Czech Interlude: Sunday Morning River

It's a fine day by November standards, dim and veiled but not drenching. Even when the clouds lighten, the air is hazy, like a backlit scrim curtain in front of the landscape. The sky is a sort of polished silver, and the river is unpolished silver, dark and streaky. 

River Vltava (Moldau), looking toward Charles Bridge, November 2014. My photo.

This is not Berlin--Archangel has a couple of days of business in Prague, and I am tagging along.

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In East Lansing (which begins to seem remote and fantastical) we used to linger over Sunday breakfasts with NPR playing in the background--and oh dear, playing the same things in the background, week after week, month after month. Recycling the same slightly eccentric Sunday-morning repertoire, behind the Sunday-newspaper rustle and the hiss of the waffle iron. An overload of late-Romantic pieces, tone-painting the European landscape. 

How many Sundays did we hear The Lark Ascending (subject: English meadows, summer mornings)? Lots; but not as often as we heard The Moldau (subject: river flowing through Czech countryside). This is the second movement of Bedrich Smetana’s patriotic tone-poem cycle, Má Vlast (Czech for “my fatherland”). Other movements of Má Vlast recurred moderately often as well. It became a sort of family joke: we haven't for years been able to hear the (unmistakable) opening notes without moaning. Aaaugh, not The Moldau again, not Má Vlast again! (Though it's a perfectly nice piece of music. Here's a pretty Youtube version of the second movement, if you like.) 

So, after all these years of hearing about it, I am happy to see our Sunday morning river, the Moldau, at last. 

Island in the Vltava, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

But what shall we call the river? (Ach, these battles over central European names and languages and identities.) We shouldn't call it the Moldau. The Czech name Vltava is on the map; the German name Moldau has been booted out, along with other German names. I believe that Smetana, as an ardent Czech patriot, called it the Vltava. (Being an ardent Czech patriot--thus anti-Austrian--was a complicated business. He manned the barricades against the Austrians in the (failed) revolution in Prague in 1848, like a proper romantic composer--like Wagner making hand grenades for the (failed) revolution in Dresden in 1849--but Smetana only learned proper Czech in middle age, having grown up as a German speaker.) 

What shall we even call the country--what's the proper name of Smetana's vlast? The country isn't Czechoslovakia any more, since the Slovaks split off. The official name in English is the Czech Republic, but this is an awkward mouthful. English speakers sometimes say Czechia, and there is a movement in the Czech Republic to encourage the use of this name; fervid websites exist to promote it. But it's politically fraught. Names are not innocent.

According to a poll in the 1990s, two-thirds of the people in the country wouldn't use the name Czechia, and Vaclav Havel, of blessed memory, is quoted as saying, "Slugs crawl over my skin a little when I hear that word." For some people the name has bad historical associations--it sounds too like the Nazi term for the country, Tschechei. Also, some people see it as only meaning Bohemia (this is the part of the country that includes Prague) and ignoring the rest of the country, that is, Moravia and the Czech part of (mostly Polish) Silesia. After all, the word Čechy (Czech-y) means Bohemia, but the word for Moravia is Morava; and of course Silesia is something else again (see previous post for some material on Silesia). 
[http://www.expats.cz/prague/article/czech-language/whats-in-name-czech-vs-czechia/] 

Sigh. This is why mono-ethnic nationalism, which is enjoying a somewhat creepy revival in Europe in recent years, is senseless. What--to take an example--is it to be Austrian? Who is really Austrian, is there an Austrian culture? (There is, but it isn't coterminous with anyone's ethnicity.) The (anti-immigrant, anti-Europe) nationalist party in Austria has said, "the overwhelming majority of Austrians belong to the German ethnic and cultural community." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Party_of_Austria]  And it's easy, from the distance of the English-speaking world, to think of the achievements of Vienna around 1900 as something Germanic. But then, Mahler, the master of Vienna's music at the time, was from Moravia--and is it fair to call Moravia, in the eastern end of the Czech Republic, "Austria"? Freud (one of the best writers of German prose at the time, regardless of the doctrinaire silliness of some of his analysis) was also from Moravia. Is there a better German poet in 1920 or so than Rilke, who came from Prague? Or a more inventive fiction-writer in German than Kafka, who came from Prague (and spoke noticeably Czech-accented German but not terribly good Czech)? 

