Prague’s hidden histories: Chad Bryant on exploring city’s diverse identities via marginalised figures
US academic Chad Bryant explores the recent history of Prague through the prism of diverse personalities in a book just launched in Czech. Prague: Belonging in the Modern City blends the stories of socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans and Vietnamese with fascinating facts about the development of the metropolis from the late days of the Habsburg Empire to the present time. I spoke to Bryant when he was in town for the launch of the Czech translation.
You’re a professor of history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. You’re an expert in the history of this region, specifically of the Czech lands. What led you to Czech history and all things Czech?
“I guess the short answer is I worked as an English teacher in Žďár nad Sázavou in 1993 and it was at that moment that I really kind of fell in love with the country.
“I became a newspaper reporter after that [in the US] for a little bit, and then decided that a great way of sort of combining writing and teaching and returning here every year was to go to grad school [laughs] and become a Czech historian.”
What was your experience of living here? How long did you stay at that time?
“I lived here in 1993, 1994, during the school year. I worked for a new private gymnazium for tourism and also there was another school, what we would call a community college, attached to that.
“Also I worked at ŽĎAS, the big steel factory there, for a little bit.
“It was great. It was an interesting time to be here in 1993.”
You’re here now for the Czech launch of your 2021 book Prague: Belonging in the Modern City. It looks at different periods in the modern history of Prague and those periods are tied, in each case, to one individual. I think it’s a fantastic book, but I’m very curious, how did you hit on that structure?
“I wandered my way toward it.
“I was approached by my editor at Harvard, Kathleen McDermott, to write a book about Prague – we both felt there was a need for it in English.
“And I began writing a sort of typical history of the city and its leaders and its great musicians and artists.
“I began writing a typical history of the city and its leaders. But then I realised I kept replicating the expected sort of narrative.”
“But then I realised that I kept replicating the expected sort of narrative that focused on the canon of Czech nationalism and Czech history.
“So I then decided I would disrupt that by finding people who were marginalised characters in the city’s history and focus on them and try to recreate the city at different moments in time, from their point of view.”
The first section is called German City and the person you focus on is Karel Ladislav Zap, who was previously known as Karl Zapp. He Czechified his name, and himself. Who was Zap, and why did he change his identity like that?
“Zap came from a lower middle-class German speaking family and he eventually found his way into university here in Prague.
“I think one of the reasons – though we don’t really know, he didn’t keep a diary or memoir – that he began speaking Czech and changed his name was that he fell in with a group of Czech patriots at that time.
“It was the same time as Karel Hynek Mácha and others.
“He became sort of enamoured of the Czech national movement and the Czech language and became a patriot of a sort.
“And he also fell in with this group and I think that was part of the story too. It was almost happenstance that he became friends with this community and this community gave him the sense of belonging in the city as Czech.
“And then he began to imagine the city as Czech, as a result.”
Would it have been a common thing for somebody who was from a German background to Czechify themselves? I guess the best-known case of this would be Miroslav Tyrš, the co-founder of Sokol, who was previously called Friedrich Emanuel Tirsch. Was that common?
“It happened. It wasn’t extraordinarily common.
“My colleague Gary Cohen wrote a book a long time ago about German-speaking rural working class folk from the countryside who came to Prague later in the century and eventually became Czechified.
“They adopted Czech as their first language and so forth. There are cases here and there.
“The vast majority of the ‘awakeners’, at least in this time period, were Czech-speaking sons and daughters of rural peasants.”
So there’s also a class aspect? These were not the elite.
“No. That’s a really important thing about that chapter: At that time the official language of the Habsburg bureaucracy was German, the gymnasia, the high schools that led to college, were all in German, the administration was in German and the largest factories and banks – the middle classes – almost all spoke German, which was also seen as the language of education.
“The vast majority of the ‘awakeners’, at least in this time period, were Czech-speaking sons and daughters of rural peasants.”
“So the lower middle classes absorbed or embraced Czech almost… not as a protest but as a mean of distinction from that, and eventually sort of sought their way into the middle classes while still distinguishing themselves from the upper middle class German speakers.”
And Zap promoted strolling around Prague?
