The other day someone asked me how long it took to write my new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe. “Six years, but really my whole life,” I answered without hesitation. For Prague has been a part of my life for as far back as I can remember.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1970, and my grandparents lived in a magical land we called “Upstate.” I found out sometime in elementary school that Upstate referred to anywhere north of Yonkers, but to me it named the place my sister and I went sledding, made up stories about the garden gnomes and plaster deer our grandfather placed around the garden, and heard our dad speak a strange language with his parents and their neighbors. Their rural neighborhood in Dutchess County had a surprising number of Czech speakers. My grandparents and their fellow-immigrant friends purchased parcels of land in the 1960s for weekend homes where they eventually retired. There was always a project going on: installing a roof on the garage, tending the garden, foraging for mushrooms, or baking an apple strudel. My grandfather filled glasses with beer or ginger ale, depending on the age of the “customer” at his built-in bar. Peanuts came in their shells, but apple slices were peeled. In the living room, a needlepoint of a castle on a hill above a river hung on wood-paneled walls.
Prague.
I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to know more about the city where my father was born. One day, in 1979, my grandmother began to cry while we watched the evening news. The story of the Iran Hostage Crisis had set her off, and I asked my father why. “She is remembering when she was in jail in Czechoslovakia.” This was information my nine-year-old brain could not reconcile. Jail was for criminals, and my grandmother—who learned to bake chocolate-chip cookies to placate her American grandchildren—was certainly not a criminal.
Over the years, I learned more about my own family’s history in Prague. My grandparents had owned a small liquor manufactory that produced sweet after-dinner drinks. My grandfather patented his chocolate-hazelnut concoction, which must have tasted like a melted chocolate bar with a kick. As a kid, I imagined their “factory” in the style of a textile mill with smokestacks and a huge workroom, but actually it occupied the basement and garage of their Prague family home. In Marxist terms, their small enterprise resembled pre-alienation artisan labor rather than exploitative capitalism. Still, in 1948, the Czechoslovak Communist Party nationalized the company and other small businesses. After a brief imprisonment, my grandfather joined an anti-communist group and eventually fled Prague. He crossed the border into Bavaria, leaving behind my grandmother and their three sons—ages twelve, six, and four months. She was arrested in January 1950 and spent several months in prison. Following her release, the family escaped to Germany, where they reunited with my grandfather. Not every family was so lucky. The man who led my grandmother’s party across the border was shot on his next trip. His wife and daughter waited for him at a Displaced Persons Camp near Munich, but he did not return. At the same camp, my grandfather knew the husband of executed Czechoslovak Socialist politician Milada Horáková.
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In fifth grade, I wrote the short story “The Road to Freedom,” a romanticized account of my family’s escape from Prague when my dad was seven years old. I must have watched too many crime-show reruns, because my introduction indicated that “names had been changed to protect the innocent.” After that undertaking, I took a break from my obsession with Prague. My sixth-grade teacher assigned me to write a country report on Czechoslovakia, and I asked to change to the United Kingdom. I think I carried some of the family trauma even at a young age. My Dad’s stories about eating Eintopf (a bland lentil soup) every day at the refugee camp, getting seasick on the Atlantic crossing, and his litany of missed opportunities had burned me out by age twelve. In high school, I embraced American history. Family trips to Boston, Hartford, and Providence and visits to historic homes along the Hudson River whet my appetite for local history. I remember talking to the minister who gave a tour of the Old South Meeting House in Boston, and I was awed by the idea that Phyllis Wheatley and a young Benjamin Franklin had sat in that very room.
In my sophomore year at the University of Richmond, in Fall 1989, I gravitated back to European history. I enrolled in a course called the History of Communist and Socialist Thought taught by Martin Ryle, an expert on the Soviet Union and European intellectual history. We read Marx, Engels, Lenin, Charles Fourier, John Stuart Mill, Robert Owen, Rosa Luxembourg, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky, and Eduard Bernstein. The predominant Cold War ideology no longer served me as I learned to think about the past—and Communism—in a nuanced way. Primary sources and historical context propelled me to complicate my thinking about the “left.” I realized that state socialism in East Central Europe was only one outcome of hundreds of forms of socialist thought.
Nonetheless, I can still recall my euphoria when my German language professor bounded into our classroom on November 10, 1989, shouting, “Die Mauer ist weg!” (the Wall is gone). Dr. Ryle, however, told me not to hold my breath for changes in Czechoslovakia or Romania: the hardliners would not let go in those countries as they were doing in Poland, Hungary, and Germany.
A few weeks later, I was home for Thanksgiving break working on a term paper on Václav Havel. Dr. Ryle had originally dissuaded me from this topic. He was unfamiliar with the obscure Czech dissident and playwright, he said, and could offer me little guidance. By the time I returned to school in late November, Havel had emerged as the leader of the Velvet Revolution and the future president of post-Communist Czechoslovakia. “Now do you know who he is?” I asked my professor. A few years later, when I was living in Prague, Dr. Ryle and other Richmond professors visited with their Dixieland band and performed with local musicians on the Charles Bridge.
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Soon after the astonishing events in 1989, I enrolled in a Czech summer school to study the language my father thought I would never need. On my first evening in Prague, in the summer of 1990, a graduate student took me to a restaurant overlooking Wenceslas Square. I pictured the crowds that had filled that space only months earlier and felt like I had at Boston’s Old South Meeting House. I was standing somewhere I could touch the past.
