in favor of the Mediterranean is in some ways analogous to Kafka’s fascination with the other of colonial South America.17 Common to both writers is a denigration of the north in favor of an idealized, romantic south. But in both cases, this European other remains contingent on its landlocked central European antithesis. In spite of Kafka’s effacement of Prague from his fiction, its constricting contours remain in its contiguous internal spaces, such as office buildings and rooming houses. With its nameless landmarks, shabby interiors, and uncommunicative populace, Camus’s Prague is really Kafka’s Prague rewritten. Around the time that Camus gave his lecture at the Maison de la Culture in Algiers, he was struggling with a novel which he would never publish in his lifetime and which remained in manuscript form for many years after his death in 1960: La Mort heureuse (The happy death, 1937–39).18 The protagonist of this novel, Patrice Mersault, kills a cripple, steals his money, and flees from Algiers to Prague, where he spends several unhappy days before returning to North Africa via Genoa. As his name suggests, Mersault is a precursor of the hero of Camus’s later novel L’Etranger (The outsider, 1942), the first syllable connoting the cult of the sea so important to that novel (mer). Conversely, Meursault’s name encrypts the motif of death central to the earlier “Death in the Soul” and The Happy Death. In this sense,

16. Quoted in Peter Dunwoodie, “From Noces to L’Etranger,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 147–64 (153). 17. For Kafka’s fascination with travel writing and exotic locations, see John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 18. Albert Camus, A Happy Death, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1972).

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both novels form part of a discursive continuum in which Camus struggled to find his own voice as a writer. Emblematic of this palimpsest-like process is the typographic slippage between “Mersault” and “Meursault.” Both “Death in the Soul” and The Happy Death share the same gloomy Prague venues of the tawdry hotel and the sordid restaurant. But The Happy Death transforms the first-person autobiographical voice of “Death in the Soul” into a third-person fictional narrative. The effect is less lyrical and more realistic. When Mersault enters the restaurant, people turn around to stare. The waiter wears a red star on his lapel, indicative of the city’s Soviet sympathies. A local sucks on a matchstick, rendering the atmosphere of the restaurant all the more nauseating. Camus also includes topographical landmarks such as the Old Town Square, the Týn Church, where Mersault sits for a while in silence, the old Jewish cemetery upon which he stumbles in the darkness, the Charles Bridge, lined with baroque statues, and the paved precincts of the castle on the opposite side of the river. But the most potent impression of the city is not its sights but its smells: the pungent, nauseating odor of vinegar and gherkins for sale on the streets seems to pursue the protagonist wherever he goes. The night before he takes a train bound for Italy, Mersault witnesses a dead man on the street, a detail which recalls the dead hotel guest in “Death in the Soul.” The sight of the corpse lying on the street reawakens memories of Mersault’s murder of Zagreus back in Algeria. Mersault now undergoes a crisis of conscience. His delirious wanderings through Prague are reminiscent of Raskolnikov’s feverish experience of Saint Petersburg after his murder of the old woman moneylender. However, the weakness of The Happy Death consists in its inability to resolve the moral implications of its protagonist’s crime. Whereas Dostoevsky allows his hero to find redemption by confessing to Sonya and then surrendering himself to the authorities, Camus elides the question of moral responsibility by making his hero succumb to tuberculosis rather than the punishment of the law. In The Outsider Camus achieves a more satisfactory solution to the problem of freedom and responsibility by allowing the question of personal morality to be eclipsed by the issue of societal hypocrisy. In part 2 of The Outsider it is not Meursault’s conscience that becomes the central problem but his apparent lack of one. In this way the focus of the novel shifts from the protagonist’s personal guilt to the sanctimonious double standards of Western civilization. In The Happy Death Camus was still struggling to formulate ideas which came to successful fruition in The Outsider. Significant in this transition from an unsatisfactory to a satisfactory novel is the effacement of Prague. Prague functions as more than just a moral purgatory



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for Mersault in The Happy Death; it also represents a discursive impediment to the writing of The Outsider. Two typescript versions of The Happy Death were found among Camus’s posthumous papers, revealing the extent to which its author struggled with his unfinished novel. Only by effacing Prague from The Outsider could Camus resolve that discursive struggle. Just as Kafka’s self-realization as a writer was achieved at the expense of his native city, so Camus is finally able to “write” Algeria without “writing” Prague. David Carroll has recently argued that Meursault is found guilty in the second half of the novel because he represents the unacceptable other of French justice and civilization. In Carroll’s words, “He dies and wants to die in the place of the Other, as a stranger to the French, the negative image of what they are or imagine themselves to be. He dies and wants to die in the place of and as an Arab.”19 Carroll goes on to point out that the novel was published in Paris two years after Marshall Pétain’s decree of 1940 that rescinded the rights of Algerian Jews, in effect relegating them to the same status as the Algerian Muslims, and concludes: “In a novel published in occupied France in 1942, Meursault, as a hated indigenous Other, thus also dies as a Jew” (Albert Camus the Algerian, 32). Nor is this the first example of Camus’s identification with the other. Although Camus never mentions Kafka in “Death in the Soul,” the reference to a remote Jewish cemetery (cimetière juif) in the city suburbs, which he wishes to visit but cannot find, can be seen as an allusion to the new Jewish cemetery where the Kafka family grave is located. This pilgrimage is never realized, but the desire to do so is evidence of Camus’s affinity not only with Kafka the writer but also Kafka the Jew. We might go so far as to suggest that the ultimate aim of Camus’s trip to Prague was Kafka’s grave: the “homeland” (patrie) he is seeking is not to be found in the baroque Christian churches in the historic heart of the city but in a remote and neglected Jewish grave on its periphery. What is so striking about The Outsider is that it does not conform to the programmatic ideal of the Mediterranean formulated in Camus’s essay “Summer in Algiers” and his 1937 lecture at the Maison de la Culture. For instance, the mythic sun does not redeem Meursault but, on the contrary, is instrumental in his murder of the nameless Arab and thus of his undoing. Instead of a Mediterranean utopia, The Outsider presents us with something much closer to a Kafkian dystopia in which a trial is not a finite event but 19. David Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 37.

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an ongoing process akin to the fate of Josef K. in The Trial. During his trial it becomes clear that Meursault’s guilt was really a foregone conclusion and his fate sealed in the first scene of the novel, where he betrays apparently callous indifference to his mother’s death, just as Josef K. is arrested for no apparent reason in the very first sentence of The Trial. With its segregated ethnic enclaves of Czechs, Germans, and Jews, Kafka’s Prague is not so very different from Camus’s Algeria, with its piednoirs and indigenous population of Arabs and Berbers. Caught between the Algerian independence movement and the French colonial conservatism and sympathetic to neither, Camus was in a position that recalled Kafka’s ethnic alienation in his own city. Perhaps Camus’s experience of Prague reminded him of his situation as a French Algerian sympathetic to the plight of the native population but unwilling to commit to the principle of total independence. Kafka found himself in a similar no-man’s-land. He could not forget that his father had originally been a Czech-speaking workingclass Jew from small-town Bohemia and had only later in life moved his growing business to Prague, where he brought up his children to be Germanspeaking and middle class. This feeling of alienation from his origins— understood both in terms of the rural scene and the Czech language—never left Kafka and helped to create his own peculiar sense of feeling a stranger in his own city. Although Camus was not born into a bourgeois home but was the son of working-class pieds-noirs, he too empathized with the plight of the oppressed indigenous population of Algeria just as Kafka felt a special connection with the working-class Czechs. Both Kafka and Camus felt like strangers in a land ensnared in its own ethnic and racial polarizations. This symbolic sense of entrapment permeates much of Camus’s subsequent writing. Prague may have been effaced as a setting, but the feeling of anxious claustrophobia it induced in him remained to haunt his imagination. As in Kafka’s mature writings, memory traces of Camus’s ill-fated visit to Prague linger on in his later works of fiction. Both the North African town of Oran in La Peste (The Plague, 1947) and Amsterdam in La Chute (The Fall, 1956) share the feeling of constriction Camus had experienced in Prague, the former as a plague city under quarantine, the latter as the personal purgatory of the self-exiled Clamence. In The Fall the concentric structure of Amsterdam’s canals is consciously compared with the circles of Dante’s hell; but they also recall Camus’s vision of Prague as a walled city. But Camus’s imagination was also intuitive. In prewar Prague he seems to have imagined the ghost town of the future from which its Jewish and German populations would be removed, the former to their deaths in the



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extermination camps of the east, the latter to exile in the west. Clamence’s Amsterdam is similarly a ghost of its former self after World War II. Early in his monologue Clamence sardonically states: “I live in the Jewish quarter or what was called so until our Hitlerian brethren made room. What a cleanup! Seventy-five thousand Jews deported or assassinated: that’s real vacuum-cleaning.”20 This was almost the same number as the Czech and Slovak Jews who were murdered. Scholars have traditionally read The Plague as an allegory of French resistance to the Nazi occupation. But its generalized allegorical significance could equally allow the plague to be read as a metaphor for Soviet expansionism into central Europe after World War II. In February 1948, just a few months after the novel was published, a Communist putsch brought an end to Czechoslovak democracy and ushered in an era of Stalinist oppression and terror. If Camus had sensed the coming tragedy of the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland during his brief stay in Prague in 1936, ten years later his intuition was equally powerful in anticipating the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948. If The Plague gestures obliquely to these tragic events in central Europe, Camus’s play Le Malentendu (The misunderstanding, 1944) may be said to offer a more explicit—if still allegorical—exploration of the political fate of Czechoslovakia. The setting of the play was based on the southern Bohemian town of České Budějovice, which Camus visited in the summer of 1936. In fact, it was originally entitled “Budějovice,” an indication that Camus initially intended the play to have a much more explicit political significance.21 At first sight, the tragedy of the protagonist, a Czech exile named Jan who returns incognito to his hometown in the heart of Europe and is murdered by his mother and sister for profit, has nothing in common with “Death in the Soul.” If the former is reminiscent of the theme of doomed homecoming in Homer and Sophocles, the latter is in the tradition of exotic travel writing exemplified by Goethe and Flaubert. And yet the two texts are thematically closer than we might suspect. In both a stranger finds himself stranded in a landlocked town far from his beloved seashore. There is something distinctly Kafkian about the play’s anonymous setting and its theme of alienation from one’s hometown and one’s own family. This affinity is all the more significant considering the fact that Camus

20. Albert Camus, The Fall, translated by Justin O’Brien (New York, Vintage, 1991), 11. 21. See Herbert R. Lottmann, Albert Camus: A Biography (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1979), 122.

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was forced to cut his essay on Kafka from the first edition of Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), subject to censorship and published during the Nazi occupation. Camus clearly regretted this decision, for a short time later he joined the Resistance and published the chapter clandestinely.22 The anonymous setting of the play serves as a political metaphor for the fate of occupied France. But the premiere of The Misunderstanding in a Paris theater just weeks before the end of the occupation also coincided with the dying days of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Formerly the twin capitals of artistic bohemia, Paris and Prague have now become conjoined manifestations of a benighted Europe. Jan’s tragic status as a stranger in his own land is a reflection of Camus’s own dilemma as a French Algerian. Yet his own feeling of alienation allows him to identify with the plight of the faraway Czechs on the eve of their betrayal at Munich in 1938. If the play’s setting functions as an allegory for the death of European democracy, Jan’s murder by his own mother and sister can be read as a metaphor for the demise of that which brought it into being: the Treaty of Versailles. Moreover, the play’s overdetermined theme of misrecognition, whereby the mother and sister respectively fail to recognize their long-lost son and brother, can be explained in terms of the French (and British) failure to recognize Czechoslovak sovereignty and independence at Munich. In a lecture delivered in April 1939 Camus saw Versailles and Munich as shared symptoms of the European crisis: “I think it takes a certain courage today to say that imperialism is also a trait of the democracies. Many of us knew it. Most have forgotten it. However, the destinies of the world’s peoples are inseparable, and we can be sure that the desire for power engenders the desire for power, hatred breeds hatred, imperialism gives birth to imperialism, and that the Treaty of Versailles is, in its spirit, the ancestor of the Munich Agreements.”23 Central Europe remained in the forefront of Camus’s political consciousness well into the 1950s. His outspoken attack on the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 may help to explain this preoccupation with a region effaced from the collective memory of the West as a result of World War II and Soviet expansionism. Yet it can be readily seen that Camus’s essays on the Hungarian tragedy did not come into being overnight but were

22. See David Carroll, “Rethinking the Absurd: Le Mythe de Sisyphe,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, 53–66 (54). 23. Quoted in Emmett Parker, Albert Camus: The Artist in the Arena (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), 48.



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the result of a long process of gestation akin to “writing” Prague. If Camus eventually found his political voice in Hungary, so to speak, he struggled to formulate it in Czechoslovakia twenty years earlier. As victims of Western appeasement, both countries represented the moral failure not only of western democracy but also of its discourse. And here we have the distinct impression that Camus is castigating his former self quite as much as the fellow travelers on the French Left: “We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.”24 What was the fascination of the city of Prague for Apollinaire, Breton, and Camus? The answer, I have suggested, consists in Prague’s function—in Ripellino’s lovely formulation—as “an ancient folio of stone parchments, city-book in whose pages there is ‘still so much to be read, to dream, to understand’â•›” (Magic Prague, 6). The stranger comes to Prague not merely in search of an exotic locale but to uncover the truth of his own identity as a writer. The discovery of that self—I have argued—is contingent on the identification with the other. For Apollinaire this is the Eternal Jew—not the doomed figure of Christian legend but the cosmopolitan hedonist of the modernist writer’s own imagination; for the young Nezval, who arrived in Prague in 1920 from Moravia, it is Apollinaire; and for Camus, it is Franz Kafka, the unnamed writer whose grave he seeks but cannot visit. Perhaps Camus could already intuit in prewar Prague the unvisitable mass grave that the city would become following the deportation of its Jewish population in the years 1940–44, its German minority in 1945–46, and the Czech victims of the Stalinist purges in the early 1950s. In a curious way Camus’s quest for the remote Jewish cemetery in the outskirts of the city also anticipated his own tragic death in a car accident on January 4, 1960. Several days earlier Camus had written to a friend: “I have finally found the cemetery where I will be buried. I will be fine there.”25 However, the identification with the other is not simply a tragic acceptance of the inevitability of death. It also permits the writer the liberating transition from loneliness to community, not the narrow community of

24. Albert Camus, “Socialism of the Gallows,” in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1995), 170–71. 25. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1951–1959, translated by Ryan Bloom (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 261.

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sectarian and ethnic hatred but the universal solidarity with the living and dead whose names have been effaced from the city-book of life but whose memories can never be entirely effaced. Kafka, says Camus, forces us to read and reread. In so doing he forces us to remember. And this is precisely what explains the modernist fascination with Prague: its constant openness to being reread, rewritten, remembered.

chapter five

Sailing to Bohemia: Utopia, Memory, and the Holocaust in Postwar Austrian and German Writing

A

round Passover, on April 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan walked from his address at number 6 avenue Émile Zola to the Pont Mirabeau in Paris. Climbing over the parapet, he jumped from the bridge into the river Seine and, although a strong swimmer, drowned undetected. On May 1 a fisherman came across his body seven miles downstream. The mail had started to pile up under the door of his barely furnished apartment, and he had been missed at his place of employment, the École Normale Supérieure. The poet’s worried wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, had phoned a friend and inquired whether he had gone to Prague. Celan always wanted to visit the city on the Vltava but never did so. For him it remained a place of the imagination, closely identified with Franz Kafka, whose work he had discovered as a young man in his native Bukovina. As he walked from his apartment to the Seine, was Celan thinking of Kafka’s story “Das Urteil” (The judgment) in which Georg Bendemann escapes from his domineering father to the nearby river and jumps across the railing into the water? Or was he thinking of his mother, who had fled to Bohemia from a Russian pogrom in 1915 only to perish in the Holocaust almost thirty years later? For his entire adult life Celan kept a photograph of his mother dating from World War I. On the back of it he wrote: “Mama, during the First World War, in Bohemia” (Felstiner, Paul Celan, 4). This must have been written after the Second World War and thus after his mother’s murder by the Nazis, shot simply because she was too ill to work. Of course, we shall never know what was passing through Celan’s mind as he made that short, tragic journey to his death; but both his life and his . See John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 287.

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art appear to have been connected in some powerful way with Prague. I shall argue that Prague has occupied a privileged position within the postwar Austrian and German literary imagination as a palimpsest of personal and historical memory. For Czech writers languishing under Communism Prague tended to connote totalitarian forgetting. By contrast, in postwar Austrian and German literature Prague denotes a site of memory, a vital link to a lost tradition destroyed by war and violence. In this capacity Prague serves as an antidote to German political amnesia. Inevitably, this “memory” of Prague is not simply historical but also cultural, since the German language and literature have been deeply and intimately associated with that city for centuries. All three writers whose work I shall be discussing were displaced from or voluntarily left their homeland after World War II. Their experience of Prague is therefore nostalgic, an act of identification with a lost Heimat. This is not to say that these writers were incapable of exercising a healthy skepticism toward the notion of origins. On the contrary, in highlighting Prague’s function as a space of the imagination, they tacitly acknowledge that the city is above all else a site of writing in which the fulfillment of desire is constantly postponed and therefore a permanent source of utopian hope. In the first half of the chapter I shall focus on two writers of the postwar “first generation” from the former lands of the Habsburg monarchy. A major representative of this generation was Paul Celan, who was born in 1920 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, called the Jerusalem of the East on account of its large Jewish population. Celan, whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, worked in various labor camps until the Soviet army liberated the region in 1945. After leaving Communist Romania, Celan stayed for several months in Vienna and finally settled in Paris, where he committed suicide in 1970. Ingeborg Bachmann was born in Klagenfurt in the Austrian province of Carinthia in 1926 and went on to study in Innsbruck and Vienna. Bachmann claimed that her childhood came to an end the moment she witnessed the Nazis entering her hometown in 1938. But in fact her father had joined the Nazi Party as early as 1932, something of which Bachmann was conscious and which she had to work through in her writing. Bachmann and Celan met in Vienna in 1948, and they had a short but intense affair. Although for most of their subsequent careers they lived in separate foreign cities, they continued to write to each other, with some interruptions, into the 1960s. Like Celan, Bachmann left her native land and lived in Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, where she eventually settled. She died from burn complications after a fire broke out in her Rome apartment in 1973.