Kafka monument, Prague. Photo, Ferran Cornellà, Wiki Commons. 

Of course all these people "came from," and didn't mostly stay in, the Czech lands. The big time was elsewhere, and they went elsewhere when they could (Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York). It doesn't exactly make sense to call Mahler or Freud or Rilke "Czechs" (or even Moravians, in the first two cases). But to call them Germans or even Austrians (especially if Austria is defined as culturally German) is missing something too--it's Germanic cultural imperialism gone much too far. 

If you wanted to declare yourself an ardent patriot of the (mono-ethnic) nation to which Rilke and Mahler and Kafka belonged, what nation would that be? 

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Prague has great charm for outsiders. Archangel was last here in 1970 and recalls it fondly, in spite of the dilapidation and the overbearing Russian presence at the time. What did you like about it? I ask. 

It was lively, it was bright, he says. The girls wore miniskirts. They didn't in East Germany. (He was nineteen.) There's some kind of Romance-country, non-Germanic, fluidity and sparkle here. 

On the right bank of the Vltava, near National Theater, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

And it's no wonder if there's a faintly Italianate flavor to the place. In the Renaissance there were important trade routes, with clots of Italian merchants settled at main stops along the way, between northern Italy and Eastern Europe. Start in Venice, go north to Nürnberg (think of Dürer coming and going to Venice; it was a well-traveled route), turn right for Prague and Cracow and Lviv. All beautiful, rich, ornate places, where people brought in Italian architects when they needed a good palace.

In fact the main theme of Smetana's The Moldau is an adaptation of an Italian Renaissance tune called The Woman from Mantua (a sort of lilting, flirty tune, a 1607 version of The Girl from Ipanema), which spread all over Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century; popular songs moved on trade routes the way stupid jokes move on the internet.  It was adopted as a tune for folk songs in Poland and Romania and the Ukraine--and for a few other purposes also, as we shall see.

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Our Berlin acquaintance Herr B. grew up in Prague and had a "somewhat adventurous escape" (his description) in 1970 or so, after giving life under the Russian occupation a try and deciding it wouldn't work. The rest of his family had cleared out to Switzerland without giving life under the Russians a try, but ...  When he was in his teens, the height of ambition for a young man who thought he was a hotshot was to study philosophy at Charles University. In the summer of 1968, when the Russian tanks moved in, young Herr B. had just succeeded in the (very competitive) admission process at the philosophy department and didn't want to waste the chance. He had gone to Switzerland with his family but went back to Prague in the fall of 1968 to start the semester. ("It's hard to understand why," he says, looking back, considering. His wife laughs, and says very tenderly, "Weil du jung und doof warst." Because you were young and dopey.) 

Herr B. is not particularly enthusiastic about present-day Prague. The goal of young hotshots now, he says, is not truth but profit; it's not to understand the human condition but to develop a successful business model. Herr B. does not regard this as an improvement.

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A lot of the successful business models must have to do with tourism, it seems. Not that there isn't a substantial non-tourism economy here also (food processing, electrial engineering, pharmaceuticals ...) But how crammed with travelers the city is, even in November; summer must be intolerable. 

One wonders how much the successful business-model developers in the tourism business credit their success to their own talents and efforts and how much to the fabulous inheritance that has fallen into their laps. All this beauty. 

And oh, to be sure, the current owners and managers have worked hard on their buildings and their services, and they pay their taxes to keep the place maintained. But you have to pay to maintain ugly cities as well. The fabulous beauty is a free gift from the past, an inheritance from the dead.

Detail, Old Town Hall, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

I wandered around for a while collecting examples of these very Prague-like hooked or horned towers, with the little extra pinnacles on the corners. They exist elsewhere as well, but they seem particularly numerous and salient here.

Church, Our Lady Before Tyn, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

This design seems to have been picked up by illustrators of fantasy tales as a model for sinister towers: this is more or less what the dark wizard's tower looks like. The white wizard's tower looks different (probably more west-European). Especially on a dark day, the towers give center city a faintly sorcerous air, which is not entirely ahistorical. 

