PRAGUE.

For many centuries the metropolis of the kingdom of Bohemia, Prague (in Czech, Praha) became the capital of the Czechoslovak (now Czech) Republic on 28 October 1918. In 2005 the city had 1.2 million inhabitants living in an area of 192 square miles on both sides of the Vltava River, spanned by eighteen bridges. Prague has an ancient historical core, but it is also a robust industrial agglomeration that produces nearly 12 percent of the entire output of the Czech Republic (heavy machinery and tools, steel and cars, chemicals, paper, and textile and leather goods) and continues to assert itself as the center of the Czech publishing and film industries. Prague is the seat of the central Czech institutions of higher learning, including Charles University, founded in 1348, the Technical University, the Academies of Arts and Sciences, and the National Library. In the early twenty-first century it has become a powerful magnet to international tourists (about three million each year) attracted to its profusion of Romanesque, gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and modern architecture and art, relatively untouched by the devastations of World War II.

GROWTH, MODERNIZATION, ARCHITECTURE

At the end of the nineteenth century Prague was a city in the Habsburg provinces with 167,178 inhabitants, but their number more than tripled by 1921 (676,178) and, by the incorporation of suburban communes and villages, rapidly increased to 962,200 (1938). World War II caused tragic losses of Jewish and Czech lives, and after the expulsion of most Germans in 1945, the number of citizens decreased to 931,525 (1950). Through intensive industrialization planned by the state during the communist period, Prague reached the one million mark in 1961 and went beyond that later. In 2005 numbers are stagnant, though informed estimates suggest the presence of tens of thousands of undocumented workers from Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. The presence of perhaps fifteen thousand Americans in the "Paris of the Nineties" has been reduced, by an official count, to three thousand. The acute problem of affordable living space for the younger Czech generation, at least in the central districts, has not been solved. The birthrate is falling and the population is aging, the average age being 42.5 years. The technological and architectural modernization of the city was launched with the demolition, beginning in 1895, of the fortifications and the impoverished medieval ghetto, which most Jewish inhabitants had left long before. In the early years of the century, Prague architecture, close to the Vienna Secession, was dominated by art nouveau (Jan Kot?ra, František Bílek, and the famous 1911 Municipal House by Karel Osvald Polívka and Antonín Balšánek, with some interior decorations by Alphonse Mucha). Not much later, cubist buildings were constructed in the city center, including the House of the Black Madonna (Josef Goc?r, 1912) and Josef Chochol's surprising apartment houses. Modernist steel- and-glass palaces were built on Wenceslas Square (the Bat'a House and the Hotel Juliš, 1931), and the Slovene Josip Plecnik, much liked by the Czechoslovak president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, remodeled some parts of Prague Castle and built the modernist Church of the Sacred Heart (1933) in Vinohrady. The communist city planners, eager to make Prague the bastion of the "working masses," made the quick construction of mass housing their prime concern and by 1957 began to use the Soviet method of building with prefabricated panels; from 1961 to 1971 nearly sixty thousand small apartments were built in entire satellite towns to be reached by new subway lines (the housing units were called paneláky by the people but more often termed králíkárny, or rabbit warrens). After 1989 it was the first task of the building industry to rescue and to gentrify the deteriorating older buildings in the city core, but it was the American architect Frank O. Gehry's ultramodern National Dutch Insurance Company Building, popularly called the "Dancing House" (or "Fred and Ginger"), on the Vltava embankment that demonstrated the city's unbroken capability to seek rejuvenation once again.

CAPITAL OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC (1918–1938)

Inevitably, Prague as the capital of the First Republic had to cope with the problems of its different ethnicities and their political expectations. In the earlier nineteenth century, German speakers predominated, but industrialization and immigration from the Czech countryside changed the proportions of ethnicities and classes. In 1861 the Germans lost control of the city council, and while the number of Czech speakers doubled, the number of German-speaking citizens (mostly middle-class, and often Jewish) dwindled to thirty-two thousand, or 7.3 percent (1910). Prague German speakers were divided in their political allegiance between the activists, meaning those who were willing to be full-fledged citizens of the liberal republic, and the nationalists, who rejected republican institutions and in the 1930s turned to the Sudeten Party and Adolf Hitler. In the 1927 Prague municipal elections the German activists still mobilized twelve thousand votes (the nationalists four thousand), but the elections of 1938 demonstrated a catastrophic change (4,849 activist votes versus 15,423 for the nationalists).