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The second half of the chapter is devoted to a major representative of the “second generation” of postwar German writers, W. G. Sebald. Like Bachmann, Sebald emigrated to a non-German-speaking land as an adult. He was born in a remote village in the Bavarian Alps in 1944 and moved to England in 1966, where he settled permanently in 1970. He was killed in a car accident on a remote English road in 2001. Although born a generation later than Bachmann and Celan, he resembles them in experiencing the alienating effect of geographic displacement from his place of origin. Hence, Sebald’s distance from the tragedy of the Holocaust is at once temporal and spatial. Like Bachmann, Sebald’s alienation from Germany was deeply connected with his knowledge of (and guilt for) the Jewish genocide. His memory of these events, however, was not direct, like Bachmann’s, but secondary, mediated through reading and looking at photographs or watching film footage. This generational distance from the historical events themselves has been termed “postmemory.” Hence, Sebald’s sense of alienation from his homeland is epistemological rather than ontological, rooted in the knowledge of events rather than the experience of place. As we shall see, this distinction is important in shaping the choice and perception of Prague as a space of reconciliation and continuity with the past. It is not simply that Prague was virtually the only major central European city to survive the destruction of World War II. It was above all its status as a site of writing that made it so alluring in counteracting the amnesia induced by postwar German guilt.

Ingeborg Bachmann Ingeborg Bachman empathized deeply with the victims of the Holocaust and regarded Austria as partly responsible for the Nazi genocide. Her own wanderings through Europe were partly the consequence of her moral misgivings about her native land and guilt at her father’s complicity with the Nazis. Bachmann felt a strong sense of alienation from Austria which endowed Prague with the utopian allure of a lost Heimat. Of course, by the time Bachmann actually visited Prague, during the cold war, the city had ceased to be a multiethnic and multicultural melting pot; in many ways her perspective was nostalgic and looked back to the way Prague had been during

. See Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. . See Dagmar Lorenz’s introduction to Last Living Words: The Ingeborg Bachmann Reader, translated by Lilian M. Friedberg (Copenhagen: Green Integer, 2005), 25.

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the Danubian monarchy. Thus, the attraction of the city for Bachmann was not so much its status as other as its similarity to her own origins. In a short autobiographical piece found among her posthumous papers, she writes: “I spent my childhood in Carinthia, in the South, on the border, in a valley that had two names—one German and the other Slovenian. And the house in which for generations my ancestors had lived—both Austrians and Wends—still bears the name that sounds foreign. Hence, near the border there is still another border: the border of speech.” Here was a Heimat that resembled Prague in predating the barbarism of the twentieth century, a home in which difference and diversity were not inseparable from the need to belong. In this valley in the south, Germans and Slavs had coexisted in relative harmony for hundreds of years, just as they had done in Prague (and in Bohemia) before the cataclysm of World War II tore apart the fabric of European civilization. Here too different languages and cultures met and intermingled before the Nazis transported the Czechoslovak Jews to the death camps in the east and the Czechs deported the German population after the war. As Hans Höller has pointed out in his careful and sensitive analysis of Bachmann’s posthumously published poems, those texts dealing with Prague envisage a utopian view of writing in which the “self is liberated from its self-destructive concentration on itself.” In postulating the possibility of a meaningful connection to other human beings, Bachmann’s Prague poems provide an antidote to the allpervading sense of death-in-life created by the war and the Holocaust: “An urban space from the destroyed world of central Europe, a Jewish cemetery, a house for the sick—peaceful places which evoke a lively exchange between human beings, where the self travels into the world as if coming home, in which the fatal dialects (Mundarten) are silenced and even the hardest anti-utopia, death, has lost its ability to inspire fear” (Höller, Ingeborg Bachmann, 38). Bachmann visited Prague twice. The first trip took place between January 15 and January 23, 1964, when she was accompanied by Adolf Opel; she returned to Prague—again with Opel—on February 27 of the same year and stayed there until March 4. These encounters with the city are given powerful poetic utterance in several poems about the city. These reflect Bachmann’s perennial and abiding concerns with lost origins and her acute . Quoted from Ingeborg Bachmann, Darkness Spoken: The Collected Poems, translated by Peter Filkins (Brookline, MA: Zephyr Press, 2006), xxi. All subsequent quotations of Bachmann’s poems are from this translation except for “Prague, January ’64,” which is my own. . Ingeborg Bachmann: Letzte, unveröffentlichte Gedichte, Entwürfe und Fassungen, edited by Hans Höller (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1998), 27.



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awareness of the tragedy of European history. In Prague these political concerns seem to cohere as if the tragedy of twentieth-century European history were an extension of her personal experience as an exile from her native land. Three of the poems—“Wenzelsplatz” (“Wenceslas Square”), “Heimkehr über Prag” (“Return Home via Prague”), and “Prag, Jänner ’64” (“Prague, January ’64”) read like entries from a personal diary. Moreover, they share the same imagery of winter, ice, and cold, reflecting Bachmann’s actual visits to the city as well as her imaginary encounter with it. “WenÂ� ceslas Square” articulates Bachmann’s utopian quest for origins and continuity with the past, an ironic aspiration in a city of endless renaming: The square on which I find my way home is still called the same, Is one and the same. I have my bit of smoke Before my mouth and turn into and enter yet alive A street that ends way back in my past In which my roots still lie. (Darkness Spoken, 583)

Here, and in “Return Home via Prague,” Prague becomes not only the stopover on the way home but the true Heimat, its river as close to the poet’s identity as her childhood river: The Moldau, it belongs To me alone, I paid for it With krone and allowed Its waters to flow again. (Darkness Spoken, 581)

“Return Home via Prague” presents the city not simply as a locus for the rediscovery of an authentic self but also as a space of linguistic renewal. Here Prague becomes a utopian textual space in which the Austrian poet can discover a purified language purged of the moral corruption of German with which to read—as well as to speak—the inscriptions on the graves of the dead. If this access to the legible city-text is a source of utopian renewal, it is also a recognition of the unending horror of the Holocaust—“the longest night” (“die längste Nacht”): On a detour I turn towards home Able to speak again Of the graveyards in winter,

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The return, the first familiar towns Under the stars, and what Is so horrible, the names that spring From the lapidary inscriptions of the old, The graves, the Moldau, The long night that does not End. (Darkness Spoken, 581)

Bachmann returns to the motif of the old Jewish cemetery in “Jüdischer Friedhof” (“Jewish Cemetery”), where the ancient burial site (fig. 6) becomes a lapidary metaphor for the history of the city and its future: Forest of stones, no fancy graves, nothing to kneel before, And nothing to hold flowers. The stones are so close, one choking Out another, each one inseparable from the others, And for the living a passage is granted no wider than a crack; Empty of sadness. Whoever reaches the exit has not death But rather life in her heart. (Darkness Spoken, 585)

The most outstanding of all Bachmann’s poems about Prague is “Prague, January ’64.” Here the city has a miraculous function in restoring to the alienated poet the power of lost speech and the ability to walk: Since that night I have been able to walk and speak again, It sounds Bohemian, As if I were at home once more, Where between the Moldau, the Danube, And my childhood river, Everything sees me whole. Walking, it’s all come back step by step; Seeing, looked at, I’ve learned anew. Still bent over, blinking, I hung from the window, Saw the shadow-years,



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Withdraw over the hill In which no star Hung in my mouth. Across the Hradčany, At six in the morning, Snow shovelers from the Tatra With their calloused paws Swept away shards of this ice-blanket. Beneath the bursting blocks Of my, my river too, The liberated waters appeared. Audible as far as the Urals.

The miraculous role played by Prague in bringing the poet back to life recalls the similar effect the city has on Apollinaire in “Zone:” “Astonished you see yourself outlined in the agates of St. Vitus / You were sad enough

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

Fig. 6. The old Jewish cemetery in Prague, with its twelve thousand tombstones, dating from the early fifteenth century to 1787. Rabbi Loew (see fig. 4) is buried here. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

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to die the day you saw yourself in them / You looked like Lazarus bewildered by the light” (Apollinaire, Selected Writings, 123). The French word used by Apollinaire to describe his artistic resurrection is affolé (literally “made mad”). Hence, Prague has an ambiguous function in the poem, at once a source of renewal and the menace of madness. Apollinaire returns to this motif in “The Stroller through Prague” where the narrator sees his own reflection in the agates of Saint Vitus and fears that he is going mad. Although the theme of madness is not made explicit in Bachmann’s poem, it is prevalent elsewhere in her oeuvre. At all events, she would have been conscious of Apollinaire’s “Zone” in her vision of Prague as a site of resurrection and personal redemption. Bachmann’s response to Prague in her poem is not merely metaphysical but has its roots in Bohemia’s deep cultural and historical links with Austria. The river Moldau (Vltava), which flows through Prague, is as familiar to the poet as the Danube and her own “childhood river.” In this way, Prague becomes part of a mythic utopian landscape linked both to the historical legacy of the Danubian monarchy and the poet’s childhood memories of Carinthia. Given the timing of Bachmann’s visit—the mid 1960s, when the repressive Communist regime in the eastern bloc was beginning to “thaw” and gave way to a more liberal cultural and political climate—the pervasive wintry imagery in the poem would appear to have a political as well as a personal significance. It is even tempting to interpret the final image of water breaking through the blocks of ice “as far as the Urals” as an expression of hope in the face of a continent divided by the cold war. But as always with Prague, politics and culture are not mutually exclusive categories but deeply intersect. If the pervasive imagery of melting blocks of ice in Bachmann’s poem serves as a metaphor for the “thaw” in the Soviet system, it also brings to mind Kafka’s unfinished story “Description of a Struggle,” with its memorable vision of Prague as a city of ice and cold. Just one year before Bachmann visited Prague, the rehabilitation of Kafka’s works in Czechoslovakia had begun to take place with the momentous conference dedicated to his work at Liblice. This event was a crucial feature of the “thaw” in the cultural and political life of Communist Czechoslovakia.

. For a contrastive reading of Apollinaire’s and Bachmann’s poetry, see Sabine I. Gölz’s essay “â•›‘Pont Mirabeau . . . Waterloo Bridge . . .’: A Contrastive Reading of Apollinaire’s ‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ and Ingeborg Bachmann’s ‘Die Brücken,’â•›” in “If We Had the Word”: Ingeborg Bachmann: Views and Reviews, edited by Gisela Brinker-Gabler and Markus Zisselsberger (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2004), 47–92.



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Another important cultural subtext to Bachmann’s response to Prague as an imagined and as a real place is Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale (1609–11). The composition of Bachmann’s poem in 1964 coincided with the four hundredth anniversary of the Bard’s birthday. Bachmann had been invited to write a poem to celebrate this auspicious event but declined to do so. However, Shakespeare was clearly on her mind at the time. Ben Jonson had disparaged Shakespeare’s alleged ignorance of geography by giving Bohemia a seacoast in The Winter’s Tale. After her return from Prague, Bachmann asserted that Jonson was wrong and Shakespeare right after all: Bohemia did have a seacoast. But apart from its famously nonexistent seacoast, Shakespeare’s play seems to have possessed a deeply personal significance for Bachmann. In The Winter’s Tale Perdita, the baby daughter of the tyrannical King Leontes, is exiled from her native Sicilia and finds refuge on the coast of Bohemia, where she is brought up by peasants. In a fit of insane jealousy Leontes had accused his wife Hermione of having an affair with his best friend, Polixenes, king of Bohemia. Tipped off about the plan to murder him, Polixenes returns home to Bohemia in secret, while Hermione is imprisoned and her son dies of grief. Thus, Perdita becomes an orphan and spends her childhood and youth in Bohemia before, sixteen years later, returning to her native land, where she is reconciled with her repentant father and reunited with her beloved mother. But there is no reconciliation with her father in Bachmann’s work, just painful memories which can only be written and rewritten, thus forming a grim contrast to the utopian refuge afforded by “Bohemia.” In Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) these memories find their darkest expression in the narrator’s memories of her sadistic father. In the second chapter of the novel (“The Third Man”) the female narrator finds herself imprisoned by her father in a dark hall with dirty walls lined with black hoses. It turns out that these are conduits for the release of lethal gas: “I’m already inhaling the gas, more and more gas. I am in the gas chamber, that’s what it is, the biggest gas chamber in the world, and in it I am alone. There’s no defense against gas. My father has disappeared, he knew where the door was and didn’t show me, and while I am dying my wish to see him once more and tell him just one thing dies as well. My father, I say to him who is no longer there, I wouldn’t have told anyone, I wouldn’t have betrayed you. Here there is no

. See Sigrid Weigel, Ingeborg Bachmann: Hinterlassenschaften unter Wahrung des Briefgeheimnisses (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1999), 356.

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defense.” As Michal Ben-Horin has pointed out, “an associative link is established between the individual biography of the narrator and the violence of the Shoah as some of the images in these narratives evoke the murderous gas chambers in the death camps.” But the passage quoted is more disturbing still in suggesting guilt by association between the daughter and her father. Even as she dies in the gas chamber, she reassures her absent father that she would not have betrayed him and would not have disclosed his terrible secret. For Bachmann, “Bohemia” serves as a utopian antidote to her political alienation as an Austrian and her personal estrangement from her Nazi father. The most moving expression of this aspiration is Bachmann’s late poem “Böhmen liegt am Meer” (Bohemia lies on the sea), which she herself considered a kind of personal gift. In this poem “Bohemia” is more than just a place; it is a utopian site of writing that transcends space and time: “If a word here borders on me, I’ll let it border. / If Bohemia still lies by the sea, I’ll believe in the sea again. / And believing in the sea, thus I can hope for land” (Darkness Spoken, 617). Later in the same poem this exiled voice finds solidarity with all those “Bohemians” who are also outcasts from their home: Come here, all you Bohemians, seafarers, dock whores and ships unanchored. Don’t you want to be Bohemians, all you Illyrians, Veronese and Venetians. Play the comedies that make us laugh Until we cry. (Darkness Spoken, 617).

This poem went through several drafts before reaching its final form. The first version (with corrections in pencil) was titled “Grüne Häuser in Prag” (Green houses in Prague). In the final version—renamed “Bohemia Lies on the Sea”—the word “Prague” has been removed, as if Bachmann needed to efface the city’s name before she could produce the poem she was seeking to write. This early, extended draft includes the following mysterious invocation in English and German:

. Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina: A Novel, translated by Philip Boehm (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), 114. . Michal Ben-Horin, “â•›‘Memory Metonymies’: Music and Photography in Ingeborg Bachmann and Monika Maron,” German Life and Letters 59, no. 2 (April 2006): 233–48 (37).



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To the only begetter des Namen sag ich nicht, doch sprech ich Böhmen aus, so wird es Böhmen geben. To the only To Dem einzigen, der mich nach Böhmen begleitet hat Und der nicht ertrank. (Höller, Ingeborg Bachmann: Letzte, unveröffentlichte Gedichte, 102–3) To the only begetter whose name I do not speak, But if I pronounce Bohemia, there will be Bohemia. To the only To The only one who accompanied me to Bohemia And didn’t drown.

Shakespeare’s famous dedicatee of his sonnets is clearly referenced in the English phrase “to the only begetter.” Moreover, the alternation between early modern English and modern German suggests the historical layering of a palimpsest in which traces of Shakespeare’s language are still legible beneath Bachmann’s own text. If Bachmann was indeed thinking of Shakespeare’s Bohemia in this poem and identifying with the fate of the exiled Perdita, who was the imagined traveling companion she addresses in these lines? Clues embedded in the poem suggest that Bachmann was in fact conflating more than one Shakespearean play. The phrase “Don’t you want to be Bohemian, all you Illyrians, Veronese and Venetians” collapses several Shakespeare tragedies and comedies, including the comedy Twelfth Night (1601–2), which is set in the imaginary realm of Illyria, just as The Winter’s Tale is partly set in Bohemia. It is likely, then, that Bachmann is identifying not just with Perdita but also with the heroine of Twelfth Night, the cross-dressing Viola, who is separated from her twin brother Sebastian after a shipwreck and whom she believes to have drowned until they are miraculously reunited at the end of the play. If Bachmann is Perdita/Viola, who is the implied twin brother Sebastian in Bachmann’s deleted dedication? Is it the muse of her poem, Shakespeare, or someone else? There is circumstantial evidence that Bachmann was addressing Celan, from whom she had been separated after the latter moved to Paris in 1948. Bachmann worried a great deal about her distant friend in his Parisian exile. In a poignant letter to him dated November 24, 1949,

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she writes: “Please believe that one day I will come and bring you back. It frightens me to see you setting forth on a vast sea, but I would like to build a ship and bring you home out of the lostness.”10 The desire to rescue Celan from the “lostness” (Verlorenheit) of the sea anticipates the imagery of “Bohemia Lies on the Sea” and identifies him with Viola’s twin brother Sebastian in Twelfth Night and perhaps also Perdita’s brother Mamillius, who dies of grief, in The Winter’s Tale. The reference to Sebastian is reinforced by the phrase “and who did not drown,” since at the beginning of Twelfth Night Viola assumes that her beloved twin brother has perished in the sea. Of course, it also provides an uncanny—and unbearably poignant—prediction of Celan’s suicide in the cold waters of the Seine in 1970. The unusual word “unlost” (unverloren) in the middle of the poem echoes Celan’s use of the same word in his famous speech of acceptance of the Bremen Prize in 1958, in which he expresses his own poetic attempt to come to terms with the Holocaust: “Only one thing remained reachable, close, and secure among all losses: language” (Erreichbar, nah und unverloren blieb inmitten der Verluste dies eine: die Sprache). In inscribing this word in the heart of her poem, Bachmann appears to be sending Celan a response to his Bremen speech, corresponding to Celan’s own famous definition of a poem as “a message in a bottle” which is washed up on the coast of the human heart. In “Bohemia”—she seems to be saying to Celan—we will no longer be lost.

Paul Celan A major postwar European poet who shared Bachmann’s concern with the moral corruption of the German language after Auschwitz and the quest for a new, purified speech was the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan. Although Celan’s poems have the reputation of almost indecipherable abstraction, several of them resemble Bachmann’s poems in mingling personal and political memory. This is particularly true in the case of those poems which touch upon the fate of the Czechs under Stalinism. As a displaced person who experienced the Nazi occupation and later the Soviet invasion of his homeland, Celan felt a deep empathy with the fate of Czech writers languishing under Communism as well as his fellow victims of the Holocaust.

