PRAGUE

Prague (Czech, Praha; German, Prag), the capital of Bohemia, the largest of the three provinces comprising the Bohemian lands of the Habsburg Monarchy, sits in a valley formed by the Vltava/Moldau River, which runs northeast-ward through the city. One of the largest cities in the Habsburg Monarchy, modern Prague was founded by imperial decree in 1784 during the centralizing and modernizing reign of the en light en ed absolutist emperor Joseph II (r. 1765–1790). The decree created a single administrative unit from four historic wards, Old Town (Staré M?sto) and New town (Nové M?sto) on the east side of the Vltava, and Lesser Side (Malá strana) and Hrad?any on the west. The newly united city had semi-independent governing bodies, including a municipal administration (Magistrát) and a city council (M?stský výbor), as well as a mayor and two vice mayors. The gubernium, the highest level of state administration, acting as Vienna's agent, limited municipal activities and determined qualifications for and approved elected and appointed members. The gubernium was responsible for many of the modernizing improvements in Prague before 1848, including public parks and road works. Prague's early administration was a step toward nineteenth-century self-government. The municipal statute of Prague, of 1 May 1850, by which Prague was governed in the second half of the nineteenth century, was initially planned as a temporary measure, but it remained in effect with minor revisions until the dissolution of the Monarchy. The statute added a fifth ward to the city, Josefov (Josefstadt), whose boundaries coincided with Judenstadt, the former Jewish ghetto. It was named for Emperor Joseph II, who had reduced limitations on the Jews of the Monarchy with his Edicts of Toleration beginning in 1782. Three more wards were incorporated into Prague before 1914: Vyšehrad (1883), Holešovice-Bubna (1884), and Libe? (1901). The last two were among the industrial suburbs that grew up around Prague during the nineteenth century, expanding first through textile production and then machine industries. The other industrial suburbs were not united with the city until 1920, following the foundation of the First Czechoslovak Republic.

Prague's population grew rapidly during the nineteenth century, rising from 75,000 in 1800 to 118,000 in 1850. According to the last census of the Monarchy in 1910, Prague's population was 218,573, while the population of the metropolitan area had reached 600,000. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Prague was predominantly Czech, with a small, but influential, German minority and an even smaller, but also influential, and primarily German-speaking, Jewish minority. As elsewhere in the Bohemian lands, the Czech residents of Prague considered the Jews to be "German." Many Czechs conflated the Jews with their "national enemies," the Germans. According to the decennial censuses that the Monarchy began conducting in 1880, the declining percentage of Prague residents who employed German as their language of everyday use (obcovací?e?/Umgangssprache) was 17.5 percent in 1880, 14.7 percent in 1890, 8.6 percent in 1900, and 8.2 percent in 1910. Jews (identified by religion), constituted 9.27 percent of Prague's population in 1880, 9.19 percent in 1890, 8.62 percent in 1900, and 8.2 percent in 1910.

constructing czech prague

During the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg Monarchy the municipalities received significant autonomy. Suspended in the 1850s during the semi-absolutist era of the minister of the interior Alexander von Bach, autonomy was reinstated in 1861. Like the limited male franchise of the Bohemian Provincial Diet (?eský sn?m/Böhmischer Landtag), the franchise that elected representatives to Prague's municipal government was based on education and property. Also like the provincial franchise but unlike the imperial franchise, which became increasingly democratic after the turn of the century, the municipal franchise remained restricted until the end of the Monarchy. Predominantly Czech Prague elected its first Czech mayor in 1861. From 8 October 1882, when the newly elected mayor spoke of "golden, Slavic Prague," and the city's five German aldermen first walked out, then demonstratively resigned their seats, Prague had only two German (-Jewish) aldermen, and from 1885, only one. After 1888 until the end of the Monarchy, Prague had no German aldermen at all. Czechs alone governed the mixed-nationality provincial capital.

The center of Czech artistic and intellectual life, Prague was also the center of Czech national life. It was home to the so-called Czech national revival (národní obrození) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Initially a linguistic-cultural movement, affecting mainly the nascent Czech intellectual elite, by the Revolutions of 1848, the national revival had become a political force. During the nineteenth century, many national organizations, among them the voluntary associations that were also a legacy of the Revolutions of 1848, were founded in the Bohemian capital. The most significant was the Sokol (Falcon), the Prague Gymnastics Association that two Czech patriots of German descent, Miroslav Tyrš (Friedrich Emanuel Tirsch) and Jind?ich (Heinrich Fügner) established in 1862. With the slogan, "Every Czech a Sokol," this organization rapidly spread throughout the Bohemian lands. In contrast to many of its elite national predecessors, the Sokol, which promoted moral and physical health, was open to all Czechs. Sokol members soon became fixtures at Czech national ceremonies in the capital and elsewhere.