GERMAN OCCUPATION AND FATE OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

Preparing his expansion eastward, Hitler ordered his Wehrmacht to occupy Bohemia and Moravia on 15 March 1939. Hitler himself did not stay overnight and left the newly established "protectorate" to the military and Konstanin von Neurath, a conservative diplomat of international experience who settled at the Palais Czernin, while the Gestapo, acting independently, resided at Bredovská Street. Prague citizens spontaneously demonstrated against the occupiers on 28 October 1939, commemorating the birthday of the republic, and after students rallied in the Prague streets in mid-November to participate in the burial of their colleague Jan Opletal, fatally wounded in October, all institutions of higher learning were closed by order from Berlin, many student functionaries were shot without trial, and twelve hundred students were transported to concentration camps. After Germany's attack on the Soviet Union, acts of resistance and sabotage continued to increase, and Hitler replaced the diplomat von Neurath with Reinhard Heydrich, SS chief of the Reich Security Office, who arrived in Prague on 21 September 1940. He immediately declared martial law. Within two months four hundred people, mostly of the intelligentsia, were executed; transport of Prague and Bohemian Jews to Terezín (Theresienstadt) and farther east was initiated; and workers in the factories were systematically wooed with better food rations, extra shoes, and an increase in wages. Heydrich was ambushed on a Prague suburban road on 27 May 1941 by a Czechoslovak commando unit flown in from England and died on 4 June. His death triggered new waves of terror in Prague and the entire country (including the destruction of Lidice and Ležáky).The commandos and their helpers were, through an informer's tip, discovered in the cellar of the Orthodox church in the center of Prague, where they all perished. In the later years of the occupation, power rested with K. H. Frank (once propaganda chief of the Sudeten Party) who continued to rely on Czech collaborators and to favor the working people at a time when the Allies drew nearer and Soviet, Slovak, and Czech partisans fought in the mountains and forests. On 5 May the citizens of Prague, guided by a National Council, rose up against the occupiers. Initially they were successful, but strong SS regiments made their way into the city and fierce fighting on the barricades erupted. For a short while Russian soldiers under General Andrei Vlasov, who had originally joined the Germans to fight the Soviets, switched sides and attacked the SS, but the National Council told them that their help was not wanted (they left for the west) and the hard-pressed Czechs had to fight alone. On the morning of 9 May 1945 the first Soviet tanks appeared to liberate the jubilant city, precisely according to the agreement between Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower and Alexei Antonov that reserved the liberation of Prague for Soviet troops. The Jewish population of Prague numbered more than 55,000 when the city was occupied (the original number had increased due to refugees from Germany, Austria, and, after Munich, from the Sudeten region), and the Prague Palestine Office succeeded in sending 19,000 Jews to Israel before it was too late. Transports to Terezín/Theresienstadt began in the fall of 1941 and continued until mid-March 1945, with 45,067 Jews deported from Prague alone. Oddly, Nazi ideologues during the war had wanted to establish a "Central Museum" of the Jewish race, with the result that collected ritual objects and entire libraries in dozens of Prague warehouses and synagogues were saved from destruction. When the war ended only 4,986 of the Prague deportees returned, and on the wall of the Pinkas synagogue the names of 77,297 Bohemian and Moravian Jews who perished in the Shoah are inscribed. In 2005 the Jewish community of Prague consisted of approximately 1,600 people, including a few young Czechs who converted for ethical reasons.

THE REPUBLIC RENEWED, THE COMMUNISTS, AND THE VELVET REVOLUTION

In May 1945 President Eduard Beneš returned to Prague Castle, unfortunately via Moscow, to an uneven conflict with the Communist Party and its new mass organizations. He accepted a new government of Communists and fellow travelers on 25 February 1948 and resigned on 6 June, making way for Klement Gottwald, longtime chairman of the Communist Party. The new regime, late-Stalinist in orientation, radically changed the shape of Prague life; all private enterprises, even small barbershops, were collectivized, and many members of the former middle classes were "relocated" to the countryside. In 1951 the party turned against itself, and in a series of show trials accused Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other leading functionaries (most of them of Jewish origins) of an "imperialist and Zionist" conspiracy against the people. Eleven of the accused, including Slánský, were executed on 2 December 1952. Destalinization was slower than in Poland and elsewhere, but over time new clubs and organizations formed, such as those of the wrongly arrested and the Club of Committed Non-Party Members; Ludvík Vaculík's courageous reform manifesto Two Thousand Words (1968) was published; and the Slovak Alexander Dub?ek, as newly named first secretary of the party, became the figurehead of the "Prague Spring" (winter to summer 1968). The Soviet Union and the communist neighbors of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, as it was called after 1960, did not tolerate efficient reform, however, and the members of the Warsaw Pact occupied not only Prague but the entire country, sending in troops and tanks and destroying what was called "socialism with a human face." The student Jan Palach protested by public self-immolation, and the state imposed a "normalization" of political and cultural life which was but a neo-Stalinist regime without Stalin. A new wave of emigration began (for example, the writer Milan Kundera and the critic and Franz Kafka defender Eduard Goldstücker). The "normalization" deprived many citizens of their jobs, and it was increasingly difficult to silence the dissidents and the opposition. On 1 January 1977 a Charter was signed by hundreds of citizens declaring "a free, informal, and open civic community," which (relying on the Helsinki Accords) insisted on its right peacefully to discuss political change with the authorities. Ultimately the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 set in motion radical transformations in Prague, and within a few weeks a "velvet" revolution ended the forty-one-year-long communist monopoly of power. A student demonstration on 17 November 1989, commemorating events in Prague fifty years before, was answered by police brutality in the streets; opposition and dissident groups resolved to work together, and on 19 November students and actors went on a university and theater strike in preparation for a general strike later. On 20 November and the days that followed, hundred of thousands of Prague citizens demonstrated in Wenceslas Square against the government. The Forum of Citizens decided to guide the mass protests, and the playwright Václav Havel, once a political prisoner and now chairman of the Forum, discussed political change with members of the communist government. In late December he was elected president of the republic, and when, on 8–9 June 1990, elections to the National Assembly were held, nearly 50 percent voted for the Forum, while the Communist Party polled 13 percent. In the Prague municipal elections of 1994, the Citizens' Democratic Party polled 40.89 percent of the votes, the Social Democrats 8.34 percent, and the Communist Party 7.26 percent.