10. Bertrand Badiou, ed., Herzzeit: Ingeborg Bachmann—Paul Celan: Der Briefwechsel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008), 14: “Bitte glaub daran, dass ich eines Tages komme und Dich zurückhole. Ich sehe mit viel Angst, wie Du in ein grosses Meer hinaustreibst, aber ich will mir ein Schiff bauen und Dich heimholen aus der Verlorenheit.”



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At first sight several Celan poems appear to have nothing to do with the Czech experience. For example, “In Memoriam Paul Éluard” from the collection Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From threshold to threshold, 1955) is ostensibly a straightforward elegy on the death of the surrealist French poet, who died on November 18, 1952. But as John Felstiner has pointed out, a closer scrutiny of the poem’s history reveals a hidden critique—even an indictment—of Éluard’s refusal to intercede with the Communist authorities for the life of the Czech surrealist poet Záviš Kalandra, who had been hanged two years earlier on the orders of a Stalinist tribunal. According to Felstiner, Celan penciled an earlier draft of the poem in the margins of a volume of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins; this draft included the words “gallows” and “guilt” in direct reference to Éluard’s collusion in the judicial murder of the innocent Czech poet. But consistent with his Kafkian desire to avoid specific contexts and perhaps given his delicate situation as a foreign poet living in Paris, Celan subsequently removed these incriminating words altogether (Felstiner, Paul Celan, 66–67). Thus, the poem resembles a palimpsest of effaced words in which the urge to mourn and memorialize the dead coexists with the antithetical impulse to forgive and forget. Another allusion to the fate of the Czechs under Communism occurs in the poem “Schibboleth” (“Shibboleth”) from the same collection. Here the speaker identifies with the fate of executed victims, at once a reference to the fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis and the Czechs under Stalinism: Behind the bars, They dragged me out into The middle of the market, That place Where the flag unfurls to which I swore no kind of allegiance.11

Reinforcing this identification with the fate of the persecuted Czechs is the subsequent reference to February, the month in which the Czechoslovak Communists carried out their putsch in 1948: Heart: Here too reveal what you are,

11. Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1988), 97. The translations cited in this section are by Hamburger and Ian Fairley, except “In Prague” and “To the one who stood before the door,” which are my own.

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Here, in the middle of the market. Call the shibboleth, call it out Into your alien homeland: February. No pasarán.

No pasarán (“they shall not pass”) was the defiant slogan of the Spanish Republicans. But it could equally constitute the universal rallying cry of all oppressed peoples, including the Czechs under Stalinism. The two poems from From Threshold to Threshold just discussed were written in the early 1950s at the height of the Stalinist terror in Czechoslovakia: in 1952, one year before the infamous “doctors’ plot” in the Soviet Union, Rudolf Slánský and ten other Jewish leaders of the Communist Party were executed as traitors. Coming just a few years after the Holocaust, these cold war political events must have reminded Celan of the continuing scourge of anti-Semitism in Europe, both east and west. The association of “Bohemia” with the poet’s “alien homeland” recurs in the poem “Hüttenfenster” (“Tabernacle Window”) from the collection Niemandsrose (Nobody’s rose, 1963). Here, as in Bachmann’s poem “Bohemia Lies on the Sea,” a powerful intertext is provided by The Winter’s Tale. Whereas Bachmann’s Bohemia affords an imaginary flight from the tyrannical father (Leontes/Austria), Celan’s Bohemia is more ambivalent in its connection with the fate of his beloved mother, who had escaped to Bohemia from a Russian pogrom in 1915: What is it called, your country Behind the mountain, behind the year? I know what it’s called. Like the winter’s tale, it is called, It’s called like the summer’s tale Your mother’s threeyearland, that’s what it was, What it is . . . (Poems of Paul Celan, 219)

This nameless homeland is linked not only with the poet’s mother but also with the elusive nature of language itself: It wanders off everywhere, like language, Throw it away, throw it away, Then you’ll have it again, like that other thing, The pebble from



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The Moravian hollow Which your thought carried to Prague, On to the grave, to the graves, into life, Long Now it has been gone, like the letters, like all The lamps, once again You must look for it, there it is, A little thing, white, Round the corner, that’s where it lies, Near Normandy-Niemen—in Bohemia, There, there, there . . . (Poems of Paul Celan, 219)

Important here is the urge to memorialize the dead in the Jewish tradition by placing stones pebbles on their graves. In invoking Prague Celan was probably thinking of Rabbi Loew’s grave in the famous old cemetery, a site of Jewish veneration for generations and a repository of little stones. Thus, for Celan, Prague is synonymous with the personal memory of his mother and the collective memory of the Jewish people. But given the fact that the poet’s dead mother has no grave, it follows that Prague cannot be visited, but only imagined. The longed-for site of the mother’s grave must be perpetually deferred (“there, there, there . . .”), synonymous with the elusive nature of language itself. Celan’s posthumously published collection Schneepart (Snow Part), written between 1968 and 1969, reveals his ongoing concern for the fate of the Czech nation, especially during and after the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968.12 One of these poems, “Kalk Krokus” (“Chalk Crocus”), was sent to the poet’s friend Franz Wurm, then living in Prague, with the instruction to show it to the city “when evening comes,” a quotation from the end of Kafka’s short story “Eine kaiserliche Botschaft” (“An Imperial Message”): “No one can force a way through that, least of all with a message from a dead man.—But you sit by your window when evening comes and dream it to yourself” (Kafka, Collected Stories, 183). Another poem from the same collection, which has Prague as its hidden subtext, is “Ein Leseast” (“A Reading Branch”). Composed in late August 1968, this poem combines painful references to Celan’s attempted suicide

12. Paul Celan, Schneepart (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971). Translated by Ian Fairley as Snow Part/Schneepart (Riverdale-on-Hudon, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2007).

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on January 30 of that year and the recent Soviet invasion of Prague on August 21: A flapping lobe Of brain, a Strip of sea, Hoists, where you live, Its capital, not to Be seized. (Snow Part/Schneepart, 133)

Important here is the fusion of the personal and the political, the visceral and the geographic: the piece of brain tissue is likened to a strip of sea (Meerstück), which in turn recalls Shakespeare’s (and Bachmann’s) littoral Bohemia. The poet’s personal defiance of his alleged psychological assailants (he was hospitalized later the same year for severe paranoia) becomes inseparable from the Czech opposition to the Soviet occupation. Celan the Holocaust survivor identifies with the Czechs as the victims of Soviet tyranny. Crucial here is the German word Besetzung, which means both “occupation” in the military sense and “cathexis” in the Freudian sense. More than anyone else—apart from his mother—Celan associated Prague with Franz Kafka, whose works he had discovered in his native CzerÂ� nowitz. When the Communist magazine Action published an article provocatively entitled “Faut-il brûler Kafka?” (Is it necessary to burn Kafka?), Celan reacted by translating four of Kafka’s parables into Romanian, including “Vor dem Gesetz” (Before the law) (Felstiner, Paul Celan, 46). Celan’s instinct was to reject the forces of political extremism which had destroyed his own family and preserve Kafka’s memory for posterity by translating his work into another language. A textual trace of Kafka’s famous parable can be glimpsed in another poem on a Prague theme: “Einem, der vor der Tür stand, eines Abendes” (To one who stood before the door, one evening).13 Not only does the title of this poem echo “Before the Law,” with its doomed protagonist waiting unsuccessfully for admittance to the law; it is addressed to Rabbi Loew, the famed inventor of the golem: To one who stood before the door, one Evening: 13. Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1983), 1:242–43.



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To him I opened my word—: toward the Clod I saw him trot, toward The half-baked Brother born in a Foot-soldier’s dung-caked boot, Him with his godLike loins all Bloody, the Chattering manikin. Rabbi, I gnashed, Rabbi Loew: From this one— Circumcise his word, For this one Write the living Nothing onto his soul For this one Spread your two Crippled fingers in the wholeMaking prayer. For this one ....... Slam the evening door shut, Rabbi. Rip the morning door open, Ra—

Striking about this poem is how the theme of writing or inscription, with its allusion to the shem inserted into the golem’s clay body to bring it to life (“write the living nothing onto his soul”), complements its formal status as a poem: its strange ellipses and the way it suddenly breaks off at the end (“Ra—”) recall a palimpsest or ancient manuscript in which key words are effaced and others remain only partially legible. If Rabbi Loew is identified with the doorkeeper in Kafka’s parable, the speaker in the poem is akin both to the golem in the Prague legend and the supplicant in the story. Both are figures of exclusion and exile, existing in a twilight state between life and death. A more direct reference to Prague is provided by the poem “In Prag” (In Prague). Here the city is a repository of personal and cultural memory as well as a love poem addressed to the “other”:

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That half-death, Suckled big with our life, Lay around us, true as an ashen image— We too Still drank, soul-crossed, two daggers, Sewn on to stones of the sky, born of word blood In the night bed, Bigger and bigger We grew interlaced, there was No longer a name for That which drove us (one of the how many And thirty Was my live shadow That climbed the insane steps towards you?), A tower The half one built for himself into whither? A Hradčany Made of pure gold makers’ No, Bone-Hebrew Ground into sperm Ran through the hourglass Through which we swam, two dreams now, chiming, Against time, in the squares.

Celan’s imagined Prague—the city he never visited—is at once highly personal and remotely historical. On the personal level, as we have seen, it is synonymous with the memory of his dead mother. His nostalgia for the city is inseparable from his desire for the womb life which defies human time and sets it in mystical reverse, like the Jewish clock famously referenced in Apollinaire’s “Zone.” But this is only one of the elements of literary allusion in a poem which, like its subject, is thickly layered with cultural memories. Inevitably, the conceit of Prague as mother recalls Kafka’s famous reference to the city of his birth as a “little mother” (Mütterchen) who will not let go of her victims. In the poem Prague is also closely identified with the memory of Rudolf II, the eccentric Habsburg ruler who made the city his imperial capital and a great center of learning, art and alchemy. As we saw in chapter 2, Rudolf’s



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reign was also the golden age of Prague Jewish culture. Just as Bachmann looks back with nostalgia to Shakespeare’s Bohemia as a source of utopian hope and renewal, so Celan invokes Rudolfine Prague as a city of alchemical transformation. But the difference between Bachmann and Celan is that for the latter Prague cannot fully efface the memory of the Holocaust. Whereas Bachmann’s Bohemia represents a utopian space of redemption and transcendence, Celan’s Prague evokes both the magical associations of Rudolf’s reign and the Jewish extermination of World War II. The idealistic seventeenth-century alchemists who labored to turn base metal into gold in the Golden Lane near the castle are conflated with the Nazi fanatics who extracted the gold fillings from the mouths of their Jewish victims (“A Hradčany made of pure gold makers’ No”). The phrase “bone-Hebrew” reinforces this association but also, perhaps, evokes the ancient Jewish cemetery, with its twelve thousand graves. The “insane steps” (Wahnstiege) suggests the castle steps leading to Hradčany, the residence where the demented Rudolf lived in self-imposed isolation after his abdication in 1608, while “how many and thirty” invokes the Thirty-Two Hidden Paths of Wisdom paced by Rabbi Loew in Perutz’s novel By Night under the Stone Bridge. Celan’s Prague is a deeply layered palimpsest of cultural and historical€memoÂ� ries, each trace pointing to another in an endless process of regression.

W. G. Sebald A writer of the next generation, W. G. Sebald emigrated to England from his native Germany in 1966, where he was born in the alpine Allgäu region in 1944. At the age of twenty-six he was appointed to a lectureship (assistant professorship) at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970, becoming professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia in 1987 and the first director of the British Center for Literary Translation in 1989. Sebald never relinquished his German passport, even though he was eligible for British citizenship, and firmly believed that one cannot escape one’s cultural context. In his case this meant confronting the difficult legacy of twentieth-century German history. Shortly after establishing his reputation as one of the most important and original postwar German writers, he was killed in a car accident in 2001. The fascination of Prague for Sebald in his last novel Austerlitz (2001) is less its function as a Heimat as the way it reflects the postwar German writer’s displacement—temporal as well as spatial—from his origins. In this sense the nostalgia for Prague experienced by the protagonist of the novel serves as a poignant metaphor for the German yearning for a pristine place

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unburdened by guilt and memories of the ruinous World War II. However, I shall be arguing that the novel at once perpetuates and critiques this position by questioning Austerlitz’s conviction, based on a radio broadcast, that he is a Czech Jew, and exposing the arbitrary fault line between memoir and fiction, narrator and protagonist. Most critical studies of the novel seem to take the protagonist’s past at face value, failing to understand how the novel exposes the secondary, citational function of these memories. One way Sebald achieves this epistemological uncertainty is by deliberately refusing to identify his textual sources, so that it becomes difficult—even impossible—to disentangle life from literature. It is this model of the city as text which makes Prague such a precarious setting for the protagonist’s attempt to recover his lost past. In this respect Prague also serves as an appropriate backdrop to the larger collective enterprise of trying to memorialize the Holocaust more than sixty years after the event. Typically, Prague as Austerlitz first encounters it is not presented as a real place but as a copy or simulacrum of a place. As he looks down at it from the elevated perspective of Petřín Hill/Laurenziberg—the setting of Kafka’s story “Description of a Struggle”—he compares it with a painting: “Then I sat on a bench in the sun until nearly midday, looking out over the buildings of the Lesser Quarter and the river Vltava at the panorama of the city, which seemed to be veined with the curving cracks and rifts of past time, like the varnish on a painting.”14 This spatial mediation is paralleled by Austerlitz’s temporal experience of the city. The first time that Prague is mentioned in the novel is not in connection with Austerlitz’s own memories of his childhood but in terms of somebody else’s recollection of it. An orphan brought up by strict Welsh Methodists, Austerlitz is browsing in a London bookstore when he hears a radio broadcast which relates the story of two Jewish children who had come to England from Prague on the Kindertransport in 1939. Significantly, the first time Austerlitz hears the word “Prague” is not in the context of the city as a place but as the name of a ferry which conveyed the children across the English Channel from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. In the original German text the ferry’s name is given in uppercase English (“PRAGUE”) rather than German or Czech. Obscured in English translation—where the word “Prague” is used throughout—this detail renders problematic Austerlitz’s immediate connection to the putative city of his birth. If the word PRAGUE brings back Austerlitz’s memories of his 14. W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, translated by Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 162. The original German version was published by Carl Hanser Verlag (Munich, 2001).



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own experience as one of the Jewish emigrants from Prague, it is not clear how such primal memories could have been triggered by a foreign (i.e., EnÂ� glish) word, which he would not have known as a Czech baby. A similar problem of naming and its relation to memory is provided by the exclusive use of Czech place and personal names in the German text. Throughout the novel Sebald uses the Czech forms rather than their German equivalents, which marks a major departure from established usage in German literature. On one level, this innovation can be seen as an acceptance of the fact that Prague is no longer a German city. But in terms of Austerlitz’s nostalgia for his pristine “Czech” origins, the exclusive use of Czech names also serves to efface the associations of German guilt. Given the problematic nature of naming and memory in the novel, Sebald seems to be suggesting that Austerlitz imagines rather than remembers Prague as the city of his birth. This supposition is supported by his sudden appearance in the city on the Vltava, as if he were transported there by magic rather than reality. Following his epiphany in the London bookstore, the next thing we learn is that Austerlitz has mysteriously surfaced in Prague and is conducting research in the city archives, where he miraculously discovers crucial facts about his dead mother’s fame as an opera singer. Austerlitz seems to go about this research with the methodical rigor of a scholar, thus providing an intriguing parallel with the German narrator’s own antiquarian disposition. However, less important than what Austerlitz discovers about his operatic mother—let alone its fantastical quality—is the process by which he arrives at the information. In the apt formulation of Amir Eshel: “Austerlitz’s search is not the means, but rather the end itself.”15 Once in Prague, Austerlitz is able to confirm what he seemed to know all along: that he is an orphaned child of Czech Jews who perished in the Holocaust. In fact, it is never made clear whether Austerlitz is really a Czech Jew at all, and the fascination of the novel consists in the way the protagonist embodies the novel’s fusion of fact and fiction, memory and invention. From the outset Austerlitz is larger than life, more akin to a character in a film or a novel than a real person. When the narrator first encounters him, he is taking notes and sketching in the Centraal Station in Antwerp: “One of the people waiting in the Salle des pas perdus was Austerlitz, a man who then, in 1967, appeared almost youthful, with fair, curiously wavy hair of a kind I had seen elsewhere only on the German hero Siegfried in Fritz 15. Amir Eshel, “Against the Power of Time: The Poetics of Suspension in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” New German Critique 88 (Winter 2003): 71–96 (79).

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Lang’s Nibelungen film” (Austerlitz, 7). At their second meeting, on the promenade beside the Schelde River, Austerlitz recalls a sixteenth-century Flemish painting of the river during the Little Ice Age, when the people of Antwerp were able to amuse themselves on the ice. Austerlitz’s description of the painting is so minutely realistic that it begins to blur the distinction between memory and invention. Austerlitz is an interstitial figure whose pedigree is more fictional and literary than real. His name recalls the famous train station in Paris—the Gare d’Austerlitz—itself named for the battle fought in Moravia (the eastern half of the present-day Czech Republic) during the Napoleonic era. In the course of the novel Austerlitz moves between the Czech Republic and France, in the first place looking for his lost mother, in the second for his lost father. If he belongs anywhere, it is between these places rather than in either or both of them. His initial impulse to go back to Prague is motivated less by the desire to revisit his putative childhood home than to reenact the journey he took as a four-year-old on the Kindertransport from there to the Hook of Holland. As he wanders through Prague in search of his lost past, Austerlitz’s quest self-consciously recalls a whole host of literary wanderers from the Eternal Jew, Laquedem, in Apollinaire’s “The Stroller through Prague” to the newcomer to the city in Nezval’s “The Prague Walker.” To be sure, the melancholy Austerlitz does not share Laquedem’s life-affirming disposition or Nezval’s sexual fantasies, but his quest makes him the most recent incarnation of a stranger who treats Prague as a city-book with which to unlock the secrets of his identity. The self-conscious, literary nature of Austerlitz’s character is not limited to himself but also extends to his Czech relatives. His mother’s profession as a famous opera singer brings to mind Emilia Marty, the larger-than-life heroine of Čapek’s play The Makropulos Case, discussed in chapter 2. And his aunt’s name (Otýlie) is the Czech form of the name of Kafka‘s favorite sister, Ottla. Even her glove shop recalls the haberdashery business owned by the Kafka family. The self-conscious status of Prague as a constantly rewritten text raises the question whether it is ever possible to access the past without endless reference, in Andreas Huyssen’s formulation, “to repetitions, reinscriptions, and rewritings that make any account of postwar literary developments as a stable progression through the decades inherently problematic.”16 Prague’s metatextual status as a city of endless rewriting and repetition can be seen 16. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 156.