“Yes, he did. That was one of the ways that this group of people – Zap and his friends and others – were mimicking the ways of the upper middle class German speakers, who in turn were mimicking the practices of the European aristocrats of their time.
“It was a means of socialisation and creating community.
“Also they were creating a sense of place by walking the city. They actually walked the walls of the city, which were open at that time.”
That’s also interesting in the book – you talk about the fact that the city walls, which also had toll gates or whatever, were done away with towards the end of the 19th century.
“Yes. It was very controversial, because many people did enjoy walking along the walls.
“But you can still see the footprint of those walls…”
At Petřin, right?
“Yes, at Petřin. Also Wilsonova, which goes just below the studio here – that was the wall. And also where Hlavní nádraží is right now.
“Yes, it was very controversial, because people enjoyed walking along the walls.
“But there were also a lot of businesses on both sides of the walls that wanted to do away with them.
“Also they didn’t serve any function any more. They used to be a customs barrier, primarily, in the 19th century, and that was also done away with.”
The next section of the book you call Czech City. When and how did the city switch from being German, as you put it, to Czech, in terms of the running of the city?
“Over the course of the 19th century, especially after 1848, there was a mass migration of Czech speakers from the countryside to the city to work in the factories and so forth.
“These beautiful late 19th century buildings, on Václavské náměstí and Národní and so forth, were sort of monuments to Czech success.”
“But there was also a booming of the Czech middle class, thanks in part to education laws, which allowed for the expansion of elementary school education but also the creation of Czech language gymnazia and eventually, in 1881, a Czech university here in Prague.
“So by the late 19th century the Czech middle class had grown to such a size that they were able to win the votes and eventually take over the city council.
“And they also began to take over the city spatially. As you walk anywhere here and see these beautiful late 19th century buildings, on Václavské náměstí [Wenceslas Sq.] and Národní and so forth – these were sort of monuments to Czech success.
“Obecní dům [Municipal House] was the culmination of that moment, of showing that we not only have wealth and political power – we have culture as well.”
And they took down the German street names?
“They did take down the German street names. First they were German and then bilingual and they eventually took down the German street names as well.
“For German speakers you can imagine how traumatic that must have been [laughs].”
In the section Czech City, you focus on Egon Erwin Kisch – I must say was the only protagonist I had heard of – who was a German language journalist. Why did you select him to be representative of that period?
“First of all because I love his writing.
“This was the early part of his career. He eventually went on to become a travel writer, he supported the Communist Party and died in 1948, but this was his first years, when he really made his name.
“And I chose him because he captures this moment in which German-speaking Jews especially became increasingly marginalised in a city that was increasingly dominated by the Czech middle classes, especially.
“Egon Erwin Kisch captures this moment in which German-speaking Jews especially became increasingly marginalised.”
“Also I liked his writings. He wrote a column called Prager Streifzüge, or Prague Forays, as I translate it.
“And he made a point of going to down and out places and attempted, in his own sort of bourgeois way, to have a sympathetic view of the down and out; I don’t think he would have used the word proletariat at that time.”
But some people accused him of slumming it a bit, no?
“Yes. He was very clever. He would sometimes even dress as a pauper or whatever and go slumming and write these beautiful stories for his upper middle class German audience.
“So yes, it’s a complicated figure. In his defence, his writings were republished by the Czech Social Democratic Party, so I think they saw something useful there.”
Around this time there was also the slum clearance of the Josefov district, the Jewish Quarter as it’s known. I was surprised, though, that by the time they did away with the quarter only around one-quarter of the population were still Jewish.
“Yes, that’s right. Because up until the early nineteenth century Jews within Josefov were not allowed to leave the so-called ghetto. They were not allowed to buy property outside it.
“But after 1848, or even before that, many began to do so. They had the opportunity to do so and the wealthier ones especially could afford to do so.
“So they sort of left this space. The land was not very desirable, right by the river, with bad infrastructure and so forth.”
Was the razing of hundreds of buildings necessary? Or was it a kind of loss for Prague, do you think?
“It’s a debate that still takes place today.
“The biggest loss for the people who lived there was they were simply expelled from their homes and became homeless, overnight.