During the 1860s and 1870s, Prague was home to the Máj School (after Karel Hynek Mácha's epic poem of the same name), which sought to create a new Czech literature. Exponents shared with the older generation of Czech writers the assumption that literature and nationality could not be separated. The authors Jan Neruda and Karolína Sv?tlá were among its best-known adherents. While during the 1870s the almanac Ruch maintained the traditional Czech view of literature in service to the nation, those around the more cosmopolitan journal Lumír sought to introduce influences from world literature into Czech.

The development of urban infrastructure in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the form of telegraphs, telephones, expansion of tramlines, public lighting, and the installation of electricity, paralleled the growth of the capital. Between 1896 and 1912, the Prague city hall, in order to demonstrate that the Czech nation was not backward, but part of advanced civilization, undertook its most ambitious urban renewal project: the thoroughgoing demolition and reconstruction of the city's former Jewish ghetto, located next to the Old Town in the center of the city. The poorest district in the capital, its population was by then majority Christian. Hundreds of buildings in Josefov and adjacent Old Town were demolished to make way for wider, straighter streets and luxury apartments and offices. Only six of nine public synagogues, the Jewish city hall, and part of the Jewish cemetery remained after its completion.

The Czechs of Prague also embarked on an energetic program of national building that provided the city with important new landmarks to complement the panoply of existing Gothic and baroque buildings that marked the city's skyline. Among the most important was the neo-renaissance National Theater (Národní divadlo), whose foundation stone was laid in March 1868. The building was funded with donations from Czechs throughout Bohemia. The motto on the proscenium, "The Nation to Itself " (Národ k sob?), reflected the broad Czech national support that made the theater possible. Czech composer Bed?ich Smetana's opera, Libuše, about the legendary female founder of Prague, was specially written for the theater and premiered at its opening in 1881. The building burned down shortly afterward, a new collection was taken, and the theater reopened in 1883, again with a performance of Libuše.

Another important effort of the Czech national revivalists was the foundation of the national cemetery, Vyšehrad, which opened on the grounds of the castle by the same name in 1869. The Prague architect Antonín Wiehl, the preeminent exponent of Czech neo-renaissance style, designed the cemetery's centerpiece, the famous Slavín monument, which was unveiled in 1893. This monument, crowned by a sarcophagus and a figure representing genius, stands above the communal grave of more than fifty famous Czech artists, including the painter-illustrator Alfons Mucha.

In 1893, street signs solely in the Czech language superseded bilingual ones, with the Czech colors white and red replacing the Austrian black-on-yellow on the signs. In the last decades of the Monarchy, other symbols of the Czech nation became part of the built environment. Construction of the art nouveau Municipal House (Obecní d?m), paid for by the city government, began in 1905 and was completed in 1912. It was decorated with murals and stained glass windows by well-known Czech artists, among them Mucha. The Municipal House, located next to the Powder Tower (Prašná brána/Pulver Turm) at one end of na P?ikopech/Am Graben, the most prestigious commercial street in the capital, constituted a national challenge, because the Germans' community building, the Deutsches Haus, better known as the German Casino, was located close to the middle of the six-hundred-foot-long street, which ended at Wenceslas Square (Václavské nám?stí/Wenzelsplatz, formerly the horse market). Shortly after the turn of the century, the Czech-language Charles University (founded in 1348 and the oldest university in central Europe north of the Alps, it was divided into independent Czech and German entities in 1882), which also attracted Ruthenian, Slovak, and South Slavic students, was almost twice as large as its German counterpart. The Czech Charles University, together with the Municipal House and the National Theater, were among the most important built symbols of Czech Prague.