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to mirror the predicament of all German writers born during or shortly after the war. As a member of this second generation, Sebald was familiar with the war only through literature, films, photographs and eyewitness accounts. He first came across the raw material for his novel Austerlitz in a Channel 4 television documentary which related the experience of two orphaned Czech Jews who came to England on the Kindertransport and were brought up by Welsh Calvinists. The notion of Prague as a site of secondary memory is reinforced in Austerlitz’s conversations about his past with his long-lost nanny Věra. Highly revealing about these passages is the way Věra’s voice weaves in and out of Austerlitz’s own narrative, creating the impression of endless displacement from a unified voice of authentic memory: “When the weather was bad, said Vera, we often visited my aunt Otýlie in the glove shop on the Šeríková, which she had been running since before the Great War and in which, as in some consecrated shrine or temple, a muted atmosphere banishing all profane ideas reigned” (Austerlitz, 159). Who is remembering/speaking here—Věra or Austerlitz? The parenthetic “said Vera” presupposes that Austerlitz’s former nanny is the speaker; but this is complicated by the subsequent reference to “my aunt,” which suggests that Austerlitz is speaking. The problem of narrative perspective raised by Sebald’s novel had already been addressed in Kafka’s famous use of the “narrated monologue” in The Trial, with its tension between an omniscient narrator and an implied first-person speaker. Sebald takes this narrative uncertainty one stage further by interweaving three different perspectives—the German narrator, Austerlitz, and Věra. The sense of ontological instability which results from this lack of an authentic, unified voice is important in terms of Prague’s function as a multilayered palimpsest in which only traces of the past—and of the self—can be recovered. As a consequence of the unusual mode of narration in Austerlitz no clear distinction becomes possible between Prague as a textual phenomenon and as a topographical space. Just as Austerlitz’s account of prewar Prague is mediated through others’ voices, so the city is experienced through a complex layering of literary and extraliterary citations. Kafka’s life and work are the most obvious example of this intertextuality. As already mentioned, the name of Austerlitz’s aunt Otýlie was also the name of Kafka’s youngest sister, who was murdered in Auschwitz along with her two older sisters. When Austerlitz enters the archive building in search of his parents’ identity, the archivist Mrs. Ambrosová materializes next to him rather as the two functionaries appear next to K. in The Castle, and her office, stacked high with bundles of old paper, recalls the lawyer’s office in The Trial. The account of

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the two men who come to arrest Austerlitz’s mother Agáta is taken virtually verbatim from the description of the stranger who comes to arrest Josef K. at the beginning of The Trial: He was slender yet solidly built, and was wearing a fitted black jacket, which, like a traveler’s outfit, was provided with a variety of pleats, pockets, buckles, buttons and a belt, and thus appeared eminently practical, although its purpose remained obscure. (Kafka, The Trial, 3–4) These messengers, as Vera described them to me, said Austerlitz, who were strikingly alike and had faces that seemed somehow indistinct, with flickering outlines, wore jackets furnished with assorted pleats, pockets, button facings, and a belt, garments which looked especially versatile although it was not clear what purpose they served. (Sebald, Austerlitz, 177)

Even Austerlitz’s nostalgia for Czech derives from Kafka’s biography. Kafka considered Czech to be more affective than the sterile Prague German he spoke at home and in the office. Similarly, Austerlitz feels closer to Czech than he does to German or English, although he barely remembers it. Consider the passage where Věra repeats the basic numerals in a poignant reenactment of his aunt’s efforts to teach him to count in Czech: “And I remember, Vera told me, said Austerlitz, that it was Aunt Otýlie who taught you to count at the age of three and a half, using a row of small black malachite buttons sewn to an elbow-length velvet glove which you particularly liked—jeden, dvě, tři, counted Vera, and I, said Austerlitz, went on counting—čtyři, pět, šest, sedm—feeling like someone taking uncertain steps out on the ice” (Austerlitz, 159–60). Austerlitz’s favorite Czech word as a child was veverka (“squirrel”), which he remembers when he sees an actual stuffed squirrel in the shopwindow during his visit to the concentration camp at Terezín. The fact that his memory of this childhood word is triggered in a town where thousands of Czech Jews were transported en route to their deaths at Auschwitz and elsewhere is more than incidental, denoting both the character’s nostalgia for his lost childhood innocence and the novel’s nostalgia for a language of innocence untainted by Nazism. Here too Sebald may have been thinking of Kafka’s affection for the Czech language, which he associated with his Czech nanny. It is significant that Věra, who spoke to Austerlitz in Czech when he was a baby, turns out to be his long-lost nursery maid. As an adult Kafka requested his mistress Milena Jesenská to write to him in Czech,



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since he felt a stronger emotional bond to that language than he did to the German. If German is associated with his strict father, Czech is identified with the loving women in Kafka’s life. Similarly, for Austerlitz, Czech is conceived as a maternal-connoted€lanÂ� guage which restores unmediated memory and authentic being to the alienated modern subject: “In the middle of her account Vera herself, quite involuntarily, had changed from one language to the other, and I, who had not for a moment thought that Czech could mean anything to me, not at the airport or in the state archives, or even while learning by heart the question which would have been scant use to me addressed to the wrong quarters, now understood almost everything Vera said, like a deaf man whose hearing has been miraculously restored, so that all I wanted to do was close my eyes and listen forever to her polysyllabic flood of words” (Austerlitz, 155). The enchantment of Czech speech—or rather Czech song—had provided Apollinaire with a temporary respite from the burden of writing in “Zone.” The notion of Czech speech as a miraculous medium which restores hearing to the deaf also recalls Bachmann’s poem “Prague, January ’64,” with its vision of Prague as a mystical “night of the soul” in which the fragmented self experiences the wondrous restoration of authentic being and speech: “Since that night / I have been able to walk and speak again, / It sounds Bohemian, / As if I were at home once more.” In both cases the immediacy and plenitude of Czech / Bohemian speech serves as a redemptive alternative to the inadequacy of German writing after Auschwitz. The most recent demonstration of this ongoing obsession among German writers with their language as morally handicapped is Bernhard Schlink’s Der Vorleser (The Reader, 1995), in which the central protagonist, a woman named Hanna who served as a concentration camp guard, turns out to be an illiterate whose victims—understood both as camp inmates during the war and her young German lover after it has ended—are forced to read aloud to her from the treasure-house of world literature. In order to find expiation for her crimes, Hanna must not only serve many years in prison but also learn to read and write from scratch. Far from being a motif of moral exculpation—as it has sometimes been interpreted by critics—Hanna’s need to learn to write again, like a child, can be understood as a metaphor for the ongoing experience of guilt felt by postwar German authors of Schlink’s and Sebald’s generation. Seen in this light, Hanna is not only the narrator’s lover but also his “mother”—the German language, the Muttersprache, he can neither cease to love nor fully repudiate. Prague’s function as a purely metatextual space correlates with what Martin Swales has termed the novel’s “metasubjective” status as a multiplicity of narrative voices. He explains the lack of “authentic voice” in

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terms of psychic repression. According to Swales, the novel represses memories of unspeakable horror by withholding an authentic voice which could give utterance to such recollections: “And it is so because the authentic voice of that anguish, were it to be uttered, would be the long-drawn-out scream of the tortured Novelli in Austerlitz—the dreadful sequence of capital A’s filling three lines of text.”17 But this lack of authentic voice can also be explained in terms of Prague as palimpsest. What the city-text ultimately reveals is not so much a repressed set of authentic memories waiting to be uncovered as a curious absence of authentic memory. There is a powerful example of this baffling emptiness when Austerlitz visits the concentration camp at Terezín. The Nazis made an infamous film of the town to mislead the Swiss Red Cross into believing it was a humane resettlement for European Jews rather than a transit camp to the death camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere. Austerlitz’s visit to the camp is intended to negate these distortions of history by recovering what happened to his mother, who was incarcerated there before being transported to the east. But the description of Terezín singularly fails to do that. Instead of a real place Austerlitz witnesses a ghost town full of closed doors and inscrutable exteriors akin to a Potemkin village. One of the most poignant sections of the novel is when Austerlitz—now back in England—is watching the Nazi film made about Terezín, known as The Führer Presents a City to the Jews. Scrutinizing this old footage frame by frame, he is looking for a lost image of his mother and thinks he remembers her from one blurred shot. In Prague he had spent several days looking through the theatrical archives on Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse, where Kafka lived), where he came across the photograph of an anonymous actress “who seemed to resemble my dim memory of my mother” (Austerlitz, 253). The accompanying photograph of a beautiful, dark-haired woman would seem to bear out this important discovery. But is this photograph really of his mother or just a visual prop intended to convince Austerlitz that he has successfully recovered his past? Before the visit to the theatrical archives Austerlitz and Věra look down at the city from the observation tower on Petřín Hill scrutinizing the cars and trains crawling along the banks of the river and crossing the bridge. This is not the first time we have seen Austerlitz looking down at Prague from the hillside. Now he is examining the city through a telescope, just as he subse-

17. Martin Swales, “Intertextuality, Authenticity, Metonymy? On Reading W. G. Sebald,” in The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of W. G. Sebald, edited by Rüdiger Görner (Munich: Iudicium, 2003), 81–87 (86).



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quently scrutinizes the documents in the theatrical archives in search of his mother. Thus, the quest for the absent mother correlates with the distant city of Prague, an inversion of Kafka’s personification of the city as a “little mother” who will never let go with her claws. If maternal Prague won’t let you go, neither, it seems will she let you in. However much Austerlitz looks and searches, the mother-city remains elusive. After his trip to Prague, Austerlitz suddenly shows up in Paris to look for his father. When the narrator visits him there, Austerlitz continues his story “without any preamble”: “When I was first in Paris at the end of the 1950s, he said, turning to me, I had a room in the apartment of an elderly lady of almost transparent appearance called Amélie Cerf, who lived at number 6, rue Émile Zola, not far from the font Mirabeau, a shapeless concrete block which I still sometimes see in my nightmares today” (Austerlitz, 255). As we have seen, the avenue Émile Zola was Celan’s Paris address and the Pont Mirabeau the site of his suicide in 1970. Here too Austerlitz’s autobiography emerges as inauthentic and his memories of Paris based on Celan’s tragic fate rather than his own. Moreover, both Celan and Sebald must have known Apollinaire’s poem about the Pont Mirabeau, another example of the novel’s extraordinarily layered intertextuality. The following pages of the novel are replete with references to the suicide of French Jews as they desperately tried to avoid transportation in 1941. Austerlitz’s father was last heard of in a camp in the Pyrenees in 1942, after which he disappeared from the records. While changing trains at the Gare d’Austerlitz, Austerlitz feels that he is getting closer to his father, who must have left from this station. After giving the narrator the keys to his flat on Alderney Street in London, Austerlitz also mysteriously disappears. Does he take a train from the Gare d’Austerlitz in the search for his father? Or does he commit suicide like Celan? It is intriguing in this context to raise the question of Sebald’s own death in a car accident in 2001, which in a curious way replicates Albert Camus’s tragic end on a road south of Paris in January 1960. I suggested earlier that Celan’s death by drowning also replicates Georg Bendemann’s fate in Kafka’s story “The Judgment.” And his father’s death in a camp in the Pyrenees makes us think of Walter Benjamin’s suicide there as he tried unsuccessfully to avoid arrest and escape across the French border to Spain. How do we make sense of these replications and reenactments? We might say that Austerlitz’s memories constitute a series of unconscious fantasies based on what he has heard and read, just as the fictional narrative of his life is derived from secondhand episodes in other people’s lives. Freud claims that memories are “manufactured by things that are heard, and utilized subsequently, and thus combine things experienced

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and heard.”18 The primacy which Freud gives to hearing in the creation of unconscious fantasy corresponds to Austerlitz’s dependence on what he hears rather than sees, the first example being the radio broadcast about the Kindertransport in the London bookstore.19 Freud suggests that our fantasies come to us from outside, and that through them we psychically reenact what our parents psychically enacted before us, their parents before them, and so on. Building on Freud’s insights, Jean Laplanche suggests that our memories are in effect implanted, and that the process of implantation begins with the maternal care of the infant’s body.20 Prague’s metatextual function as a city of citation here meshes with its phantasmatic function as the mother. Austerlitz’s memories of Prague as his home of origin are implanted, based on what he has heard and read about the city rather than his direct experience: his descriptions of Prague are not based on his unmediated experience but are secondhand borrowings, in particular, from Kafka’s life and fiction. This process of endless revision is also evident in Freud’s essays The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, from which his essay on “screen memories” is derived: “The rehearsal of everyday life in these pages is piled high with small . . . specimens. What results is a collage or palimpsest, extrapolated through recension after recension, over two decades—from its first periodical publication in 1901, and book appearance in 1904, to progressively enlarged editions in 1907, 1910, 1912, 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1924. It is Freud’s Thousand and One Days, as if to finish would be to fail to have convinced the reader.”21 Freud’s and Laplanches’s insights into memories as implants are of great relevance to our understanding of the function of the photographs in Sebald’s text. The first thing to observe about these inserted or implanted images is how they differ from more conventional book illustrations. For example, the photograph of Celan’s mother in John Felstiner’s biography of the poet is an example of this more conventional kind of illustration (Felstiner, Paul 18. Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 239. 19. For Brad Prager the “blind spot” in Sebald’s The Emigrants and Austerlitz is visual rather than acoustic: “The unspeakable point of origin for such testimony takes the form of a visual problem—a blind spot, or a horror that cannot be visualized lying beneath the narrative’s tragic surface.” See Prager, “The Good German as Narrator: On W. G. Sebald and the Risks of Holocaust Writing,” New German Critique 96 (2005): 75–102 (94). 20. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 24. 21. Quoted from Paul Keegan’s introduction to Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, translated by Anthea Bell (London: Penguin Books, 2003), x.



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Celan, 5). With its identifying caption it is intended to support or illustrate the argument advanced in the text and is thus in some way subordinated to it. By contrast, the image of the mysterious woman in Austerlitz is typical of Sebald’s idiosyncratic use of photographic material. Lacking a caption, the picture forms a seamless continuity with the text, corresponding to the way figurative and textual material is often conflated in the dream-work. Ostensibly, this kind of photograph provides an objective, highly specific visual record of Austerlitz’s visit to Prague. Yet the photographs also serve to underline the secondary or borrowed status of the experience they illustrate and thus destabilize the epistemological basis of the entire narrative. In other words, Austerlitz’s memories of Prague may be based on his observation of the photographs rather than the other way round. Significantly, none of the photographs in the text are identifiable as real Prague landmarks but, as in Kafka’s novels, represent anonymous urban spaces. In this respect the novel addresses the kind of questions posed by recent forged Holocaust memoirs. As Susan Suleiman has stated in an essay on the problems of memory in the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, a Swiss national who claimed to be a Polish Holocaust survivor, the blurred border between recollection and invention, autobiographical memoir and novel, is typical of Sebald’s previous novel, Die Ausgewanderten (The emigrants).22 As I have argued, the slippage between the third-person novelistic narration and the first-person autobiography is especially true of Austerlitz. In presenting Prague as the city of secondary memory, Sebald is not denying that the Holocaust actually took place, just as surely as he is not denying the existence of the city. He is not concerned with the ontological basis of the Holocaust—that it happened—but with its epistemological uncertainties—how we come to imagine the unimaginable so long after the events occurred and how prone we are to efface those events from our collective memory. Just as our attempt to memorialize the Holocaust is constructed from a collage of photographs, writings, letters, and films, so Austerlitz’s Prague consists of an assemblage of fragmentary texts and images. Suleiman detects the same mixture of memory and fabrication in the genre of the autobiographical Holocaust memoir. The difference between history and fiction, memory and invention, becomes hopelessly blurred in Sebald’s novel. So too does the distinction between the novel and the genre of the memoir. As I have indicated, the novel does not clarify whether Austerlitz is

22. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Facts, Writing, and Problems of Memory: The Wilkomirski Case,” in Cultures of Forgery: Making Nations, Making Selves, edited by Judith Ryan and Alfred Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2003), 187–98 (188).

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really a Czech Jew or not. Like the Swiss Wilkomirski who wanted to be a Polish Jew, Austerlitz both as a character and as a novel can be read as a biographical extension of the German narrator’s profound identification with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Important here is the proximity of the unnamed narrator to the protagonist. As Brad Prager points out, “Austerlitz’s state of mind is reported through his German narrator, who once again is unnamed, though we have enough information that his relative proximity to Sebald is not in doubt. Not only is Sebald like the narrator, but the narrator is like Austerlitz” (Prager, “The Good German as Narrator,” 98–99). In this sense the novel reveals an autobiographical tendency, exposing something of Sebald’s split identity within his liminal protagonist. In his own life Sebald found himself in an indeterminate location between EnÂ� gland and Germany, neither fully at home in his adopted land nor comfortable with the land he had left. His decision to remain in England suggests a degree of repudiation as well as resignation: he does not want to be German yet recognizes that he cannot escape his past. Another feature of the proximity between the protagonist and the German narrator/author is the problematic relation of victim to persecutor, signaled by the eerie acoustic resemblance of “Austerlitz” to “Auschwitz.” To what extent is Austerlitz a Jewish victim of the Holocaust, and to what extent is he an extension of the narrator/author’s desire to identify totally with his victim? If the German narrator shares some of the protagonist’s post-traumatic stress disorder, as Brad Prager has suggested, Austerlitz has in common with the narrator/author the obsessive need to catalog and photograph monuments and places, including the ghostly streets and facades of Terezín. This urge to document was, of course, a marked feature of the Nazis’ compulsion to catalog their murderous practices within and beyond the death camps. Christopher Bigsby has drawn our attention to the similar actions of Sebald’s own father: “One German officer even gathered together his pictures of the Krakow ghetto, its empty streets filled with the abandoned suitcases of those taken away to die, and had them mounted and leather-bound to take home. W. G. Sebald’s father, whose activities in Poland were never to be spoken aloud, nonetheless himself presented a similar album to his wife.”23 Sebald’s father had been in Poland but never talked about it after the war and refused to engage when challenged by his son. Sebald’s own urge to 23. Christopher Bigsby, Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 16.