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What do you think of, when you think of a city that you barely know, let's say Prague?  It had miniskirts in 1970, says Archangel. It looks like a cross between Rome and Salzburg, says our friend the diplomat, who grew up on the German-Austrian border an hour or so from Salzburg. (In unfamiliar places we see reflections of ourselves.) I think of sitting in the fairground stands in Colorado, playing in the band that provided background music for the rodeos in the summer of 1968. One afternoon between the bull riding and the barrel racing someone came clumping down the stands and said, There are Russian tanks in the streets of Prague (which, in rural Colorado, we pronounced to rhyme with "plague"). We were doubtful that this could be true. 

Or I think of a history-of-science course in college, taught by one of those disappointed intellectuals who were bounced by history from the stimulating and disastrous environment of central Europe to the cornfield and cow-town universities of the interior US. 

He was born an hour west of Cracow, in Silesia, on that road the Italian merchants took from Prague. He grew up in Berlin, studied physics at the U of Berlin with Schrödinger, had a recommendation from Einstein, got his PhD at 24 ... while being busy with many things. There was theater; he worked as an assistant to some director in the ebullient Berlin theater scene. There was politics, lots of left-wing, anti-Nazi politics. But his side lost, and the Nazis took over the year after he got his PhD. This was the end of any career hopes for a Jew, and the storm troopers beat him up for his political activity, so he took the hint and cleared out to Israel. More politics, journalism, a little science on the side. Then university positions in South Africa and the US, more science again, and history of science. A handful of books with mostly second-tier publishers. Some attempts, with decreasing energy and interest, to teach the massively clueless mid-American young, who thought he was vain and boring when he talked about his past. In a few more years he would be dead.

He had us read Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, which leaves a vivid impression of scientific life in Renaissance Prague. Here is Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer at Rudolf II's court. (Prague is the capital of the Holy Roman Empire under Rudolf, who does not much like Vienna.) Brahe is an observation and measurement maniac: "the first competent mind in modern astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts," says one historian. [Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.]  

Portrait of Tycho Brahe. From Wiki Commons.

You can't really tell from the portrait that Brahe has a false nose. (He lost part of his own in a duel and wore a metal replacement. The duel was over the correctness of a mathematical formulation. Apparently neither Brahe nor his opponent could come up with an adequate proof--and under these circumstances, if you're a sixteenth-century nobleman who cares about math, what are you going to do?)

Brahe does not do great things with his measurements; he just likes to measure. He still believes that the sun orbits the earth. But Kepler, Brahe's assistant and successor as court astronomer in Prague, is able to show decisively, No it doesn't, using Brahe's fantastically abundant and exact measurements. And, on the same basis, Kepler can deduce the laws of planetary motion that will provide the foundations for Newton. 

Kepler also hopes, through mathematical analysis, to capture the harmony of the music made by the souls of the stars and the planets. (Koestler's point, in The Sleepwalkers, is that the process of scientific discovery is not nearly so sanitized and rational as some science-zealots claim. When Kepler makes great strides in physics, he thinks of them as steps along the way toward hearing the songs that the stars sing to each other. (Songs presumably not resembling themes from Má Vlast?))

As Kepler believes this music is in harmony also with the music of human souls-- that is, there is an influence of stars on souls--Kepler is kept busy casting horoscopes for Emperor Rudolf. Then, later, casting horoscopes for the players in the Thirty Years War, which starts in Prague when Rudolf and his successor are dead, and tears Central Europe to pieces. 

So when I have thought of Prague I have thought of Rudolf's court, with its extraordinary gathering of artists and scientists and magicians. And Rudolf in the middle: withdrawn, depressive, a political failure, an alchemist of some reputation. 

Mala Strana and Judith towers, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

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Besides wicked-wizard towers there are plenty of 1900-ish art-nouveau-ish buildings in Prague. As I walk up and down the riverside neighborhoods I start collecting caryatids and atlantes (this is the plural of atlas)--those female or male figures that support a portal or a cornice or a roof. Some are just willowy young persons holding up architectural decorations (such lightweight decorations in the picture below that the ladies probably do not count as caryatids). 

Caryatids on building near National Theater, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

The atlantes are often more more heavy-duty, more obviously carrying the weight of the turn-of the century world.