In addition, monuments to Czech national heroes were constructed. The most important was Ladislav Šaloun's art nouveau statue of the reforming Bohemian priest and Czech national hero Jan Hus, who was martyred in 1415. It shared the center of Old Town Square with the baroque Marian Column that the Habsburgs had unveiled in 1650 to commemorate their victory over the Swedes in the Thirty Years' War. The cornerstone of the Hus monument was laid amid much fanfare in 1903, and the completed monument was unveiled in 1915 on the four hundredth anniversary of Hus's death at the stake in Constance. Two more important national monuments in the center of Prague were Stanislav Sucharda's art nouveau monument of František Palacký, the leader of the Czech national revival, and Josef Václav Myslbek's equestrian statue of Saint Wenceslas at the top of the square that bore his name. Both were unveiled in 1912. The Palacký monument was among the largest in Prague. In addition to a huge granite statue of the great nineteenth-century Czech "national awakener" himself, it incorporated an allegory of the spiritual life of the Czech nation. The bronze figures around the base personified various phases of national life, including the physical and spiritual servitude of the Czech people. The equestrian statue stood before the neo-renaissance National Museum building that had been constructed between 1885 and 1890. These important symbols and institutions for nationhood that Czech leaders established in Prague's major public spaces during the second half of the nineteenth century both signaled the formation of the modern Czech nation and distanced the Czechs from the Germans.

The Bohemian capital, Prague, was host to a number of exhibitions and congresses at the turn of the century. The most important was the long-planned Provincial Jubilee Exhibition. Commemorating the centenary of the first industrial exhibition held in Bohemia (in honor of the coronation of the Habsburg emperor Leopold II [r. 1790–1792]), indeed in continental Europe, it opened in May 1891. Although it was originally conceived as a joint Czech-German project, the Germans had withdrawn the previous summer to protest Young

Czech opposition to the Bohemian Compromise in the imperial Parliament. Thus, the wildly successful exhibition became a display of Czech economic progress and the site of Slavic manifestations that highlighted Czech national cultural, economic, and political claims and achievements.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, predominantly Czech-speaking but cosmopolitan Prague was home to a circle of German-Jewish writers, the most famous of whom was Franz Kafka. Other important German-Jewish writers of that generation included Max Brod, Willy Haas, Egon Erwin Kisch, and Franz Werfel. They were part of a larger world of writers in German-speaking central Europe, and Brod especially played an important mediating role in helping make Czech literature better known in western Europe through translation into German.

nationality conflict in prague

The establishment of a republic in France in March 1848 had repercussions throughout the Habsburg Monarchy. Before 1848 Prague may have appeared to be a German city, but the revolutions that year demonstrated otherwise. Although Czech and German liberals made joint demands in March and April 1848, the language of the Slavic Congress, and the first open expression of Bohemian state rights (?eské státní právo/Staatsrecht) demonstrated the incompatibility of their aims. The question of German unification was the largest issue dividing the Czechs and Germans during the revolutionary year, a division underscored by Palacký's refusal to participate in the planned Frankfurt Parliament to discuss that very subject. The Prague Slav Congress, to which all Slavic peoples of Austria were invited, was to be a symbolic counterpart to the Frankfurt Parliament. It opened on 31 May, the day the Frankfurt Parliament was meant to convene. Its 341 delegates from the Habsburg Monarchy sought to promote political cooperation among the Slavs, an idea that became known as Austro-Slavism. The revolution in Prague had national, political, and social aspects, as demonstrated by the worker unrest of April and May, which sometimes took an anti-Semitic character, as had earlier Czech worker protests in 1844. The return of Czech students from revolutionary Vienna in late May, together with increased military activity in Prague, increased tension until a student-led rebellion erupted on 12 June. The rebellion lasted five days, ending only when the rebels capitulated to the Austrian field marshal Prince Alfred Windischgrätz. This uprising was essentially a social one and separate from the Slavic Congress, although the Congress in Prague was precipitously closed in June when Windischgrätz declared martial law, which lasted until 1853.

Martial law would be declared in Prague four times after the revolutions of 1848: in 1868, 1893, 1897, and 1908. Residents of Prague supported the Monarchy during the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, sending declarations of support as well as the coronation jewels to Vienna. The war was a disaster for Austria, and shortly after its victory in the Battle of Königgrätz/Sadowa in northeastern Bohemia, the Prussian army occupied Prague, easily breaching the city's baroque fortifications. One result of Austria's defeat was the decision to reach a compromise (Ausgleich) with Hungary in February 1867, restoring the Magyars' historic rights. The failure of the Czechs to reach a similar agreement, despite their loyalty to Vienna in 1859 and 1866, resulted in both Czech political parties, the Young and the Old Czechs, boycotting the diet and the imperial parliament and led to demonstrations in Prague during 1867 and 1868. There were protests on 28 August 1867, when the Bohemian coronation jewels were returned from Vienna; in January 1868, when imperial ministers visited the city; on 14 June, the seventieth birthday of the historian-politician Palacký; and on 21 June, when Emperor Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916) visited. The largest demonstration occurred on 14 May 1868, when the foundation stone was laid for the Czech National Theater. Paralleling the demonstrations in Prague were encampments (tábory, recalling the Czechs' Hussite legacy) at Czech historical sites throughout the Bohemian lands, in which thousands of Czechs participated. The imperial government declared martial law in Prague on 11 October 1868. It lasted for six months, during which time hundreds of Czechs were arrested, some patriotic associations were banned, and members of the Czech press—still headquartered mainly in Prague—were hounded.