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remember the Nazi past of his own nation is curiously analogous to Austerlitz’s need to reclaim his past as the child of Czech Jews. In identifying with Austerlitz as a would-be Jew, Sebald highlights how the past can neither be fully reclaimed nor fully redeemed but only rewritten. For all the writers we have discussed in this chapter—Bachmann, Celan, and Sebald—Prague exemplifies this palimpsestic process by which every attempt to reach an authentic state of being through unmediated memory is exposed as secondary and citational.

epilogue

Postmodern Prague?

I

n concluding this study, I would like to consider two fairly recent novels and two films about Prague that might, at first glance, be characterized as “postmodern” rather than “modernist” in the way they collapse the distinction between reality and representation. All four postdate the fall of Communism in 1989 and employ different narrative modes to explore that newfound experience of capitalist alienation. The novels in question, Sylvie Germain’s La Pleurante des rues de Prague (The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague, 1992) and Michal Ajvaz’s Druhé město (The Other City, 1993) are examples of magical realism, while Ole Christian Madsen’s Danish film Prag (Prague, 2006) is strictly realistic in its treatment of the postCommunist city. But I shall argue that what all four seemingly postmodern “narratives” of Prague have in common is a tendency to “rewrite” the city in ways that do not represent a radical break from the modernist past but rather represent a continuation of its avant-garde self-reflexivity. Sylvie Germain’s The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague is firmly in the French tradition of self-conscious fiction of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Natalie Sarraute, and Margeurite Duras. From the opening sentence of the book the reader is reminded that the nameless protagonist of the novel— the lachrymose female giant who stalks the streets of Prague—is on some level the same as the writer herself. Just as the weeping woman enters the

. By contrast, Jan Švankmajer’s film Lekce Faust (Faust, 1994) is firmly in the tradition of Czech and European surrealism. . For a similar argument that postmodernism does not represent a radical break with the modernist past but the continuation of a variety of projects launched by the historical avantgarde, see Huyssen, After the Great Divide.

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cityscape of Prague like a phantom from the past, so does the writer enter the pages of her book: “She entered the book. She entered the pages of the book as a vagrant steals into an empty house, or a deserted garden. She entered suddenly. But she had been circling the book for years. She would brush against it—though it did not yet exist—she would leaf through its unwritten pages, and some days she even made its blank, expectant pages rustle faintly.” Germain lived in Prague during the latter days of the Communist era, so in some sense the book is autobiographical as well as fictional. Notwithstanding the author’s knowledge of modern Czech literature, as illustrated by the erudite epigraphs which punctuate the beginning of each chapter/apparition, the novel breathes an aura of exclusion and alienation. Just as the mysterious female emanation that haunts the streets of Prague, weeping copiously as she goes along, represents the spirit of that melancholy city, so does she parallel the experience of the expatriate writer herself. Germain’s novel clearly emerges from the self-conscious tradition of the French nouveau roman, but it is also a richly layered palimpsest of many other literary allusions and references. The central motif of the weeping woman who appears sporadically on the streets of Prague recalls Meyrink’s novel The Golem, with its mysterious apparition who appears every thirtythree years in the ghetto and similarly transcends time and space. Just as Meyrink’s narrator is the alter ego of the golem, so the narrator of Germain’s novel is the double of the eponymous weeping woman. And the fact that Germain’s latter-day “golem” is female also replays some of the more arcane features of the golem legend discussed in chapter 2. Although Germain’s magical realism owes a great deal to Borges, it should be remembered that the Argentinian writer was himself drawing on the modernist tradition of Meyrink and the Prague school in the creation of his own fictional universe. In this sense, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague may constitute a novel treatment of an old literary motif, but its self-conscious mode of writing is not so very different from the literary tradition of “magical Prague.” In fact, I would suggest that the novel’s atmosphere of melancholy and its vision of a city of entrapment derive from the inability of its narrative mode to break out of that tradition. All Germain can do is endlessly “rewrite” Prague, just as her protagonist walks the streets of Prague.

. Sylvie Germain, The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague, translated by Judith Landry with an introduction by Emma Wilson (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus, 1993), 27. For the original French, see La Pleurante des rues de Prague (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).

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Second City Another highly self-conscious treatment of Prague in the spirit of Borges is Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City, published just one year after The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague. Like Germain, Ajvaz is not concerned with the familiar tourist sites of Prague but with an alternative world that exists alongside it and that is visible only to the initiated, literary eye. As the Czech title indicates, this parallel universe is not just another city but a “second” city, implying an infinite regression of other cities in a palimpsest-like fashion. Like The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague, The Other City begins in a highly self-reflexive manner: the narrator is browsing in an antiquarian bookstore on Karlova Street, where, among the shelves, he discovers a strange book with a purple binding and an unfamiliar script which glows green in the dark. The purchase of the book introduces the narrator to the “other” Prague—an oneiric world of ghosts, talking animals, and liquid-filled statues: “Or had I found myself on the frontier of an unknown city adjoining our own? Is it a city growing out of the waste that our own order has not been able to consume and throw away, or is it a community of autochthons, who were here before we arrived and to whom we are of so little account that they will not even notice when we depart? What is the ground plan of that city? What districts is it divided into and what are its laws? Where are its boulevards, squares and gardens, where it gleaming royal palace?” (22). Although Ajvaz’s Prague appears to represent a magical realist departure from the modernist city as we have explored it, it emerges, on closer scrutiny, as yet another instance of “rewriting” Prague. If the novel is reminiscent of Borges’s self-conscious, ironic mode of writing, it also betrays more local influences. The notion of two parallel cities recalls Comenius’s The Labyrinth of the World with its Augustinian vision of the corrupt earthly city of the first half (“the labyrinth of the world”) and the celestial city of the second part (“the paradise of the heart”). Like Comenius’s masterpiece, Ajvaz’s novel is not simply the product of wishful thinking or fantasy but a reaction to historical circumstance. Written in 1623, three years after Prague was invaded by the marauding armies of the Habsburg emperor Ferdinand II, The Labyrinth was conceived as a work of consolation to his Protestant coreligionists in their state of exile and internal persecution. Similarly, Ajvaz’s novel can be seen to take imaginative flight from a city swamped by foreign speculators and tourists. What is striking about Ajvaz’s . Michal Ajvaz, The Other City, translated by Gerald Turner (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009. For the Czech original, see Druhé město (Prague: Mladá Fronta, 1993).



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Prague as a work of fantasy is the way it almost entirely effaces this foreign presence, although at one point the narrator is awoken by the sound of approaching tourists, as if the entire novel were conceived as a dreamlike escape from them. In fact, Ajvaz’s Prague is a curiously empty metropolis, its familiar landmarks—the university library, the Lesser Town Café, the Charles Bridge— akin to theatrical props or a film set populated exclusively by strange creatures and inhabitants from the author’s imagination. These landmarks are divested of their everyday function and are transformed into defamiliarized objects. For example, the baroque statues on the Charles Bridge become the hollowed-out homes of the domestic animals from the other city: “The other city seems full of statues, I thought to myself, and its inhabitants cunningly make use of our statues, transforming them into stabling for their domestic animals” (94). Here too we can see the influence of Comenius’s famous technique of “making strange.” For example, in chapter 10 of The Labyrinth the Pilgrim-narrator enters a library in which the books on display are envisioned as strange boxes which scholars tear apart and eat in a futile attempt to absorb knowledge: “Here was a great hall, the end of which I could not see, but on all sides it was full of shelves, compartments, boxes, and cartons” (Comenius, The Labyrinth, 95–96). Clearly, the theme of the city-book central to Ajvaz’s novel is nothing new but reprises a rich metatextual tradition stretching all the way back to Comenius and reaching its high-water mark in Meyrink’s novel The Golem, with its vision of the ancient Jewish ghetto as a semilegible set of alien symbols and hieroglyphs. As we shall see, this notion of the city as a book of mysterious clues, so fundamental to The Other City, is also attested in Švankmajer’s film Faust, with its characteristic combination of live actors and marionettes and its convoluted narrative of a Prague citizen discovering a strange map which leads him on a quest through a strange labyrinthine world populated by puppets and animated dolls. Furthermore, Ajvaz’s fascination with the outskirts of the city is nothing new but an imaginative recycling of a well-worn surrealist fascination with the périphérie pioneered by Breton in his novel Nadja, Nezval in his poem Edison, and Hackenschmied in his short film Aimless Walk. In spite of its attempt to “unwrite” Prague as a completely “other” world of the imagination, Ajvaz’s novel simply takes to the most extreme point of development a firmly established tradition of the city as text. Even the aspiration to efface Prague through writing reprises Kafka’s attempt to escape the city of his birth. Of course, unlike Kafka, Ajvaz does not obliterate Prague altogether but leaves some of its topographical traces intact. Yet Ajvaz’s desire

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to escape the real the city by taking flight to the “other city” of magical realism constitutes a clear continuation of a modernist tradition in which the alienated artist seeks to escape the city of his birth by effacing its presence and its memory.

Faust in Prague Jan Švankmajer’s surrealist film version of the Faust tale has, at first sight, little in common with Prague. Neither is it an obvious example of “writing” in the immediate sense of the word. Yet it soon becomes apparent that Prague is central to the film’s interest, less as a recognizable setting (there is a deliberate surrealist avoidance of well-known monuments and a greater focus on the uncanny aspects of the everyday or mundane aspects of anonymous city life) than as a series of textual traces or citations, including the legend of the golem discussed in chapter 2 and the fictional universe of Franz Kafka analyzed in chapter 3. The opening sequence of the film shows an office worker emerging from an escalator of the Prague subway system, a detail which seems to set in reverse Faust’s ultimate descent into hell in most versions of the legend. We are always-already in hell, implies the film, not the traditional fiery inferno envisaged by Christopher Marlowe’s play but the modern urban hell of Franz Kafka. On the street two sinister-looking men are distributing flyers, which turn out to be a map of an unidentified building. Like the manuscript in Egon Erwin Kisch’s golem story considered in chapter 2, which is used as a map to locate the golem’s long-lost remains but only ends up frustrating that quest, the map in Švankmajer’s film becomes a Faustian trap for all those who respond to the temptation it arouses. With hindsight the map can be seen as the precursor of the infamous contract signed in blood which seals Faust’s perdition. As he sits at his table and eats an evening meal of bread and cheese (the first example in the film of a typically Švankmajerian obsession with bodily functions), the office worker looks more closely at the map and appears to recognize the location of the house. Unfolding a more general map of the city, he places his finger on a point at a bend in the river which can be identified as Josefov (the Jewish quarter). In the next scene we see this Faustian character standing before a dilapidated building numbered 27, which corresponds to the number on the mysterious map. After the character’s sudden materialization in front of the house, we sense that he has not simply moved through space but also back in time to the ramshackle ghetto before its partial demolition in the late 1890s. Entering the building, Faust finds himself in a labyrinth of inter-



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connecting spaces. The first of these contiguous spaces is a theater where an audience is waiting for the curtain to rise and a play to begin. Fearful of exposure in his Faustian costume, wig, and makeup, the interloper takes a knife and slits open the canvas backdrop. He now finds himself in a corridor which leads into a room resembling a Renaissance chamber of curiosities full of books and pseudo-scientific artifacts. We must presume that this is Doctor Faust’s study and that the intruder is about to assume the guise of Faust. The presence of a glass vessel covering a clay fetus points not only to the homunculus familiar from Goethe’s Faust II but also to the Prague legend of the golem. Combining the role of Faust and Rabbi Loew, the protagonist writes an incantation on a piece of paper, folds it up and—smashing the glass cover—places it in the baby’s mouth. The baby suddenly comes to life and its skull expands to assume the character’s features, a foreshadowing of the conjuration of Mephistopheles with Faust’s own face. Thus, the golem motif in the film is not merely an independent episode but is closely related to the main Faustian theme of doubling and damnation. The rest of the film seemingly returns to the standard story line of the Faust legend: his conjuration of Mephistopheles, his discussion with Satan’s plenipotentiary on the nature of human agency and free will, his fateful decision to sign the diabolical contract in his own blood, and his twentyfour years of unlimited freedom before his inexorable damnation. However, what makes Švankmajer’s filmic version of the legend so original is its self-conscious treatment of the legend as a series of obsessively repeated motifs. What seems to have attracted writers of the legend, from the anonyÂ� mous medieval Faustbuch to the twentieth-century reincarnations of it in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, and Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, is precisely what has attracted so many writers to Prague: the desire to uncover the ultimate meaning or truth at the heart of the city-text. This urge to get to the bottom of the legend is what motivates the protagonist of the film to accept the map and undertake his infernal odyssey in the first place. Švankmajer’s film constitutes an eclectic collage of textual citations drawn not only from various narrative strands of the Faust legend itself but also from ostensibly unrelated textual sources related to Prague. The “real” Prague, which provides the humdrum, modern background of the story, coexists alongside an imagined Prague represented by the writings of Neruda, Apollinaire, Breton, and Kafka. In fact, the contiguous interior spaces, which provide the immediate context of Faust’s experience of entrapment, recalls Neruda’s and Kafka’s vision of Prague as a series of interconnecting interiors from which there is no escape (chapter 3). At the same

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time, Švankmajer’s film also provides a series of cinematic echoes from the grotesque scene of Faust putting on his makeup and costume—reminiscent of the abject male hero of Josef von Sternberg’s Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930)—to the labyrinth of illogical interiors redolent of Orson Welles’s brilliant film version The Trial (1962). Faust’s inability to escape from his prison and the repetitions which accompany this forlorn aspiration parallel the way the legend is doomed to repeat itself as narrative. Even Faust’s eventual “escape” from the building onto the street emerges as a series of textual citations from Kafka and Bulgakov when he is crushed and killed by a passing car. As a shocked crowd gathers around the accident scene, the sinister “twins” reappear, just as the two actors accompany Josef K. to his death at the end of The Trial. The old man, who was first glimpsed in the hostelry holding an amputated leg wrapped in paper and pursued by a hungry stray dog, now returns to claim his prize: Faust’s leg severed by the car. Not only does this grisly denouement confirm that the earlier scene was merely a replay of Faust’s damnation; in its allusion to Faust’s evisceration by devils in the Faustbuch and the decapitation of the atheist Berlioz by a tram in Master and Margarita, Švankmajer’s film confirms that there is no space beyond the city-text of Prague just as there is no escape for Faust from the hell that he has created for himself.

A Dane in Prague On the face of it, Ole Christian Madsen’s Danish film Prague would appear to have nothing in common with Ajvaz’s magical realist or Švankmajer’s surrealist city. In many ways this account of an unhappy Danish couple, who come to Prague to reclaim the remains of the hero’s father, has more in common with the psychological studies of dysfunctional marriages familiar from the Scandinavian films of Ingmar Bergman and Lars von Trier. In the film the city serves as a dreary backdrop to the marital crisis of Christopher and Maja, a middle-aged couple whose trip to Prague coincides with the breakdown of their marriage. Their return is delayed for several days when the coffin, intended for burial in the family grave back in Denmark, is mistakenly flown to Singapore. In the course of this bizarre interlude, the husband

. In making a film about a Dane who comes to Prague to collect his father’s remains, Madsen may also have been thinking of Hans Christian Andersen’s pilgrimage to the city to pay his respects at the grave of another famous Dane—Tycho Brahe, the astronomer of Emperor Rudolf II. See Hans Christian Andersen, “Ein Däne in Prag,” in Europa Erlesen, edited by Helmuth A. Niederle (Klagenfurt: Wieser Verlag, 1998), 21–23.



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(Christopher) is forced to remain in Prague until the body of his father has been returned. During these tedious few days spent under a gloomy winter sky, Christopher finds out that Maja is having an extramarital affair with a younger man back home in Copenhagen. Christopher takes revenge by having a casual affair with his father’s former housekeeper, a Czech single mother, in his country house. Looking for her absconded husband, Maja takes a cab to the house and discovers Christopher having breakfast with the Czech housekeeper and her child. During the taxi ride back to Prague Christopher and Maja have a violent argument. As recriminations fly back and forth, Maja stops the car and gets out, surrounded by the bleak, working-class tenements of the outskirts of the city. In front of a bemused (and amused) crowd of immigrants, the couple acts out their marital tragedy. Throwing the taxi money at the terrified driver and scattering the contents of his wallet to the wind, Christopher shouts at his wife “I give, I give, I give . . .” This drama of marital crisis is in fact not new at all but recalls Camus’s visit to Prague in 1936, after a terrible argument with his wife, Simone, in Salzburg. The melancholy, almost despairing mood of “Death in the Soul,” where Camus wanders about the city like a lost soul, has a great deal in common with Madsen’s portrayal of Prague as a gloomy backdrop to Christopher’s failed marriage. But like Camus’s story, which was written just a few years before World War II and only two years before the Munich agreement, the Danish couple’s marital crisis can also be read as a metaphor for the political problems of European unification. In spite of the political, economic, and cultural harmony promised by the expanded European Union, the film explores the fault lines between east and west in the comic scenes of misunderstanding between the Danish couple and the Czech hotel staff: when Maja, speaking fluent English, requests an adaptor so that she can use her laptop computer in her hotel room, the maid brings an ironing board instead. The film also explores how Prague is synonymous with personal and historical memory. Trapped in a city he dislikes, Christopher reminisces about his lonely childhood and his alienation from his deceased father. But these memories are shown to be secondary and citational rather than primary and authentic. Christopher experiences his past not through the standard cinematic device of flashbacks but by looking at the family photographs which hang on the walls of his father’s house outside Prague. Christopher’s exposure to the historical landmarks of Prague is similarly mediated to him through the postcards his wife shows him at dinner in the hotel restaurant. As in Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, Prague is not experienced firsthand but as a series of secondhand quotations.

