Stephen Weeks: a story of Prague on the edge of a cliff
The British writer, director and film producer, Stephen Weeks, is fascinated by the past and he relishes exploring the unexpected and sometimes uncomfortable details that tend to be left out of the history books. This is certainly the case in his novel Daniela, which is set mainly in Prague in the last months of World War Two, and is steeped in historical detail. In the week’s Czech Books Stephen Weeks talks to David Vaughan about the book.
“What is so interesting here is that history is actually around us. The buildings that most people live in were the scenes of historical events. Both the Nazi occupation and the communist era were extraordinary events, and although they have actually passed into history, they are really still alive, people remember them, the buildings actually reflect them.”
The fact that so much of the city’s architectural legacy survives can seem almost unnerving – being able to go back to exactly the same places where sometimes terrible things have happened in the course of the 20th century.
“Yes, a friend of mine had a big block of flats returned to her, that her family had owned before communism, and one day she just recounted the extraordinary events that took place on her landing, where there was a big shoot-out, some people committed suicide, all kinds of terrible things happened during the May Uprising of 1945. And yet, of course, this was a hallway that I’d walked through often. You’d never, ever know that such a thing took place. And these things to me are very interesting.”
“It began as an exercise in trying to show a city on the edge of a cliff. Indeed, in 1945, Prague was on the edge of a cliff. It could have been completely destroyed by the Nazis – it nearly was – then, of course, the terrible tsunami of communism overtook it.”
And let’s take a look at the plot, which is complicated. It takes us through the battlefields of the Eastern Front to Stalingrad, it takes us to Breslau – now Wroclaw – and then to Prague – through many of the places where some of the most dramatic events of the Second World War were happening. On top of that, you have the almost forgotten story of General Vlasov’s Russian army – his anti-Soviet Russian army.
“Well, originally I wanted to tell the core story, which takes place in Prague from November 1944 to May 1945, when the hero of the book, the protagonist, has a love affair with a woman here. This is something he never, ever forgets, so it colours his entire life. But before then I wanted to sketch in his life in some detail, so that by the time he gets here, we know what this character is, what his conditioning is. He is, in fact, Jewish, so that of course colours it in a tremendous way. So he has a secret life as well. And again, to show how enduring this love affair was in his life, how it affected his later life, the last quarter of the book is placed after he left Prague and takes us right through to 1997, when he dies.”
“What I wanted to express as a theme through the whole story is that absolutely nothing in love or war is black or white. Everything’s a funny shade of grey and nothing’s as it seems. This is his life. Nothing quite worked out the way he wanted it to, but he’s buffeted by fate. Really he never makes a choice. The choices are all made for him in some way. You never say: ‘Why did you do that, Nikolei?’ because you have seen that his only choice to survive is something, and he takes it.”
The part that most fascinates me are the episodes about General Vlasov’s army, simply because it’s such a little-known historical episode – the fact that there were these Russians fighting against the Red Army with the Germans, and then they switched sides and helped to liberate Prague from German occupation in May 1945. Again, there’s an extraordinary twist there.
“As soon as I got hold of General Vlasov, I realised that I had the key man in all this. You can’t write anything about the Nazi occupation and the Prague Uprising without thinking of General Vlasov. The more I researched him, the more complex and interesting a character he became, and he knew he was dicing with history. I think that all along he had it in his mind to double cross the Germans. As it was, only 50,000 of them got properly organised, 25,000 of these soldiers reached Bohemia and they were trying to make their way to the Americans where they estimated they’d be, near Plzeň. So it was an extraordinary thing. And they helped the Czechs, one has to say, altruistically. They were asked to. General Bunachenko, who was second-in-command to Vlasov, was simply asked by the Prague committee – the “Rada” – to help them, because the British had failed to bring their support, because Stalin had vetoed it, and consequently the Prague Uprising was without its proper back-up. Vlasov supplied it.”
“Obviously, this book is a mixture of fact and fiction and the truth is that this episode that’s coming up is fiction. But the fact is that the Nazis did have genuine plans to blow the whole place up. These were thwarted, so Prague was saved by someone’s intervention.