REPUBLICAN LITERARY LIFE AND THE AVANT-GARDE

At the turn of the twentieth century Prague, with its many newspapers, theaters, and literary cafés, (among them the Slavia, the Unionka, and the Deminka) was the principal scene of Czech writing, though many "ruralist" authors preferred the quiet provinces. The founding of the Moderni Revue (1895) signaled the emergence of intellectuals of neoromantic vision (Julius Zeyer, Ji?í Karásek ze Lvovic) and a "decadent" view of human relationships, often imported from European fin-de-siècle literature. Within ten years, however, younger writers (among them Stanislav Kostka Neumann and Frá?a Šrámek) felt far more attracted by the collective demands of anarchism or communism than by erotic refinements. Jaroslav Hašek, one of the most famous Prague writers of the twentieth century, invented the character of Švejk, the (seemingly) dumb soldier eager to survive, in 1912. During World War I, Hašek served in Russia as a Czech legionnaire and Bolshevik commissar, and after returning to Prague he expanded his character's exploits into Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka z?tovéválky (1920; The adventures of the good soldier Švejk), the first of four satirical Švejk novels. The writers that were to represent the spirit of the independent republic published a literary Almanach for the Year 1914 as early as 1914, and in the conflicts of the 1920s and 1930s they did not hide their indifference to empty aestheticism and the rigid demands of class warfare. Karel ?apek published translations of new French poetry (to be used by the Czech avant-garde), plays about the future fate of mankind, including R.U.R. (1920), and many charming books about animals, gardens, and travels in Europe. His brother Josef, an eminent artist who died in a concentration camp, published a book of philosophical ruminations; František Langer, after his return from Russia, wrote plays about his World War I experiences and about picaresque characters in the Prague suburbs; and Karel Polá?ek, who died in Terezín, liked to portray "little people" in small towns. Shortly after the founding of the republic, poets, artists, and musicians of the Czech avant-garde formed the group Dev?tsil (The Magic Root) in 1920, their hectic admiration moving between the Soviet revolution and the powers of art. Vítz?slav Nezval, in his rich and melodious poems and his ideas about "poetism," celebrated the magic and seductive life of big cities (Pražský chodec, 1938; Walking in Prague). Vladislav Van?ura, originally a member of the avant-garde, turned to a stringent prose exploring the Czech past, as in his Obrazy z d?ji?eského (1939–1940; Pictures from the history of the Czech nation). He was executed in Prague in 1942. The musical avant-garde of Prague, occasionally in close proximity to Dev?tsil, developed its own factions. Alois Hába, in charge of his own composition class at the conservatory since 1923, wrote atonal and microtonal music, while others, including Bohuslav Martin? and Erwin Schulhoff, a German-Jewish contemporary of Kafka, experimented with fusions of classical music and jazz (Schulhoff later turned to agitprop music). Jaroslav Ježek, in-house composer of the Jan Werich and Ji?i Voskovec theater (originally close to the Dev?tsil group) became the true genius of Czech jazz in the 1930s and died in exile (New York, 1942).