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Many of the scenes in the film are equally citational. For example, the episodes in the lawyer’s offices and the anonymous, soulless hotel rooms recall the dreary settings of Kafka’s fiction. Perhaps the most obvious allusion to Kafka is the troubled relationship between Christopher and his father. In the course of the film it becomes apparent that Christopher has been deeply scarred by his father’s emotional neglect. As a consequence of his own dysfunctional childhood, he is incapable of communicating with his own son in a satisfactory manner. The sight of his father’s corpse in the mortuary triggers Christopher’s memory of his own unhappy adolescence. Christopher’s distant relationship with his father is replayed in the awkward, strained scenes where he talks to his own son via a computer screen. The grainy computer image of the boy recalls the black-and-white photographs of Christopher’s unhappy childhood. Many of the scenes in the film betray the nightmarish quality of Kafka’s fiction. For example, Christopher’s inability to unlock doors evokes the atmosphere of entrapment and claustrophobia which is such a marked feature of Kafka’s universe. The non sequiturs and misunderstandings in the conversations with the Czech lawyer recall Josef K.’s bureaucratic entanglement with the law in The Trial. Miscommunication also characterizes the relationship between Christopher and his estranged wife. During their perfunctory strolls through the city Maja reveals that she never felt that she never had anything in common with her husband. Her aesthetic appreciation of Prague means nothing to him. Hence, Prague becomes the symbol not only of Christopher’s emotional alienation from his father but also the symbol of his inability to relate to his wife. While she, as an art historian, savors the city’s aesthetic charm, Christopher spends most of his time in the depressing interior of the morgue, in the lawyer’s office mired in bureaucratic red tape, and in his father’s dismal house outside the city. Following Maja’s return to Denmark, Christopher is left behind to await the return of his father’s coffin and accompany it back to the family grave. But as he wheels the coffin toward the waiting plane on the airport tarmac, he has an abrupt change of heart and entrusts his father’s earthly remains to the lawyer, who—it turns out—was his father’s long-term lover and partner. With this gesture of repudiation Christopher is finally able to relinquish his past and face his future. Or so it seems. The final sequence shows him trundling his suitcase across the cobbled streets of the Old Town. We know that he is about to leave Prague yet we do not actually see him do so. This no-exit finale highlights the circular predicament of all those who encounter Prague as an imagined space: the city we can never cease to “write” and which will never cease to “write” us.

appendix

Translations of Poems about Prague

Jaroslav Seifert “Paris” I lose all desire to walk by the river When evening descends and mists make me shiver. The water is murky and refuses to speak As it flows to the Elbe close by Mělník; And it’s no longer amusing to stroll without aim Or wander by evening and sit in the park In this city of Prague where all looks the same, And policemen shine lamps on lovers in the dark; Where all actions and thoughts are equally sad, Where life is routine and no one is glad. And when something happens, it soon leaves us cold— Whether uprising, murder, or factory strike— Here nothing is vibrant, assertive, and bold; And all is a source of doom and dislike. And since it was not meant to be our sweet fate To be born in the heart of an African wood Where the rays of the hot sun never abate And monkeys swing through the neighborhood; And since we weren’t destined to bathe in the Nile, Observed all the while by a still crocodile; To pluck lotus leaves in the heat of the day And breakfast, when hungry, on fresh coconut— Yet never so lazy to turn lion’s prey— 177

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And then fall asleep at a waterfall’s foot. And since we weren’t destined to lie in the heat, Like curly-haired natives, and eat till replete; Then why were we fated to feel so constricted In this tedious town on parallel fifty, Where excitement and fun are always restricted And good men are few, and many are shifty; Where emotions will perish as soon as they’re born, Where collars are stiff and worn out as well; Where birds are forgotten and jazz is the rage, And the only wild lions are those in a cage? If it has to be so, then why in this city, With hammers, machines, and men without pity? Where civilization is always so close That even in nature we still feel morose; Where factory gates are the keys to our cell— O why were we doomed to live in this hell? But there in the West by the Seine is Paris. When the silvery stars take their place in the sky That town comes alive as the cars hurtle by; Where cinemas, restaurants, bars are so gay, Poets, painters, killers, Apaches hold sway, And the excitement of life simply bears you away. Things that go on there are novel, exotic, and rare, Where detectives are famous and women go bare; Where dancers dance naked at the Variété And the scent of their lace takes your reason away. For Paris seduces all men who are tame. There’s a poet I like there. Ivan Goll is his name. For he, just like me, adores cinema And sad Charlie Chaplin is his favorite star. Boxing matches are a popular theme for a show, Where men feel so wistful and sigh for their love; Whack, an eye for an eye, a blow for a blow.



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When the city succumbs to evening and shadow In the sky you can see the Roue de Paris And couples who stroll through the dark Tuileries. And if earthly dust oppresses their tread They fly to the sky, ever eager and swift, To sample the beauties of heaven instead, In the Eiffel Tower in an electrical lift. But here all our actions and thoughts are so sad For life is routine and no one is glad. When darkness creeps through the windows and stairs I dream that nightingales sing in Père-Lachaise. For at least in Paris bits of heaven remain. Come, my love, come to the city on the Seine. Vítězslav Nezval Edison (canto 1) Our mournful lives are full of woe. One night a gambler left his casino. Monstrancelike bars shone through the sleet In the moist air where spring and winter meet. But the night still rumbled like a buffalo Beneath the pounding of the stars and snow, Overheard by drinkers at their glass, Heads inclined as at a sodden mass; Half-naked girls in peacock plumes, Melancholics of late afternoons. Something burdensome as a grinding knife: Sadness, fear, and anguish at death and life. Returning home, I crossed the Vltava While singing to myself an aria; A drinker of nocturnal barks and light; The castle clock was chiming in midnight— Star of my horizon—midnight of my death— On the brink of March with moisture on my breath.

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Something burdensome as a grinding knife: Sadness, fear, and anguish at death and life. Leaning from the bridge, I saw a shadow leap, A suicidal shadow plunging to the deep. Some sadness there that every soul could rent, A gambler’s shadow and his sad lament. I asked him who he was and whence he came; He answered, just a gambler from his game. Some sadness there beyond the realm of hope, A shadow upright as a hangman’s rope, A shadow falling from the bridge; I cried: “You’re not a gambler, you’re a suicide!” Something burdensome as a grinding knife: Sadness, fear, and anguish at death and life. Hand in hand we strolled through the night, Hand in hand, as dreaming lovers might, Beyond the town where Košíře began. From far away a bright nocturnal fan Waved to us its alcoholic dance; But on we went as in a silent trance. Something burdensome as a grinding knife: Sadness, fear, and anguish at death and life. I climbed the stairs and opened up the door, Then showed my shade a mattress on the floor. “I trust,” I said, “we’ll both be happy there,” And turned to see him vanish into air. Was he a vision, trick, or self-deceit? I stood alone above my daily sheet. Something burdensome as a grinding knife: Sadness, fear, and anguish at death and life. I sat down at my desk; across a pile of books I gave the snow a melancholy look,



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Watched the snowflakes weave a twirling wreath With chimerical nostalgia far beneath. A drinker of shades fast fading from sight, A drinker of lights extinguished by night, A drinker of women whom snakes and dreams obey, A drinker of women whose youth has passed away, A drinker of women with hearts as hard as wood, A drinker of pleasures and foam that’s speckled with blood, A drinker of cruelty that grinds just like a knife, A drinker of sadness and horror of death and life. I said, “Forget your shadows, let them go,” And took a newspaper from a week ago, Then slowly turned the gas light on. I saw a photograph of Thomas Edison: His latest invention, but surely not his least. He sat there like a medieval priest. Something beautiful that grinds just like a knife: Joy and courage in spite of death and life.

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index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Absolutní hrobář (Nezval), 125 Achilles, 31 Action (magazine), 152 Aeneid (Virgil), 15 After the Great Divide (Huyssen), 63 Ajvaz, Michal, Druhé město (The Other City), 168, 170–72 alchemy, 44, 77, 154–55 Alexander the Great, 23 Algeria, 128–29, 131, 132 Alter, Robert, 7 Amazons, 18, 19, 23, 24, 31–32 anaphora rhetorical effect, 122–23 Andersen, Hans Christian, 174n5 Anne’s Bohemia (Thomas), 101 anti-Semitism: 1920s, 56–59; Communist, 103n29, 150; early twentieth-century, 52–53; late nineteenth-century, 39, 46, 48, 50, 78–79, 97–98; post–World War II, 103–4 Antschel, Paul. See Celan, Paul Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Le Passant de Prague” (“The Stroller through Prague”), 13–14, 111, 112–15, 116, 126–27, 135, 144, 158, 173; “Le Pont Mirabeau,” 163; “Zone,” 109, 112, 114–15, 116, 117, 143–44, 154, 161 Aragon, Louis, Le Paysan de Paris (The Peas­ ant of Paris), 118, 119 architecture in Prague, 1, 3–4, 32, 55, 88 Arnim, Achim von, “Isabella von Ägypten,” 43–44, 75

Arthur, King of Britain, 25–26 Auerbach, Berthold, 45 “Auf der Kleinseite” (Rilke), 83 Auschwitz, 74, 161, 166 Ausgewanderten, Die (Sebald), 165 Austerlitz (Sebald), xii, 155–67, 175 avant-garde, Czech: Devětsil movement, 109– 10; French relationships to, 13, 110–15, 128, 168; Kafka influenced by, 85;€Mo­ derní revue group, 85; Nezval and, 115–25 Babička (Němcová), 79, 80, 96–99 Bach, August, 36, 37 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 139–48, 167; “Böhmen liegt am Meer” (“Bohemia Lies on the Sea”), 146–47, 148, 150; Celan and, 138, 147–48; “Heimkehr über Prag” (“Return Home via Prague”), 141–42; “Jüdischer Friedhof” (“Jewish Cemetery”), 142; life of, 14, 138, 140; Malina, 145–46; “Prag, Jänner ’64” (“Prague January ’64”), 141, 142–44, 161; “Wenzelsplatz” (“Wenceslas Square”), 141 Bach reaction, 36, 37, 97–98 Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 65 Balzac, Honoré de, 6 Bar Kochba, 79 Básně noci (Nezval), 119 Battle of the White Mountain, 4, 8, 23, 32, 93 Baudelaire, Charles: as flaneur, 113, 119; Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), 39 Beguiling of Merlin, The (Burne-Jones), 42

193

194

index

Ben-Horin, Michal, 146 Benjamin, Walter, 163 Bergman, Ingmar, 174 Besetzung, meaning of, 152 Between Redemption and Doom (Isenberg), 78, 107 Bezruč, Petr, Slezské písně (Silesian Songs), 81 Bezúčelná procházka (Hackenschmied film), 121–22, 171 Bible: Cain story, 95–96; Esther story, 53, 70– 71; Exodus story, 70–71; Garden of Eden story, 53; Genesis story, 74–75; Jonah story, 70; Tower of Babel story, 99, 100 Bible moralisée, 57–58 Biely, Andrei, 6, 120 Bigsby, Christopher, 166 Blaue Engel, Der (Sternberg film), 174 blood libel, 12, 46, 52–53 Bloom, Harold, 35 Bohemia (in Bachmann/Celan), 150 Bohemia, kingdom of: depicted with seacoast, 145–47; eighteenth-century, 30–31; fourteenth-century Jewish pogroms, 55–56; fourteenth-century succession issues, 20–21; nineteenth-century, 37; in Renaissance, 27–30; thirteenth-century succession issues, 23 Bohemian Body, The (Thomas), 67 Bohemian Brethren, 95 Bohemian Estates, 6, 93 “Böhmen liegt am Meer” (Bachmann), 146–47, 148, 150 Boleslav Chronicle, 25 Boleslav I, duke, 26 Borges, Jorge Luis: “El Golem,” 45–46; influence of, 169, 170; Perutz and, 70 Bossy, John, Christianity in the West, 46 Bourgeois, Yves, 125 Brahe, Tycho, grave of, 114, 174n5 Brentano, Clemens, Die Gründung Prags (The Founding of Prague), 35 Breton, André: attack on Stalin, 110, 125; introduction to Arnim’s tales, 44; “Magic Prague” coined by, 3, 14, 110, 173; Nadja, 118, 171; visit to Prague, 110–11, 135 Březina, Otakar, 81 Bridge of Legions (Prague), 120 Britain foundational legend, 15, 18, 24, 25–26 Brod, Max, 5 Brožík, Václav, 33 Brutus figure, 18, 25

Buber, Martin, 79 Bulgakov, Mikhail, Master and Margarita, 173, 174 Bürger, Gottfried August, “Leonore,” 73–74 Burne-Jones, Edward, The Beguiling of Merlin, 42 By Night under the Stone Bridge (Perutz), 69–71, 155 Byron, Lord, 6 Byt (Švankmajer film), 104n30 Cain figure, 95–96 Cairo, 125–26 Camus, Albert, 125–36; La Chute (The Fall), 132–33; death of, 135, 163; “L’Été à Alger” (“Summer in Algiers”), 128, 131; L’Etranger (The Outsider), 129–32; “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka,” 112; Kafka’s influence on, 131– 32, 133–34, 135, 136; Le Malentendu (The Misunderstanding), 133–34; “La Mort dans l’âme” (“Death in the Soul”), 111–12, 125–29, 130, 131, 133, 175; La Mort heureuse (The Happy Death), 129– 31; Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Si­ syphus), 134; La Peste (The Plague), 132, 133; Prague visit, 14, 125–26, 175 Čapek, Karel: R.U.R., 12, 59–64, 68, 75; translations of French poetry, 109; Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Case), 65–66, 68, 158 Carroll, David, 131 Castle, The (Kafka), 91–99; Comenius’s influence on, 92–94; K. as descendant of Cain in, 95–96; Němcová’s influence on, 80, 96–99; Neruda’s influence on, 89; 1960s reception of, 102; Sebald influenced by, 159 Catholicism: Baroque cathedrals in Prague, 5, 9, 119; cult of Saint Wenceslas, 8, 26; German place-names and, 4; Grillparzer’s Libussa and, 35; Libuše legend and, 27– 30, 32–33; victory over Hussites, 8–9, 93 Čech figure, 18 Celan, Paul, 148–55; attempted suicide, 151– 52; Bachmann and, 138, 147–48; Bremen Prize acceptance speech, 148; “Einem, der vor der Tür stand, eines Abendes” (“To One Who Stood Before the Door, One Evening”), 152–53; “Hüttenfenster” (“Tabernacle Window”), 150–51; “In Me-



index

moriam Paul Éluard,” 149; “In Prag” (“In Prague”), 153–55; Kafka’s influence on, 149, 152–53; “Kalk Krokus” (“Chalk Crocus”), 151; life of, 138; “Ein Leseast” (“A Reading Branch”), 151–52; mother’s murder by Nazis, 137; Prague and, 14, 137–38, 167; “Schibboleth” (“Shibboleth”), 149–50; Schneepart (Snow Part), 151–55; suicide of, 137, 163; Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (From Threshold to Threshold), 149 Celan-Lestrange, Gisèle, 137 Celetná Street (Zeltnergasse), 3, 108 České Amazonky aneb Děvčí boj v Čechách pod správou Řekyně Vlasty (Šedivý), 32 České Budějovice, 133 Charles Bridge (Prague), 77, 82–83, 130, 171 Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, 2, 8, 21, 27, 29, 30 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 43 Chatwin, Bruce, Utz, 71–73 Chelčický, Peter, Siet’ viery (The Net of Faith), 94–95, 101–2 Christianity in the West (Bossy), 46 Chronica Boemorum (Cosmas), 16, 17–19; Dalimil Chronicle compared with, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26; Renaissance accounts compared with, 27, 28 Chute, La (Camus), 132–33 Cikán Synagogue (Prague), 44 “city book” (definition), 6 “City Coat of Arms, The” (Kafka), 99–102 Claudel, Paul, 110 Clementis, Vladimír, 8 clinamen (term), 35 collective memory, Libuše as embodiment of, 37 Comenius, Jan Amos: Janua linguarum reserata (The Gates of Languages Un­ locked), 93; Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (The Labyrinth of the World), 79, 81, 92–94, 170, 171; Orbis pictus (The World in Pictures), 93 Commission Building (Prague), 104 Corngold, Stanley, 85 Cosmas, Chronica Boemorum (Chronicle of the Czechs), 16, 17–19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 cosmopolitanism: Apollinaire and, 13–14, 111, 112–15, 126, 135; avant-garde and, 85–86; fin de siècle, 39–40, 42, 84; Mácha

195

and, 9; Neruda and, 88; in 1860s, 37–38, 79–80 Counter-Reformation, 4, 5, 8–9, 32, 93 Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky), 130 Ctirad and Šárka (Myslbek sculpture), 39 “Ctirad a Šárka” (Zeyer), 40–42 Ctirad figure, 21, 22, 24, 33, 40–42 Cyrus, Emperor of Persia, 23 Czech lands: anti-Semitism in, 39; country life cult in, 96; depicted as vampire, 40; ethnic conflicts in, 5–6, 99–101; Hussite defeat in, 8–9, 93, 170; martyrdom complex, 38; nationalist movement, 79–80, 84–85, 88, 101; 1848 revolution, 98; obsession with myths, 33–34; Vormärz era, 36, 44–45. See also Czechoslovakia Czech language: Hus’s encouragement of, 101; Kafka’s ambivalence toward, 13, 78–80, 98, 160–61; Prague foundational legend and, 19–20, 22, 23, 34–35 Czech national anthem, 81–82 Czech National Theater, 38 Czechoslovak Communist Party, 110, 115, 122, 124–25 Czechoslovakia: under Communism, 102–8, 134–38, 144, 148–52; Communist putsch, 10, 102, 133, 149–50; fall of Communism, 10, 102, 105; First Czechoslovak Republic, 4, 99–102, 107; Nazi invasion of, 10, 103–4, 125, 133; Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 134; 1930s politics, 110–11, 115, 122, 124–25;€NorÂ� malization period, xii, 105; writer’s function in, 105–6 Czech revivalists, 32–33, 36–38 Czech Surrealist Group, 14, 110, 118–21, 122, 124–25, 149 Dalimilova kronika (The Dalimil Chronicle), 16, 19–26; ethnic tensions in, 101; Hněvkovský’s poem compared with, 33; Jirásek’s tale compared with, 38; Kleist’s drama compared with, 31; opening of, 100; Renaissance accounts compared with, 27, 28, 29, 30; Zeyer’s poem compared with, 40 Dante, 132 Darius, King of Persia, 23 Darka figure, 24 “Darkness Casts No Shadow” (Lustig), 103n29 De Amicis, Edmondo, 110