Then, rapidly – pam, pam, pam. The empty cartridge-cases clattered onto the ground followed noiselessly by Skobol’s cigarette end. He’d got all three. He smiled as he ground his dog-end into the pavement. We probably had very little time until his act would be noticed. Dodging the anti-tank ditches and the German barricade we hurtled onto the bridge, surprising the guards who were lounging over the other parapet, just by one of the famous statues. We pulled to a sharp stop by a manhole cover almost invisible among the cobbles. Glaser flashed some kind of pass over in the direction of the guards, who did nothing. Soon we were hauling up the bundles of dynamite and Skobol and I heaved them over into the river. As we were doing this, another KW jeep had pulled up and two SS men were also heaving something into the ever-receptive Vltava. “So what’s yours then?” I called across to them. One of them lifted a black cloth. It was a blade, a shiny, diagonal blade, fixed to a heavy block. It could have been from one thing only… a guillotine. I said nothing more to them, but watched it splash into the fast-flowing water below. How easy it would have been for them if their crimes could so easily have been eradicated.
You tie in quite extensive historical research with the story that you tell – and the romantic story that you tell as well. Tell me a little about the key romance of the story, the figure Daniela, who gives the book its name.
“Nikolei, the hero, falls in love with a woman who is working as a prostitute, but there’s something enigmatic and unexplained about both her and her actions, which really comes clear as the story progresses, and we only finally know what she really was doing at the very end of Nikolei’s time in Prague, and it justifies everything that had gone before. I’m going to read a piece which is actually the death of Daniela. I’m not really ruining the story for you because I think you’ll know from the very start of the book that Nikolei lives, because he’s obviously very old at the beginning and that Daniela doesn’t. That’s why he’s sad. So she dies at some point. This is, in fact, her death, and I was inspired to write this because I met an English lady here, Joy Kadečková. She spent her life here as an interpreter. She was the English wife of a Czech RAF pilot. On her way into Prague she herself nearly suffered the same fate, because people on the train thought that she was either a German or a Czech who had collaborated with the Germans, neither of which was true, of course. I have to point out that this is, in fact, narrated by Nikolei’s sister-in-law. She’s in hospital.
On the train to Prague. It was crowded. The only one that day. People were on the roof, clinging to the sides. We managed to get a single place on one of the wooden benches. She stood and I collapsed onto it. I had a sore throat and stomach pains and I could feel my temperature really beginning to rise now. I was beginning to feel delirious too. I remember someone saying something about her fur coat – “that’s what only a German whore would have”. Daniela was saying a name to me… could it have been Mrs Poláčková, who had lived downstairs at her house in Žižkov? What was she doing on the train? But it was her because she was saying Daniela’s name. Other people began shouting too. They were shouting “Nazi’s tart”, “collaborator”. A Czech man asked if he should open the window. It was all blurred to me. I tried to move but I couldn’t. I couldn’t save her. I wasn’t even able to cry out. I was paralysed. I wanted to yell ‘She’s a good Czech – saving a Czech Jew’ – then I wondered if they even liked Jews, these people. I was all confused. Daniela was still holding the bunch of teasels in her hand. The train was going quite fast. There was a rush of air from the open window. I revived me. But too late. Daniela’s terrible screams had passed like the whistle of a train hurtling by in the opposite direction. She had been thrown from the window. The same man looked out of the window a moment then pulled the glass back up and rubbed his hands together as if it had been nothing. The four or five men that had actually done it were strangely silent, but their consciences had come too late.
And that’s a scene that has echoes of that rather horrible tradition in Prague of defenestration…
“Yes. That was part of this consciousness as well, in a strange way.”
And I should add that Daniela isn’t your only novel set in this country.
“No, I have started a Prague detective and my detective is a woman. She’s a countess, whose mother is English, and she in her turn has married a Czech count. So she’s a half English, Czech countess and her casebook runs from 1904 to 1914. I plan to start with ten novels. The first one published as Hraběnka v nesnázích, translated into Czech in 2007, the second novel, Sins of the Father, is about to be translated and then I’ve now got another eight to write!”