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I am happy to get my ear attuned to the sound of Czech here; in Berlin it sometimes bothers me that I can't tell one Slavic language from another in the street (and there are a lot of Slavic languages in the street in Berlin). But in Prague I could hear the difference. There were a lot of Russian tourists (the free maps at our hotel had text mostly in Russian), and of course the general stream of talk in the street was Czech, so you could hear the languages side by side. The Russian was clear and open and hard like cold water, and the Czech somehow thicker and sweeter, like poured honey. 

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Czech is one of those languages like Dutch or Danish that is spoken by too few people to make it practicable as the only language a non-backwoods-dweller speaks. If you're a native Czech (Dutch, Danish, etc.) speaker, you need to have a serious second language. And here, you can more or less tell someone's age by their second language. For the oldest it's German, for the middle aged it's Russian; for the young it's English. And all these languages have brought cultural influences with them.

Ethnic nationalists worry that letting in too many different sorts of people into a country will dilute everyone's culture to nothing, to some dreary lowest common denominator. Eastern Europe makes it obvious that this is not so. You can have a distinctive culture that is not mono-ethnic. Bohemia and Moravia and Silesia used to be wonderful mixed forests of culture--Slavic and Jewish and Germanic and even a bit Mediterranean. The twentieth century laid waste to these mixed forests, in ways that probably cannot be mended. The Prague that was twenty-five percent Jewish, in the eighteenth century, is not a version of the city that will return.

The Jews are mostly gone, and the Germans are mostly gone from Prague. There was a wish, at the end of World War II, to clear the murk of Central European ethnicity, to have the Czechs on one side of the line and the non-Czechs on the other. 

This worked about as well as you would expect. Other people always come, and Prague is full of immigrants. A Czech acquaintance who lives in a heavily Vietnamese neighborhood was telling us that the Vietnamese children are often very culturally Czech. Their parents work such long hours at their businesses that they don’t have much time for the children. They hire old Czech women as nannies, so the children grow up with Czech language and songs and fairytales and (somewhat old-fashioned) attitudes, and not so much Vietnamese.  Banana children, they say, yellow on the outside, white on the inside, and a bit uneasy about it. But this is life, we are all more mixed in our identities than the identity-politicians would like to admit. 

What is má vlast, what is someone's native country? Our acquaintance Herr B, the would-be Prague philosophy student, found when he arrived in Germany in the early 1970s (having rejected Switzerland as hopelessly philistine) that he could be counted as a German (automatic citizenship, stipend at the university, etc.) because his father’s education had been at the German gymnasium (college-prep school) in Prague, not the Czech gymnasium. This counted as an indicator of cultural identity and probable ethnicity. But the only reason Herr B.’s father got a German education was that in the 1930s the German school in Prague accepted Jews and the Czech school didn’t. So, being a Jew, he ended up counting as ethnic German. 

Go figure.

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When we set out to return to Berlin, we had to stand around a longish time in the train station waiting for the track announcement of our delayed and strike-truncated train. The trains are very frequent at the Prague station and the announcements flowed endlessly over us in uncomprehended Czech.

And what was driving me crazy was the set of tones indicating that a major announcement was coming. It was the four-note opening theme from the first movement of Má Vlast. It was absolutely insane-making, like having an announcement every minute preceded by the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. (Music used this way is not exactly Kepler's harmony of the universe.)

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But it's hard to get away from these tunes. Hanns Eisler, the composer of the now-unused East German national anthem, adapted the Moldau theme to provide a tune for Brecht's Song of the Moldau, a fine rabble-rousing piece that was meant to say, during Nazi times, Things change, oppression doesn't last forever:

     Am Grunde der Moldau wandern die Steine,

     Es liegen drei Kaiser begraben im Prag.

     Das Große bleibt groß nicht, und klein nicht das Kleine,

     Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag.

 The stones in the bed of the Moldau roll onward,

 The bones of three Kaisers lie buried in Prague,

 The great don’t stay great nor the little stay little,

 The darkness has twelve hours but then comes the day.

(Of course in English you lose the sound that carries so much of the verse here: those grinding, growling, gr and dr sounds with long ahs and ees between them (Es liegen drei Kaiser begraben in Prag--Rudolf the alchemist and who else?). It sounds like wind on a rocky hillside, like water rolling stones.)

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Also, the Moldau theme--that classic expression of Czech nationalism, that Italian Polish Ukrainian Moldovan folk tune--is, with a few  modifications, the tune of the Israeli national anthem.