196

index

decadence, 39–42, 67–68, 79–80, 86 Deism, 32 Dějiny národu českého (Palacký), 32 Deleuze, Gilles, 85 Demetz, Peter, Prague in Black and Gold, 2, 3, 36 “Description of a Struggle” (Kafka), 85–87, 144, 156 Devětsil, 109–10 Děvín (Hněvkovský), 32, 33 Děvín Castle, 21, 23 Diamonds of the Night (Němec film), 103n29 Dickens, Charles, 6 Dientzenhofer, Christoph, 9 Dijkstra, Bram, 39 Döblin, Alfred, 7 Dobner, Gelasius, 29–30 Doctor Faustus (Mann), 173 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 172 doppelgänger (double) motif, 55, 120–21 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 6; Crime and Punish­ ment, 130 Double Helix, The (Watson), 76 Dracula (Stoker), 39 Druhé město (Ajvaz), 168, 170–72 Dunwoodie, Peter, 129 Duras, Marguerite, 168 Dvořák, Antonín, 20 Dvůr Králové manuscript (fabricated), 33–34 Edison (Nezval), 119–21, 171, 179–81 Eichendorff, Josef von, 84; “In Danzig,” 83 “Einem, der vor der Tür stand, eines Abendes” (Celan), 152–53 Elijah of Chelm, Rabbi, 43 Eliot, T. S., 120 Elizabeth Přemyslovna, 20–21, 27 Éluard, Paul, 111 Enlightenment, 30–33, 55 Erben, Karel Jaromír: Kytice z národních legend (A Bouquet of National Legends), 36–37; “Svatební košile” (“The Wedding Shirts”), 74 Eschenloër, Peter, 28 Eshel, Amir, 157 Esther, biblical heroine, 53, 71 “Été à Alger, L’” (Camus), 128, 131 Eternal Jew figure, 13–14, 113–14, 116, 135 Etranger, L’ (Camus), 129–32 Euripides, Medea, 63 Evans, R. J. W., 84n9

Eve figure, 53 expressionism, 53–59 Fadren (Strindberg), 63 Faust (Goethe), 173 Faustbuch, 173, 174 Faust legend, 172–74 Felstiner, John, 149, 164–65 female founder-heroes, sparsity of, 15–16 Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, 93, 170 Fibich, Zdeněk, Šárka, 42 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 34 fin de siècle literature, 38–42, 85–86 First Czechoslovak Republic: establishment of, 99–102; German place-names changed under, 4; interwar years, 107 Flag Wars and Stone Saints (Wingfield), 4, 99 flaneur figure: in Apollinaire’s poems, 112–15, 158; Eternal Jew as, 13–14, 113–14, 116, 158; in Germain’s novel, 168–69; in Nezval’s poem, 116–17, 158; in Sebald’s novel, 158 Flaubert, Gustave, 6, 125–26, 133 Fleurs du mal, Les (Baudelaire), 39 forged Holocaust memoirs, 165–66 Frankenstein (Shelley), 68, 75 Franz Josef, Holy Roman Emperor, 4 Franz Kafkas Sprachen (Nekula), 81 Freud, Sigmund, 55, 163; The Psychopathol­ ogy of Everyday Life, 164 Frič, Josef Václav, Libušin soud (Libuše’s Judgment), 34, 36 Frommer, Benjamin, 5, 104 Führer Presents a City to the Jews, The (Nazi film), 162 Ganymedes (Karásek ze Lvovic), 66–68 García Márquez, Gabriel, 70 Gas (Kaiser), 60 Geary, Patrick, 15, 18–19, 24 Genesis, Book of, 74–75, 100 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Bri­ tanniaie (History of the Kings of Britain), 15, 18, 24, 25–26 Germain, Sylvie, La Pleurante des rues de Prague (The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague), 168–69 German-language treatment: of golem legend, 56–59; of Prague foundational legend, 32, 35–36



index

German population of Prague: animosity toward, 78, 80–85, 97–98, 113, 138; German language used by, 78–80, 97–98; postwar removal of, 1, 4–5, 135 “Gespenst der Judenstadt, Das” (Leppin), 48, 50, 72–73 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 84; Faust, 173; Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia on Tau­ ris), 31; sorcerer’s apprentice story, 43; Venice viewed by, 110, 125–26, 133 Golem, Der (Meyrink), 11, 12, 50–51, 169, 171 Golem, Der (Wegener film), 11, 12, 56–59, 57; Čapek’s R.U.R. compared with, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64; X-Files episode compared with, 73 “Golem, El” (Borges), 45–46 Golem, The (Leivick), 53–56 Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maha­ ral of Prague, The (Rosenberg), 12, 51–53 golem legend, 11, 12–13, 43–77; in Arnim’s story, 43–44, 75; biblical models for, 53, 70–71; Borges poem, 45–46; Čapek’s treatments, 12, 59–66, 68, 75; Celan’s reference to, 152–53; Chatwin’s treatment, 71–73; as doppelgänger, 55; Faust and, 172– 74; female disobedience as theme in, 12– 13; female golems, 12–13, 43–44; Fran­ kenstein and, 68, 75; Freudian€treatÂ�ment, 54–56; in Hoffmann’s story, 44; homosexuality and, 66–68, 71–73; humanism and, 59–60; Karásek ze Lvovic’s treatment, 66–68; Kisch’s treatment, 68–69, 172; Leivick’s treatment, 53–56;€Loew and, 44– 45; Metropolis film and, 43, 58–59, 60, 62, 63, 64; Meyrink’s treatment, 11, 12, 50–51, 169; Mulisch’s treatment, 12–13, 74–76; as palimpsest, 45, 51, 67–68; Perutz’s treatment, 69–71; positive portrayals of, 52–53; Rosenberg’s treatment, 12, 51–53; sorcerer’s apprentice story and, 43, 53; talisman (shem) in, 45, 58, 61–62, 64, 66, 67, 71, 74–76, 153; Wegener’s film treatment, 11, 12, 56–59, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 73; X-Files adaptation, 73–74 Gothic literature, 55 Gotická duše (Karásek ze Lvovic), 86–87 Gottwald, Klement, 8 Gregory VII, Pope, 19 Grillparzer, Franz, Libussa, 35–36, 84 Grimm, Jakob, 43 Gründung Prags, Die (Brentano), 35

197

Guattari, Félix, 85 Guido delle Colonne, Historia Destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy), 24 Gypsies, association with Jews, 56, 58 Habimah Theater (Moscow), 53 Habsburg empire: Czech resentment of, 4; Czechs as subjects in, 30–33, 138, 170; ethnic mix in, 139–40 Hackenschmied, Alexander, Bezúčelná pro­ cházka (Aimless Walk), 121–22, 171 Hagen, Friedrich von der, 34 Hájek Václav, of Libočany, Kronika česká (Czech Chronicle), 28–30, 38 Haman figure, 53 Haughton, Hugh, 55 Haussmann, Baron Georges-Eugène von, 4, 46, 118 Havel, Václav, 78, 105, 107 Havlíček-Borovský, Karel, 5 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 34 Heimat, lost or second, xii, 14, 79, 138, 139, 140–41, 150–51, 155 “Heimkehr über Prag” (Bachmann), 141–42 “Heizer, Der” (Kafka), 88n16 Henry of Carinthia, 20–21 Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor, 19 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 32 Hié, Simone, 125, 175 Hindle, Maurice, 75 Historia Destructionis Troiae (Guido delle Colonne), 24 Historia Regum Britanniaie (Geoffrey of Monmouth), 15, 18, 24, 25–26 Historica Bohemica (Piccolomini), 27–28 historiography, forgeries and, 33–34 Hitler, Adolf, 1, 125 Hlaváček, Karel, 85 Hněvkovský, Šebastián, Děvín, 32, 33 Hobsbawm, Eric, 33 Hoffmann, E. T. A., “Der Sandmann,” 43, 44 Höller, Hans, 140 homosexuality: golem legend and, 66–68, 71– 73; in Kafka’s “Description of a Struggle,” 86–87 “Hope and the Absurd in the Work of Franz Kafka” (Camus), 112 Hora, Josef, 6 Hrabal, Bohumil: Kafka’s influence on, 104–6; Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I

198

index

Hrabal, Bohumil (cont.) Served the King of England), 106–7; Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Watched Trains), 105; Příliš hlučná samota (Too Loud a Solitude), 105–6 Hradčany Castle (Prague), 2, 44, 82–83 “Hradschin, Der” (Rilke), 82–83 Hughes, Edward, 126 humanism, 27, 59–63, 101 Hungarian uprising (1956), 134–35 Hus, Jan, 2, 9, 27, 30, 32–33, 101 Húska, Jan, 28 Hussites, 6, 8–9, 29, 93, 101. See also Utraquists “Hüttenfenster” (Celan), 150–51 Huyssen, Andreas: After the Great Divide, 60, 63; Present Pasts, 158; Twilight Memo­ ries, 10

Jewish population of Prague: disappearance of, 1, 14, 103–4, 135; emancipation of, 10–11; golden age of, 44, 69–71, 154–55; historical tensions, 71; Kafka’s Jewish identity, 78–80; pogroms against, 54–56 Jewish Town Hall (Prague), 46, 47 Jirásek, Alois, Staré pověsti české (Old Czech Tales), 38–39, 48, 113 John of Luxembourg, 19, 20–21, 22 John of Pomuk, statues of, 8–9 Jonah figure, 70 Jones, Colin, 118 Jonson, Ben, 145 Josef Kilián (Juráček/Schmidt film), 102 Joyce, James, 6 “Jüdischer Friedhof” (Bachmann), 142 Juráček, Pavel, 102

“Im alten Hause” (Rilke), 82 “In Danzig” (Eichendorff), 83 “In Memoriam Paul Éluard” (Celan), 149 “In Prag” (Celan), 153–55 intellectuals, disappearance of, 1, 2–3, 14 Investiture Contest, 19 Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe), 31 “Isabella von Ägypten” (Arnim), 43–44, 75 Isenberg, Noah, 56–57; Between Redemption and Doom, 78, 107 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (Wells), 60

Kafka, Franz: Camus influenced by, 131–32, 133–34, 135, 136; The Castle, 80, 89, 91– 99, 102, 159; Celan influenced by, 137, 149, 152–53; “The City Coat of Arms,” 99–102; Claudel and, 110; Communist ban on, 3, 13, 77, 102, 107–8; cosmopolitan influences on, 85–86; as cultural outsider, 78–80, 92; Czech language and, 13, 78–80, 98, 160–61; “Description of a Struggle,” 85–87, 144, 156; family of, 77, 78, 108, 158, 159–61; fascination with Jewish and Yiddish culture, 78–79; fascination with South America, 129; grave of, 131; “Der Heizer” (“The Stoker”), 88n16; house of, 77, 108; “Eine kaiserÂ� liche Botschaft” (“An Imperial Message”), 151; Liblice conference and, 102; Madsen influenced by, 176; “memory” of Czech literature, 79, 80; “Der Nachbar” (“The Neighbor”), 90; postwar Czech literature and, 102–8; Prague in works of, 7, 13, 80, 85–108, 117, 126, 131, 154, 163, 165, 171, 173; reception of, 3, 13, 77–80, 102–8; reinventions of, 102, 107–8; Sebald influenced by, 158, 159–61; statue of, 10; The Trial, 87–91, 93, 102, 103, 104, 105, 132, 159–60, 174, 176; “Das Urteil” (“The Judgment”), 137, 163; Der Verschollene (“The Missing Person”), 103, 107; “Vor dem Gesetz” (“Before the Law”), 104n30, 152–53; writing style, 85–86, 87–88 Kafka, Hermann, 78, 108 Kafka, Ottla, 77, 158–59

“Jak Pan Vorel si nakouřil pěnovku” (Neruda), 88–89 Janáček, Leoš, Šárka, 40 Jan Hus (Tyl), 32 Janua linguarum reserata (Comenius), 93 “Jaroslav Vrchlický” (Rilke), 83–84 Jesenská, Milena, 160–61 Jesuits, 5 Jewish cemetery, new (Prague), 131, 135 Jewish cemetery, old (Prague), 1, 11, 56, 130, 142, 143, 151 Jewish ghetto (Prague): associations with venereal disease and prostitution, 11, 46, 48, 50, 55, 57; demolition of, 3–4, 10–11, 45, 46, 48, 50, 55, 56; golem legend and, 11, 12–13, 44–77, 171; nostalgia for, 46, 48, 50–51; as place of memory and forgetting, 46, 51, 123; surviving buildings from, 1, 11, 46, 48; in Švankmajer’s film, 172–73; tour guides of, 44–45 Jewish Holocaust, 139, 148, 155–67



index

Kaiser, Georg, Gas, 60 “kaiserliche Botschaft, Eine” (Kafka), 151 “Kajetán Tyl” (Rilke), 81–82 Kalandra, Záviš, 149 “Kalk Krokus” (Celan), 151 Kant, Immanuel, 31 Kara, Avigdor, 55–56 Karásek ze Lvovic, Jiří: Ganymedes, 66–68; Gotická duše (Gothic Soul), 86–87; Kafka influenced by, 85; Prague in works of, 117; Rilke influenced by, 81 Katz, Isaac, 52 Kazi figure, 18 Kieval, Hillel J., Languages of Community, 44 Kindertransport, xii, 156, 158, 159, 164 Kisch, Egon Erwin, Tales from Seven Ghettos, 68–69, 172 Kleist, Heinrich von, Penthesilea, 31, 35–36, 41, 42 Klutschak, Franz, 45 Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (Kundera), 8, 107–8 Kostrowitzky, Wilhelm de. See Apollinaire, Guillaume Kristián, Legenda Christiani, 12, 15, 16–17, 21, 26 Krok figure, 18 Kronika česká (Hájek of Libočany), 28–30, 38 Kundera, Milan: exile of, 105; Kafka’s influence on, 78, 107–8; on Kafka’s Prague, 80; Kniha smíchu a zapomnění (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), 5, 8, 107–8 Kytice z národních legend (Erben), 36–37 Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (Comenius), 79, 81, 92–94, 170, 171 LaCoss, Don, 11 Lang, Fritz: Metropolis, 42, 43, 58–59, 60, 62, 63, 64; Die Nibelungen, 157–58 Languages of Community (Kieval), 44 Laplanche, Jean, 164 Larenopfer (Rilke), 81–84 Legenda Christiani, 12, 15 Leivick, H., The Golem, 53–56 Lekce Faust (Švankmajer film), 168n1, 171, 172–74 Lenin, V. I., 5 Leppin, Paul: “Das Gespenst der Judenstadt” (“The Ghost of the Jewish Quarter”), 48, 50, 72–73; Prague portrayed by, 117 “Leseast, Ein” (Celan), 151–52

199

Lessing, Karl Friedrich, 32–33 Liblice conference (1963), 102 Libuše (Smetana), 38, 39 Libuše legend, 15–42; in Cosmas’s account, 17–19; in Dalimilova kronika, 19–26; Elizabeth Přemyslovna and, 20–21; as embodiment of collective memory, 37; in Enlightenment accounts, 31–32; Erben’s treatment, 36–37; fin de siècle treatments, 38–42; German interest and treatments, 32, 35–36; Grillparzer’s portrayal, 35–36, 84; in Hájek of Libočany’s account, 28–30, 38; Historica Bohemica account, 27–28; in Jirásek’s story, 38–39, 113; Legenda Christiani account, 15, 16–17; Mašek’s painting of, 39–40, 41, 42; modernist treatments of, 41–42; nationalism and, 33–35, 36–38; National Revival and, 33, 36–38; in Renaissance accounts, 27–30; rewritings of, 11–12; Šedivý’s romance, 32; Smetana’s opera on, 38, 39; Thám’s play, 32; in Zelená Hora manuscript, 34; in Zeyer’s poem, 40–42 Libušin Sňatek (Škroup), 36 Libušin soud (Frič), 34, 36 Libussa (Grillparzer), 35–36, 84 Lipton, Sara, 57–58 Loew ben Bezalel, Jehudah (Maharal of Prague): equated with Faust, 173; golem legend of, 44–45, 152–53; grave of, 11, 44, 67, 143, 151; portrayed by Čapek, 65, 68; portrayed by Mulisch, 75–76; portrayed by Perutz, 70–71; revival of interest in, 46, 48; statue of, 48, 49 Louthan, Howard, 93 Ludmila, Saint, statues of, 8–9 Lumír and Song (Myslbek sculpture), 39 Lustig, Arnošt, “Darkness Casts No Shadow,” 103n29 Mácha, Karel Hynek: Máj, 9; remains of, 9–10 Macpherson, James, 33–34 Madsen, Ole Christian, Prag (Prague), 168, 174–76 magical realism, 70, 168, 170–72 Magic Prague (Ripellino), xii, 2–3, 6, 44, 62, 93, 108, 115, 135 “Magic Prague” epithet, 3, 14, 110, 154–55, 169 Maharal of Prague. See Loew ben Bezalel, Jehudah (Maharal of Prague)

200

index

Máj (Mácha), 9 Malentendu, Le (Camus), 133–34 Malina (Bachmann), 145–46 Manley Hopkins, Gerard, 149 Mann, Klaus, Mephisto, 173 Mann, Thomas, Doctor Faustus, 173 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 72 Marian Column, demolition of, 4, 99 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, 172 Masaryk, T. G., 2, 61, 63, 101 Mašek, Karel Vítězslav, The Prophetess Libuše, 39–40, 41, 42 Master and Margarita (Bulgakov), 173, 174 Matilda of Tuscany, Countess, 19, 20 Medea (Euripides), 63 Meisl Synagogue (Prague), 44 memories, Freud’s views on, 163–64 Mephisto (Mann), 173 “Město věží” (Nezval), 122–23 Metropolis (Lang film), 42, 43, 58–59, 60, 62, 63, 64 Meyrink, Gustav, Der Golem, 11, 12, 50–51, 169, 171 Moderní revue (journal), 85 modernity, modernism: golem and, 55–64, 68–69; Prague as modernist metropolis, 13–14, 109–10, 112–15, 119–25, 126–27; Rilke and, 80–81; Zeyer’s poem and, 41–42 More, Thomas, Utopia, 60 “Mort dans l’âme, La” (Camus), 125–29, 130, 131, 133, 175 Mort heureuse, La (Camus), 129–31 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 2 Mrštík, Vilém, Santa Lucia, 86 Mucha, Alphonse, 40n25 Mulisch, Harry, The Procedure, 12–13, 74–76 Müller-Funk, Wolfgang, 35 Munich Agreements (1938), 111–12, 134, 175 Munk Synagogue (Prague), 44 Musil, Robert, 7 Myslbek, Josef Václav, sculptures by, 39 Mythe de Sisyphe, Le (Camus), 134 “Nachbar, Der” (Neruda), 90 Nadja (Breton), 118, 171 Napoleon III, 46 narrative perspective, problem of, 87–88, 116, 159 nationalism, 6, 33–38, 79–80, 84–85, 88, 101 National Revival, 9, 33, 36–38, 41, 80, 81–82