PRAGUE WRITING IN GERMAN (1900–1945)

In the first years of the century and during the First Republic, Prague produced world-famous writers in German including Rainer Maria Rilke (who left Prague early), Franz Kafka, and Franz Werfel. Many of these writers came from Jewish families (who earlier in the nineteenth century had used Yiddish), sympathized with the Czech struggle for independence, and often translated Czech literature (Rudolf Fuchs, Pavel Eisner). The poet, novelist, and critic Max Brod liked to gather his writing colleagues around himself to organize their lives and publications; in his early novels (e.g., Ein tschechisches Dienstmädchen, 1909; A Czech servant girl) he finely probed what was called the Czech-German erotic symbiosis, but his later novels tend to be of a philosophical if not didactic kind. His closest friend was Franz Kafka, who worked in insurance offices most of his life and wrote long letters to women he loved, among them his first translator, Milena Jesenská. His stories and novels, such as Die Verwandlung (1915; The metamorphosis), Der Prozess (1925; The trial), and Das Schloss (1926; The castle), have attracted generations of dedicated readers trying to unravel their political, metaphysical, and existential meanings. Franz Werfel published exemplary expressionist poems (Der Weltfreund, 1911), wrote a famous novel, Das Lied von Bernadette (1941; The song of Bernadette), and lived with his wife, Alma Mahler, in Hollywood. Other Prague writers include Egon Erwin Kisch, untiring reporter in the service of the Communist International; Paul Leppin, charmed if not obsessed with the red-light corners of the old city; and Gustav Meyrink (not a native), who wrote the famous Der Golem (1915), repeatedly made into movies. It was the German occupation that dispersed, imprisoned, or killed the Prague German writers; among the few survivors were the novelist and sociologist H. G. Adler (who later died in England), Franz Wurm (now at Ascona), and the writer Lenka Reinerová, who, as of 2005, continued to live in Prague.

VICISSITUDES OF POSTWAR PRAGUE WRITING

Republican Prague, in spite of the later economic and political crises, was productive in literature and the arts, and while men dominated the poetic genres, women (such as Marie Majerová or Marie Pujmanová) importantly contributed to the development of the social and psychological novel. Modern poetry constitutes one of the glorious secrets of Czech literature. Josef Hora looked to Romantic tradition; František Halas forced language to articulate his tragic vision of life;Vladimír Holan, alone in the midst of Prague, cultivated the most difficult forms; and Jaroslav Seifert, in the days of Munich, published moving verse recited by old and young and, to the consternation of the communist functionaries, received the Nobel Prize for poetry in 1984. After the change of government in 1948 the communists used many sticks and a few carrots to keep the writers (many of them old party members) in line, but the official prescription for a Soviet type of socialist realism was embraced by few, and dogmatic critics like Ladislav Štoll ruled without mercy. Yet in the late 1950s and 1960s, concurrent with the stirring of the thaw, ironic and imaginative writing strongly reemerged: J. V. Škvorecký's Zbab?lci (1958, written in 1949; The cowards) celebrates jazz and mocks heroic slogans; Bohumil Hrabal enlisted the many virtues of a surrealist Czech idiom, and Milan Kundera, in his first (and best) novel, Žert (1967; The joke), wrote with grim melancholy about love, revenge, and the changes of political life. As early as 1963 Kafka was publicly discussed by scholars and critics, and small theaters produced many plays, called "absurd," by little-known playwrights like Václav Havel (Zahradní Slavnost, 1963; The garden party). However, the "normalization" was unable totally to suppress the independent writing that was published in clandestine samizdat editions, and after the Velvet Revolution, continuities of writing—as in the prose of Philip Roth's Prague friend and ally Ivan Klíma or of Daniela Hodrová, Kafka's true Prague heiress—were as important as the new books by Michal Ajvaz, Jáchym Topol, Michal Viewegh, and Edgar Dutka.

See alsoBeneš, Eduard; Charter 77; Czech Republic; Czechoslovakia; Destalinization; Dub?ek, Alexander; Havel, Václav; Prague Spring; SlánskýTrial;Velvet Revolution.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Czech Modernism: 1900–1945. Boston and Toronto, 1989. Exhibition curated by Jaroslav And?l et al. with contributions by Peter C. Marzio, Ji?í Kotalík, et al.

Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York, 1997. A history, from the first Slavic settlements to T. G. Masaryk, considering the creative presence of Czechs, Jews, Germans, and Italians.

Eggers, Wilma. Women of Prague: Ethnic Diversity and Social Change from the 18th Century to the Present. Providence, R. I., 1995.

Eyal, Gil. Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From "Prague Spring" to the Break-Up of Czechoslovakia. Minneapolis, Minn., 2003.

Lützow, Count Francis. The Story of Prague. Illustrated by Nelly Erichsen. London, 1902. Much read in earlier generations.

Mamatey, Victor S., and Luža Radomír, eds. A History of the Czechoslovak Republic, 1918–1948. Princeton, N.J., 1973. Inclusive and precise.

Novák, Arne. Czech Literature. Translated by Peter Kussi and edited with a supplement (1946–1974) by William E. Harkins. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1976. A classic, though a little on the conservative side.

Rothkirchen, Livia. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust. Lincoln, Neb., and Jerusalem, 2005. Inclusive and precise.

Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History. Princeton, N.J., 1998. The best book about the modern Prague arts.

Peter Demetz