I devoted the rest of my undergraduate career to understanding Prague and the broader region of East-Central Europe. I studied Czech and German, wrote a senior thesis on the nineteenth-century writer Božena Němcová, and studied abroad in Prague twice. However, when I entered graduate school in 1992, I was unprepared for the challenges that historical thinking would pose for a scholar with personal ties to her region of focus. I had inherited a romantic view of “Czech” history in which an oppressed people emerged from the Habsburg era known as temno (darkness) and formed a democracy, only to be conquered again by Nazis and then Communists. Not only was this my family’s perception, but traditional historiography also emphasized this Czech national narrative. At Columbia, my advisor István Deák, a Hungarian by birth and a Habsburgist by profession, disabused me of those oversimplifications. Yet, even he sometimes fell into his own national-narrative trap. He loved to remind me that his grandfather had “smashed his Bohemian crystal in the fireplace” following the Treaty of Trianon that ceded Slovakia (or Northern Hungary) to Czechoslovakia.
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Writing Prague: The Heart of Europe enabled me to embrace the history of that city in all its contradictions. In my first book, Prague Panoramas: Sacred Space and National Memory in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, 2009), I argued that Czech nationalism was more complex than the Czech historical narrative that emerged in the nineteenth century. I recounted the religious rivalries among Roman Catholics, Protestants, and secular nationalists who embraced the fifteenth-century proto-Reformation led by Jan Hus and his followers. Still, my analysis stayed safely inside the Czech community to expose fissures within it, rather than delving into the diversity that defined most of Prague’s past.
My new book, Prague: The Heart of Europe, compelled me to write about the city in a new way. Composing a longue-durée history taught me how much the singular Czech narrative still affected my thinking. The French historian Lynn Hunt’s inspiring essay “How Writing Leads to Thinking” advises authors: “You can only really figure out what you think if you first put it on paper and then develop some distance from it. It has to be a part of yourself, but a part that you are willing to release from yourself.” Indeed, having to breathe life into eleven centuries of history forced me to think and rethink how I look at the past, particularly a past that affected both my personal history and my professional work. Writing Prague strengthened my resolve to question every conclusion I drew, which in turn enabled me to experience the city’s complexity and diversity in a way I never had before. As Hunt wrote, “Writing crystallizes previously half-formulated or unformulated thoughts, gives them form, and extends chains of thoughts in new directions.”
The five “lessons” that follow are not new ideas for me, but they are concepts I frequently reminded myself about as I composed my book. I hope that my readers will come to love the city I call my second home, but that they will also learn to appreciate the complex and contradictory history of the heart of Europe.
- We can never really know the past. The further back you go in history, the truer that statement is. In early drafts, I found myself reproducing some of the national narratives about the foundation of Prague that medievalists and archeologists now reject. Medieval sources are scarce and were produced for specific purposes—to promote a certain family’s prominence in a region, to legitimize new Christian beliefs and saints, and perhaps even just to tell stories.
- Prague was never the Czech capital (at least not until 1993, when it became the political capital of the newly founded Czech Republic). In fact, the way we understand “Czechness” did not emerge until the nineteenth century. Prague was diverse and multilingual from its establishment of the Bohemian Duchy in the tenth century. In subsequent centuries, speakers of Old Czech and Middle High German, polyglot Jews, and merchants and artisans from all over Europe all called Prague home. The Slavic “Czech” Přemyslid family ruled medieval Prague only into the fourteenth century. “Foreign” kings from Poland or Austria held power there from 1471 to 1918.
- Jewish history cannot be separated from Prague’s history. The first mention of Jews living in Prague occurs in a tenth-century travel narrative, and by 1700 the city had the largest Jewish population in Europe. The Jewish community’s intellectual and financial contributions to the city cannot be overstated. Medieval Torah studies shaped Ashkenazi daily life throughout Europe; the educational philosophy of Rabbi Loew and the financial prowess of Mordechai Maisel in the sixteenth century contributed to Prague’s “Golden Age.” Franz Kafka’s experiences in a rapidly changing fin-de-siècle Prague launched a modern form of literature that still brings visitors to his birthplace.
- You can love your family but question its narrative. Although Prague: The Heart of Europe does not tell my own family’s story, I acknowledge that my relatives were in Prague when thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths and when thousands of Germans were violently expelled from the country. While not directly involved in either atrocity, my family members–like most Prague Christians–likely kept their heads down and tried to live normal lives. While members of my Czech-American family may cling to a black-and-white narrative of the Cold War, I painted a nuanced picture of life under Communism. The brutality my grandparents experienced in the early 1950s did not characterize the whole communist era, but for immigrants, history of the homeland often becomes frozen in time.
- You can love a place and still see its cruelties and weaknesses. Without acknowledging how anti-Semitism and nationalism shaped Prague, we will never have a full understanding of the city’s–—and Europe’s–—past. Seeing Prague as a Czech-German-Jewish place (with Italian, Dutch, English, French, and other influences), enables us to grasp Prague’s unique blend of cultural practices, creative contributions, and architectural styles. We can also come closer to understanding how human societies descend into violence and intolerance.