“One of the arguments at the time was that this was a sanitation effort.
“But it was also intended primarily to beautify Prague. This was a sore spot for Czech national pride in the city.
“And there were a lot of xenophobic and racist stereotypes that were sort of imagined onto that space.
“Kisch wrote after this all, but the remnants of that anti-Semitism were very much alive in Prague at that time.”
In the Revolution City part of the book you focus on the foundation and early decades of the Czechoslovak Communist Party through a member called Vojtěch Berger. But there were a few facts that also really jumped out at me. One was that Masaryk had his own intelligence service, which would seem to me to go against his benevolent image. Why did have his own intelligence service?
“That was mostly to keep an eye on political parties and rivals.
“I think even more so it was the censorship apparatus that he sort of oversaw.
“But I think it’s also important to appreciate how fragile the republic must have felt in 1918.
“It’s important to appreciate how fragile the republic must have felt in 1918.”
“There was a Communist government, obviously, in Bolshevik Russia, in Hungary. There was an uprising in Munich, and there were also German-speaking uprisings in places like Kadaň.
“So this was sort of a heavy hand to protect what he saw was an important project.”
And the Czechoslovak Communist Party got a million votes in one of the elections in the interwar period.
“Yes, one-fifth of the vote in 1925, I believe.”
Also I thought the Spartakiads were created after 1948, when the Communists basically took the Sokol slets and rebranded them. But you say that the two ran in parallel between the wars.
“Yes. The original Sokol, with Tyrš, was in the 19th century of course and they were inspired by German equivalents.
“And yes, it was in part Bolshevik/Soviet inspired, but it also grew out of these local roots.
“Because the Social Democrats had also had their own gymnastics organisation before the war and, as I write in the book, the Spartakiáda was one of the many ways in which radical leftists within the Social Democrats broke away from the party: they created their own gymnastics organisations.
“And Berger was crucial to that. He was in the gymnastics organisation at Výtoň, right below Vyšehrad.”
And in 1921 when a Spartakiad took place at Maniny it was a huge event?
“Yes, absolutely. There’s a wonderful sort of documentary that you can find on YouTube of that moment, of people marching in and the enormity of the Spartakiad. The coordination was best seen live.
“All these different people were moving in unison and that’s really the idea: that you are part of this larger movement, this larger community, and you get meaning through that effort.
“It was very powerful. And [Berger] wrote about this in his diary, how emotional this moment was. And he encouraged his kids to do it as well [laughs], and so forth.”
Are you one of those people who regard the First Republic as not having been a success?
“I think that’s a hard question to answer. What’s the measure of success?
“In some ways they were a product of the late 19th century and in many ways of the middle class political practice of the time.
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“And they were facing a lot of headwinds. As the cliché goes, this was the last liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.
“But that said, I think there was also a lot of blindness to Slovak nationalism, to working class concerns.
“There was a lot of paternalism that came with it.”
In the fourth section, Communist City, the main character is Hana Frejková, whose father Ludvík Frejka was a Communist economist who worked for Gottwald. Previously he was known by his German name, Ludwig Freund. He was executed after the notorious Slánský trial. What was the appeal of Hana Frejková as a character for you? I know you also met her and, as far as I know, she’s still alive.
“Absolutely. In fact I’m having a koláč with her on Friday. She’s wonderful.
“I was actually referred to her by my friend and colleague Kateřina Čapková. I’m co-writing a book right now with her and Diana Dumitru about the Slánský trial, which ended in Ludvik Frejka’s death.
“She had suggested I read her memoir, one because Hana’s background is again this wonderful mix of German, Czech and Jewish backgrounds.
“Also the memoir really captures her life after her father’s execution and her effort to sort of find her way back into society, which had literally expelled her and her mother from the city after his death.”
And yet when Gottwald died, Hana and her mother Alžběta, formerly Elisabeth, cried.
“Yes. People often talk about that moment. It’s kind of hard to recreate and I wouldn’t even try to get in the minds of those people.
“Part of it I would say was a kind of a collective obligation but also feeling.
“But I don’t know. It was an interesting moment.”