National Theater (Prague), 65 Nazis, Nazism, and Holocaust, 1, 5–6, 10, 103–4, 125, 133, 134, 137–41, 148, 160–67 Nekula, Marek, Franz Kafkas Sprachen, 81 Němcová, Božena, Babička (Granny), 79, 80, 96–99 Němec, Jan, Diamonds of the Night, 103n29 Němec, Josef, 97–98 neorevivalism. See National Revival Neruda, Jan: cosmopolitanism, 38; “Jak Pan Vorel si nakouřil pěnovku” (“How Mr. Vorel Broke in His Meerschaum pipe”), 88–89; Povídky malostranské (Lesser Town Tales), 88–91; Prague portrayed by, 117, 173; “Pro strach židovský” (“Concerning the Jewish Fear”), 79; “Týden v tichém domě” (“A Week in a Quiet House”), 89, 90–91; “U tří lilií” (“At the Sign of the Three Lilies”), 91 “Netečný divák” (Weiner), 67 New Town Hall (Prague), 48, 49 Nezval, Vítězslav: Absolutní hrobář (The Absolute Gravedigger), 125; Apollinaire’s influence on, 135; Básně noci (Poems of Night ), 119; “city book” epithet coined by, 6; “Edison,” 119–21, 171, 179–81; “Město věží” (“City of Spires”), 122–23; “Obskurní hotely” (“Obscure Hotels”), 124; “Podivuhodný kouzelník” (“The Wondrous Magician”), 118–19; Praha s prsty dešté (Prague with Fingers of Rain), 116, 122, 124–25; “Pražský chodec” (“The Prague Walker”), 14, 116–17, 158; “Předměstí” (“The Suburb”), 123; “Tržnice” (“Covered Market”), 124; “Václavské náměstí k večeru” (“Saint Wenceslas Square at Evening”), 122 Nibelungen, Die (Lang film), 157–58 Nibelungenlied, 33, 34 nouveau roman genre, 168–69 Novotná, Magdalena, 98 “Obskurní hotely” (Nezval), 124 Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (Hrabal), 106–7 odsun (“transfer”), 4–5 Old-New Synagogue (Prague), 1, 11, 46, 47, 69 Opel, Adolf, 140 Orbis pictus (Comenius), 93 Ossian fabrications, 33–34 Ostře sledované vlaky (Hrabal), 105



index

Palacký, František, Dějiny národu českého (History of the Czech Nation), 6, 32 Palacký Bridge (Prague), 39 “palimpsest” (definition), 6 Pankl, Barbora, 79, 80, 96–99 Paris: Haussmann’s rebuilding of, 4, 11, 46, 118; Prague and, 13–14, 109–15, 117, 137–38; surrealists’ view of, 118 “Paříž” (Seifert), 109–11, 112, 177–79 Parzival (Wolfram von Eschenbach), 25n8 “Passant de Prague, Le” (Apollinaire), 13–14, 111, 112–15, 116, 126–27, 135, 144, 158, 173 Paul Celan (Felstiner), 164–65 Paysan de Paris, Le (Aragon), 118, 119 Pearsall, Derek, 25 Penthesilea (Kleist), 31, 35–36, 41, 42 Penthesilea, Amazon queen, 24, 31 Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), 145, 147 Perutz, Leo, By Night under the Stone Bridge, 69–71, 155 Peste, La (Camus), 132, 133 Pétain, Marshall, 131 Petřín Hill (Laurenziberg), 4, 86–87, 156, 162–63 Pfitzner, Josef, 5–6 photographs: airbrushing of, 8; avant-garde, 120, 123; function in Sebald’s Austerlitz, 162, 164–65, 166; of Jewish Ghetto, 57; of Paris, 109–10; secondary memory and, 139, 159, 175–76; Wagstaff’s collection of, 72, 73 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius (Pius II, Pope), Historica Bohemica, 27–28 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 68 Pius II, Pope, Aeneas Silvius, 27–28 place-names, changes to, 4–5, 157 Pleurante des rues de Prague, La (Germain), 168–69 “Podivuhodný kouzelník” ( Nezval), 118–19 Poetism movement, 115, 119 “Political Position of Today’s Art, The” (Breton lecture), 111 politics, 1930s, 110–11, 115, 122, 124–25, 129 Pollak, Oskar, 7 Pöllnitz, Charles-Lewis, Baron de, 110 “Pont Mirabeau, Le” (Apollinaire), 163 “postmemory” concept, 139, 159, 175–76 postmodernism, 14, 168–76 Povídky malostranské (Neruda), 88–91 Prag (Madsen film), 168

201

“Prag, Jänner ’64” (Bachmann), 141, 142–44, 161 Prager, Brad, 164n19, 166 Prague: after Soviet Union’s collapse, 5; architectural demolitions in, 3–4, 46; architectural diversity of, 1; Bachmann and, 139–48; Camus and, 125–29, 130– 31; changed place-names in, 4–5, 157; cultural accounts of, 2–3; dialectic€between memory and forgetting in, 5–7, 45– 46, 50–51, 107–8, 138, 158–59; eclipse during Renaissance, 29; effacement of Hussite monuments, 8–9; eighteenthcentury, 30–31; envisaged as palimpsest, 7–8, 162, 167, 170; ethnic tensions in, 78, 80–85, 97, 99–101, 113, 132, 135; etymology of name, 27–28; Francophilia in, 3–4; Golden Lane, 77, 108; Hrabal’s portrayal of, 105–6; Jewish ghetto, 1, 3–4, 10–13, 44–77; Kafka’s reception in, 77–80, 102–8; literary portrayals of, 7; as “magic,” 3, 14, 110, 154–55, 169; Moldau River in, 144; Nazi occupation of, 103–4; Neruda’s€portrayal of, 88–91; Paris and, 13–14, 109–15, 117, 137–38; as place of self-discovery, 135–36; postmodern treatments of, 168– 76; post–World War II, 72, 138, 139;€prewar ethnic mix, 4, 97, 140; public€executions in, 5–6; public-private blurring in, 90–91; reinvention as modernist metropolis, 13–14, 111, 112–15, 119–25; role of monuments in, 8–10, 33, 39, 48, 82–83, 171; in Sebald’s Austerlitz, 155–67; as site of nostalgia, 14, 46, 48, 50–51, 79, 138, 139–40, 155–67; as space of alienation, claustrophobia, and surveillance, 86–87, 89–99, 105, 132–33, 138–39, 169, 176; as spiritual home of bohemian artist, 127–28; vanished citizens of, 1, 4–5; in World War II, 1; Yiddish theater in, 79. See also specific names, places, and topics Prague (Madsen film), 174–76 Prague foundational legend, 15–42; Cosmas’s account, 16, 17–19, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28; Czech dukes and, 16, 19; Czech independence and, 19–26; Czech€language€and, 19–20, 22, 23; Czech lower nobility and, 19–26; Czech nobility and, 16, 32–33; Dalimilova kronika account, 16, 19–26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 40, 100; “discovered” accounts, 25–26; fin de

202

index

Prague foundational legend (cont.) siècle treatments, 38–42; German€interest and treatments, 32, 35–36; Hájek’s account, 28–30, 38; Kristián’s account, 12, 15, 16–17, 21, 26; nationalism and, 33–35, 36–38; National Revival treatments, 36– 38; need for male founder in, 18;€Piccolomini’s account, 27–28; Přemyslid family and, 18; Pulkava’s account, 27–28; Šedivý’s romance, 32; Thám’s play, 32 Prague in Black and Gold (Demetz), 2, 3, 36 Praha s prsty dešté (Nezval), 116, 122, 124–25 “Pražský chodec” (Nezval), 14, 116–17, 158 “Předměstí” (Nezval), 123 Přemyslid dynasty, 18, 19, 20–21 Přemysl Otakar II, King of Bohemia, 2, 23 Přemysl the Plowman figure, 15; in Cosmas’s account, 20; in Enlightenment accounts, 31–32, 33; Erben’s treatment, 36–37; Grillparzer’s portrayal, 35–36; Jirásek’s portrayal, 38–39; in Kristián’s account, 16–17; in Piccolomini’s account, 27 Příliš hlučná samota (Hrabal), 105–6 Procedure, The (Mulisch), 12–13, 74–76 Procházka, Arnošt, 85 Prophetess Libuše, The (Mašek), 39–40, 41, 42 prostitution, 11, 46, 48, 50, 55, 57 “Pro strach židovský” (Neruda), 79 psychoanalysis, 55–56 Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (Freud), 164 public executions in Prague, 5–6 Pulkava of Radenín, Přibík, 27–28 Pyrrhus, 24 Rank, Otto, 55 Rilke, Rainer Maria: “Auf der Kleinseite” (“In the Lesser Town”), 83; departure from Bohemia, 84–85; “Der Hradschin” (“The Prague Castle”), 82–83; “Im alten Hause” (“In the Old House”), 82; “Jaroslav Vrchlický,” 83–84; “Kajetán Tyl,” 81–82; Larenopfer (Offering to the Lares), 81–84; literary models, 84; Zwei Prager GesÂ�chiÂ�chten (Two Prague Stories), 81, 84–85 Ripellino, Angelo Maria, Magic Prague, xii, 2–3, 6, 44, 62, 93, 108, 115, 135 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 168 romanticism, 9 Rosenberg, Yudl, The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, 12, 51–53

Rubin, Miri, 55–56 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 2, 29; Celan’s reference to, 154–55; reign of, 44, 65, 70, 77 R.U.R. (Čapek), 12, 59–64, 68, 75 Ryan, Judith, 83, 88n16 Sabine women, rape of, 24 Sagan, Princess Katharina Wilhelmina von, 98 Saint Nicholas Church, 9, 82 Saint Petersburg, 9, 120, 130 Saint Vitus Cathedral: in Apollinaire’s poem, 144; in Rilke’s poem, 82–83; shrine to Saint Wenceslas in, 8, 26, 114–15 Šalda, F. X., 13 Šalmonová, Lydia, 56 Šaloun, Ladislav, 9, 33; statue of Loew, 48, 49 Sand, George, 30–31 “Sandmann, Der” (Hoffmann), 44 Santa Lucia (Mrštík), 86 Šárka (Fibich), 42 Šárka (Janáček), 40 Šárka aneb děvčí boj u Prahy (Thám), 32 Šárka figure: in Dalimilova kronika account, 21, 23–24, 33; in Fibich’s play, 42; in Hněvkovský’s narrative poem, 33; in Thám’s play, 32; in Zeyer’s poem, 40–42 Sarocchi, Jean, 129 Sarraute, Natalie, 168 Scheinpflugová, Olga, 62 “Schibboleth” (Celan), 149–50 Schlink, Bernhard, Der Vorleser (The Reader), 161 Schmidt, Jan, 102 Schneepart (Celan), 151–55 Schnitzler, Arthur, 7 Sebald, W. G., 14; Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants), 165; Austerlitz, xii, 155–67, 175; Kafka’s influence on, 158, 159–61; life of, 139, 166–67 Sebastian (Twelfth Night), 147, 148 Šedivý, Prokop, České Amazonky aneb Děvčí boj v Čechách pod správou Řekyně Vlasty (The Czech Amazons . . .), 32 Seifert, Jaroslav, 122; “Paříž” (“Paris”), 109–11, 112, 177–79 Shakespeare, William: Twelfth Night, 147, 148; The Winter’s Tale, 145, 147, 150 Shaw, George Bernard, Back to Methuselah, 65 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 68, 75 Siegfried figure, 34 Siet’ viery (Chelčický), 94–95, 101–2



index

Simpson, James, 24 Škroup, František, Libušin sňatek (Libuše’s Wedding), 36 Slánský, Rudolf, 103, 150 Slavín Cemetery (Vyšehrad), 9–10 Slezské písně (Bezruč), 81 Smetana, Bedřich, Libuše, 38, 39 socialism, 68–69 socialist realism, 105, 121–22, 124–25 Soviet Union, collapse of, 5 Stalin, statue of, 10, 102 Stalinist Terror, 1, 102, 133, 135, 148, 149–50, 152 Stará Boleslav, 25, 26 Staré pověsti české (Jirásek): golem legend in, 48; Libuše legend in, 38, 113 Statue of the Disappearing Man, 10 Sterk, Andrea, 93 Sternberg, Josef von, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), 174 Stoker, Bram, Dracula, 39 Strindberg, August, Fadren (The Father), 63 Suleiman, Susan, 165–66 surrealism, 6, 14, 44, 110, 118–24, 149, 168n1, 171 Švankmajer, Jan: Byt (The Apartment), 104n30; Lekce Faust (Faust), 168n1, 171, 172–74 “Svatební košile” (Erben), 74 Swales, Martin, 161–62 Symbolism, 81 syphilis, 11, 50 Tales from Seven Ghettos (Kisch), 68–69, 172 Tanner, Tony, 6; Venice Desired, 7 Teige, Karel, frontispiece for Nezval poetry collection, 122–23 Terezín camp, 104, 160, 162, 166 Tetka figure, 18 Thám, Václav, Šárka aneb děvčí boj u Prahy (Šárka; or, The Maidens’ War near Prague), 32 Thomas, Alfred, Anne’s Bohemia, 101 Tower of Babel myth, 99–102 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 34 Trial, The (Kafka), 87–91, 93; Camus influenced by, 132; Madsen influenced by, 176; postwar literature influenced by, 102, 103, 104, 105; Sebald influenced by, 159–60; Švankmajer influenced by, 174 Trial, The (Welles film), 174 Troy legend, 18, 24, 25, 31

203

“Tržnice” (Nezval), 124 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 147, 148 “Týden v tichém domě” (Neruda), 89, 90–91 Tyl, Josef Kajetán, 81; Jan Hus, 32 Týn Church (Prague), 130 unverloren, meaning of, 148 “Urteil, Das” (Kafka), 137, 163 Utopia (More), 60 Utraquists, 28 “U tří lilií” (Neruda), 91 Utz (Chatwin), 71–73 “Václavské náměstí k večeru” (Nezval), 122 vanitas concept, 94 věc, meaning of, 66 Věc Makropulos (Čapek), 65–66, 68, 158 venereal disesase, 11 Venice, 6, 7, 110, 125–26 Venice Desired (Tanner), 7 Versailles Treaty (1919), 4, 111, 134 Verschollene, Der (Kafka), 103, 107 “Věštkyně” (Erben), 37 Vilímková, Milada, 10–11 Viola (Twelfth Night), 147, 148 Virgil, Aeneid, 15 Vlasta figure: in Dalimilova kronika account, 22–23, 24; Jirásek’s portrayal, 38–39; in Kronika česká account, 29; as New Woman, 39; in Šedivý’s romance, 32; as symbol of Czech political struggle, 31–32; in Zeyer’s poem, 40 Vlček, Tomáš, 40 Volkovo Cemetery (St. Petersburg), 9 Von Schwelle zu Schwelle (Celan), 149 von Trier, Lars, 174 “Vor dem Gesetz” (Kafka), 104n30, 152–53 Vorleser, Der (Schlink), 161 Vrchlický, Jaroslav, 81 Wagstaff, Sam, 72, 73 War of the Maidens: Dalimilova kronika account, 21–24, 25, 31; Enlightenment treatments of, 31–33; Kronika česká account, 29–30; Zeyer’s treatment, 41–42 Watson, James, The Double Helix, 76 Wegener, Paul, The Golem: How He Came into the World, 11, 12, 56–59, 57, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 73 Weil, Jiří, Život s hvězdou (Life with a Star), 103–4

204

index

Weiner, Richard, “Netečný divák” (“The Indifferent Spectator”), 67 Weisel, Leopold, 45 Welles, Orson, The Trial (film), 174 Wells, H. G., The Island of Dr. Moreau, 60 Wenceslas I, Saint, 27; Charles IV’s life of, 27; martyrdom of, 26; shrine and chapel of, 8, 26, 114–15; statues of, 8–9 Wenceslas III, King of Bohemia, 20 Wenceslas IV, King of Bohemia, 55–56 Wends, 140 “Wenzelsplatz” (Bachmann), 141 Werfel, Franz, 81 Werner, Maria, 78 Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 68 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 165–66 Wilson, Woodrow, 4 Wingfield, Nancy, Flag Wars and Stone Saints, 4, 99 Winter’s Tale, The (Shakespeare), 145, 147, 150 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, 25n8 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 30 Wolverton, Lisa, 26 women: Amazons, 18, 19, 23, 24, 31–32; gender relations in early twentieth€cenÂ� tury, 59–64; gender relations in€EnlightÂ� enment, 30–33; as golems, 43–44, 65–66, 74–76; gynecological theories, 39;€matriarchal authority of, 96–97; motherwhore representational split, 39–40; New Woman figure, 39, 61; as rulers, 18–19; as vampires, 38–39, 40, 42; voting rights of,

60–61; wayward, threatening, 12–13, 53, 56–59, 60–64, 74 Women at the Beginning (Geary), 18–19 women in foundational legend of Prague, 15– 42; Chronica Boemorum account, 17–19; Dalimilova kronika account, 19–26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 40; fin de siècle treatments, 38–42; Historica Bohemica account, 27–28; Kronika česká’s account, 28–30; Legenda Christiani account, 15, 16–17; misogyny and, 16, 18–19, 35–36; National Revival treatments, 36–38; Pulkava’s account, 27; Šedivý’s romance, 32; Thám’s play, 32; War of the Maidens, 21–24, 25. See also Libuše legend; Šárka figure; Vlasta figure Wrong Side and the Right Side, The (Camus), 126 Wurm, Franz, 151 X-Files (television show), “Kaddish” episode, 73–74 Záboj and Slavoj (Myslbek sculpture), 39 Zelená Hora manuscript (fabricated), 33–34 Zeyer, Julius, “Ctirad a Šárka,” 40–42 Život s hvězdou (Weil), 103–4 Zlatá ulička (Alchemistengasse), 77 “Zone” (Apollinaire), 109, 112, 114–15, 116, 117, 143–44, 154, 161 Zusi, Peter, 84 Zwei Prager Geschichten (Rilke), 81, 84–85