Class-based demonstrations and protests in Prague, especially May Day celebrations, increased in size and intensity in concert with the growth of the organized working class. Although in November 1905 demonstrations for universal suffrage reached revolutionary proportions in Prague as well as in Vienna, bringing almost one hundred thousand workers into the streets of the Bohemian capital, there was no declaration of martial law. It was national conflict, sometimes containing a class component, that resulted in the declaration of martial law twice in the 1890s and once again in 1908. Beginning in 1891 there were street demonstrations in the capital in favor of universal suffrage. By 1893 they had taken on an antidynastic character, and the imperial government declared martial law. In its wake came the mass trial of the so-called Omladina (youth), in which Czechs were convicted of an alleged secret conspiracy against the state. The trial became a Czech national cause célèbre.

The 1897 and 1908 demonstrations, which included Czech attacks on both Germans and "Jew-Germans," reflecting persistent anti-Semitism in Prague, occurred within the context of Bohemia-wide, indeed, Cisleithania-wide national tensions. In April 1897 the imperial prime minister, the Polish count Kazimierz Badeni, proposed language ordinances calling for the equality of Czech and German in official usage among civil servants of Bohemia and Moravia, who would be required to demonstrate proficiency in both languages by June 1901. The proposal was met with eight months of protest throughout the Bohemian lands. Badeni's resulting resignation on 28 November precipitated violent clashes in Prague and its suburbs, after brawling erupted between Czech and German university students. Members of the Czech majority attacked German and Jewish property for four days, damaging German communal buildings and looting businesses and homes identified as German or Jewish in the city and its suburbs. A decade later, ongoing Czech-German tension throughout the Bohemian lands coalesced around the Diamond Jubilee celebration of the Habsburg emperor Francis Joseph's rule on 2 December 1908. They resulted in one more round of anti-German, anti-Semitic violence and the last declaration of martial law in Prague before 1914.

Following the outbreak of World War I, restrictions on the civilian population in Prague—political newspapers, many of which had their offices in the capital were censored or suspended; food and other commodities were rationed, and, increasingly unavailable—met little overt opposition prior to the abortive strike of Czech workers in Prague on 14 October 1918. When news that the Austrians had sued for an armistice on 27 October reached Prague the next day, hundreds of thousands of Czechs filled Wenceslas Square, and Czechoslovak independence was declared in Prague on 28 October 1918. Democratic interwar Czechoslovakia would provide ground as fertile for Czech-German national tension in Prague as had the Habsburg Monarchy, both because it was in fact a multinational state governed as a nation-state and because its legal system permitted a differently contoured, even an expanded, space for national opposition.

See alsoAustria-Hungary; Austro-Prussian War; Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia; Cities and Towns; Kafka, Franz; Nationalism; Palacký, František; Prague Slav Congress; Young Czechs and Old Czechs.

bibliography

Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York, 1997. A thousand years of Prague cultural history.

Giustino, Cathleen M. Tearing Down Prague's Jewish Town: Ghetto Clearance and the Legacy of Middle-Class Ethnic Politics around 1900. Boulder, Colo., 2003. A pioneering study of middle-class politics in the Bohemian capital at the fin-de-siècle.

Hojda, Zden?k, and Ji?í Pokorní. Pomníky a zapomníky. 2nd ed. Prague, 1996. A fascinating, well-illustrated series of essays on the politics of national sculpture in Prague and elsewhere in Bohemia.

Ripellino, Angelo Maria. Magic Prague. Berkeley, Calif., 1994. The volume employs a blend of fact and fiction to examine the commingling of three peoples—Czech, German, and Jewish—who produced a city that continues to fascinate.

Vlcek, Toma. Praha 1900. Prague, 1986. This art and architectural history contains spectacular illustrations of the city.

Nancy M. Wingfield