The most famous, or notorious, show trials were of course the Slánský trial and the trial of Milada Horáková. But you say that in early 1951 there were nearly 500 local show trials. Would they have been on the same kind of model, with fabricated testimonies and all the elements that we know from the classic show trials?
“Yes. The Slánský trial was recorded and the smaller show trials were not; most of them were behind closed doors, though they were publicised in local papers and so forth.
“A lot of it depends on how you define show trials.
“The Slánský trial is the classic show trial in which the defendants are basically reading a script and this was made into a propaganda effort to explain away deficiencies of some sort and also undo rivals within the party.”
But also didn’t Ludvík Frejka write some letter to Gottwald, basically apologising for whatever he had done, or hadn’t done?
“It’s maybe less an apology than sort of… It was a complicated letter.
“A lot of the people who confessed had obviously undergone months of torture and they knew that their families were under threat.
“But there was also the sense, among some of them, that they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the party.
“And in that letter I think he’s mostly saying, in coded words, I didn’t do anything wrong, I did exactly what you asked me to do and I’ve always been committed to this cause.
“So I kind of read it as there’s almost a sense of him writing with a sense of betrayal: ‘You know, maybe nobody else knows, but at least I hope that you know that I wasn’t part of this fictitious conspiracy.’
“And he was Jewish. He didn’t say that, but it was pretty clear that he understood what was going on.”
And Hana Frejková herself has had a very colourful life. But still I think maybe her story is in some ways not so atypical. She was somebody who somehow found a way to navigate through the Communist years and have some kind of OK life.
“Yes. She became an actress, and a very well-regarded actress, here in Prague in the 1970s and ‘80s especially.
“And like a lot of people, she kind of found her space within normalised Czechoslovakia.
“Other people found their spaces in chaty [country houses] or in their apartments, or other places where they could meet people and enjoy a sense of community different than the official spaces of going to parades or even schools, which required certain curricula and so forth.”
You say also that about 20,000 Czechoslovak Jews were the victims of something called Operation Spider early in the normalisation period. What exactly was that?
“That was mostly an effort to, for lack of a better word, terrorise people of Jewish background here in the 1970s.
“It grew out of this anti-Semitic sort of moment, which in some ways was more intense than it had been under Stalinism or in the immediate years after Stalinism.
“It was mostly run by the secret police and involved intensive surveillance of anybody who they believed to be Jewish.”
In the final section of the book your lead character is a Vietnamese blogger called Duong Nguyen and you write quite a bit about the Vietnamese minority here. That part of is called Global City. Can we really consider Prague to be a global city?
“Yes. I guess my argument there is that in some ways it’s always been a city of migration, whether it was Czech peasants in the 19th century or Germans being expelled after the war, or Greek civil war fighters coming here afterwards, and so forth.
“And even during the communist period there were various international agreements with places like Vietnam and Angola that brought people from around the world to Prague.
“Especially after the fall of communism, the world came to Prague.”
“My argument there is that in some ways it’s always been connected to the larger world, but in the case, especially after the fall of communism, the world came to Prague in ways; through capitalism, but also through migration, specifically through the Vietnamese community but also through the Ukrainian community.
“Many Slovaks moved here. Yugoslavs in the 1990s and so forth.”
I would say that some foreigners, especially from places like the States and the UK, tend to regard Czech society as quite vanilla. But for me it is very international – it’s just a different kind of international.
“Absolutely. I think it’s very important to rethink that whole thing.
“I’m always very cautious; I’m not Czech, I don’t live here, I’m not a citizen, I don’t vote.
“But I think it is important and I think this is a sort of global challenge: how to imagine a sense of community and nation than isn’t based on race?
“Duong’s writing is fantastic. Her Czech is beautiful. And in my mind she’s more Czech than many people I know [laughs].
“Because she loves this place and she loves this language, and that’s the core of what Czechness really is, in my mind.
“It’s about language and this culture and this history. It doesn’t mean that you have to have white skin to become part of that.”
Prague: Belonging in the Modern City was published by Harvard University Press in 2021. It came out in Czech last year under the title Sounáležitost s moderním městem on the Argo imprint.
