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The Language of Nationality and the Nationality of Language: Prague 1780-1920 Author(s): Derek Sayer Reviewed work(s): Source: Past & Present, No. 153 (Nov., 1996), pp. 164-210 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/651139 . Accessed: 17/11/2011 09:15
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THE LANGUAGE OF NATIONALITY AND THE NATIONALITY OF LANGUAGE: PRAGUE 1780-1920*

In April 1920, Franz Kafka wrote to his Czech translatorand lover MilenaJesenskaasking her to write to him in Czech rather than German.He was then living in Prague, which had eighteen months earlier become the capital of the newly independent CzechoslovakRepublic, she in the former Habsburg imperial capital of Vienna. Both were native Praguers.He explained his request to her thus:
Of courseI understand Czech.I've meantto askyou severaltimesalready why you never write in Czech. Not to imply that your commandof German leavesanythingto be desired. . . I wantedto readyou in Czech because,afterall, you do belongto thatlanguage, becauseonly therecan Milenabe foundin her entirety. . . So Czech,please.l

Her letters to him have not survived, but she evidently complied. He thankedher the next month, explaining:
I haveneverlived amongGermans. German is my mother-tongue and as such morenaturalto me, but I considerCzechmuchmore affectionate, which is why your letter removesseveraluncertainties; I see you more clearly,the movements of your body, your hands,so quick, so resolute, it's almostlike a meeting.2

The notion that somebody"belongsto a language",that she "can

* The research on whichthispaperis basedwasgenerously supported by a research grantfrom the SocialSciencesand Humanities ResearchCouncilof Canada. I am gratefulto Mrs VeraBenova,of the libraryof the MuzeumhlavnihomestaPrahy, for herunstinting andexperthelp with sources; to Gerald Aylmer, Michael Clanchy, ColinRichmond andotherparticipants in the 1995annual meetingof the Discussion Groupon the EnglishStateat St Peter'sCollege,Oxford,wherean earlier versionof this paperwas presented,for their encouragement of whatI am tryingto do here; andto graduate students at the University of Alberta, in particular MeytalElhavand Yoke-SumWong, on whom I have more than sufficiently inflictedthe historyof Prague.My greatestdebt is to my wife Alena.She has contributed far moreto this projectthan translations from the Czechand scrupulous checkingof all quotations andreferences, thoughshe did thattoo. 1Letterto MilenaJesenska, end of Apr. 1920, in FranzKafka,Letters to Milena, trans.PhilipBoehm(New York, 1990),p. 8. 2 Letterto Milena, May 1920:ibid.,p. 14.

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only be found there in her entirety", is an interesting one. It becomes particularlyinteresting when that statement is made from Prague,a city where the questionof the relationof language to identity has been a fraught one over the last two centuries. And it is still more so, when its author is a man whose own locationand belongingnesswas a source of perpetual uncertainty to him. Kalia felt anything but at home in that mother-tongue of which he is one of this century's undisputedliterarymasters. Prager Deutsch was not "good" German, being infected with both Czechisms and Yiddishisms. inbred and Kafka spoke Germanwith a Czech accent,3which immediately identifiedhim as a Praguer,4and described his feel for the language as being thatof a "half-German".5 He both admiredand resentedGoethe for the purity of his linguistic usage.6 He was no more secure abouthis Czech, which while more than serviceablewas far from "classical".7 He thought highly of Bozena of the most beloved of nineteenth-centuryNemcova, the author Czech novels Babicka (Grandma, 1855);8but he was tongue-tiedbefore the Czech directorof the insuranceoffice where he worked, from whom he "first learned to admire the vitality of spoken Czech".9He joked with Milena about how "the people who understandCzech best (apart from CzechJews of course)are the gentlemenfrom Nase rec(Our Language), second best are the readersof that journal,third best the subscribers- of which I am one''.l? He joked with his sister Ottla about having "launched into the world the lie about my
3 Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka: Notes and Reminiscences, trans. Goronwy Rhys (London,1953),p. 29. 4 See Kafka's letterto his sisterOttla,6 Apr. 1920, in his Letters to Ottlaandthe Family, ed. N. N. Glatzer, trans.Richard andClara Winston (New York,1982),p. 43. 5 Letterto Ottla,20 Feb. 1919:ibid.,p. 36. 6 See the entriesrelating to Goethein TheDiariesof FranzKafka,ed. Max Brod, trans. JosephKresh, MartinGreenberg and HannahArendt(London,1964), esp. pp. 28, 152 (16 Nov. 1910,25 Dec. 1911).This latterentryalso contains a long and perceptive discussion of the role of Czechliterature in creating"the coherenceof national consciousness" and "the spiritualization of the broadarea of public life" (ibid., p. 148). 7 See his letterto Ottla, thirdweekof Jan. 1921,in Letters to OttlaandtheFamily, ed. Glatzer, p. 58. 8 See, for example, his letterto Milena Jesenska, 29 May 1920,in Letters to Milena, p. 17; letter to Felix Weltsch,22 Sept. 1917, in Franz Kafka,Lettersto Friends, Family, andEditors, trans.Richard andClara Winston 9Letter to Max Brod, 11 Mar. 1921:ibid.,p. 266. (New York,1977),p. 145. Compare his letterto Ottlaof Jan. 1921:Letters to OttlaandtheFamily,ed. Glatzer, p. 57. l0 Letterof 24 June 1920:Letters to Milena,p. 58.

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splendid Czech''.ll Beyond this, of course, Franz Kafl<awas Jewish. What that meant, in turn-of-the-centuryPrague, was unclear and contested, both within and outside Jewish circles. But at the least it implied that Kafka could not be wholeheartedlyGerman (or, come to that, Czech), whichever language he spoke. AntiSemitismwas rife in both Bohemia'smajorethnic commties as, I think, it is valid to describe them by this date, though it would not have been seventy years earlier. At times this made for strange bedfellows, as when we find the eminently patriotic Czech writer Jan Neruda invoking "the great composerand still greater Germanand liberal Richard Wagner"in support of the view that BohemianJews are foreigners.l2Whether they spoke Czech, German or both, Prague's Jews did not "belong to a language", they could not "be found there in their entirety". The languagesof the ghetto had been eroded over the nineteenth century. Joseph II's reforms had opened trade and commerceto Jews, but forbadethe furtherkeeping of businessand communal records in Yiddish or Hebrew; they resourced Jewish schools, but required the medium of instruction within them to be German.Nearly a centuryand a half later, Kaikacould begin his introductionto an evening of Yiddish poetry in Prague'sJewish Town Hall with the ironic observation: "many of you are so frightenedof Yiddish that one can almost see it in your faces''.l3 For PragueJews of Kafka'sgeneration,languageand identity could be painfully dissonant. In Kaika's case, this dissonance reacheddeep into his own family, conferringan alien quality on the most intimateof humanrelationships. In his diaryfor October 1911 we read:
Yesterday it occurred to me thatI did not alwayslove my motheras she deservedandas I could,only becausethe German language prevented it. The Jewishmotheris no "Mutter",to call her "Mutter"makesher a
1lLetter to Ottla, first week of Jan. 1924: Letters to Ottla and the Family, ed. Glatzer, p. 89. 12 JanNeruda,"Pro strach zidovsky"[On the Fearof Jews], in his Studie krathe a kratsi [StudiesShortand Shorter], ed. Q. M. Vyskociland V. Vitinger,2nd edn (Prague,1928), p. 248. This openlyanti-Semitic tractwas writtenin 1869. Unless otherwise specified, all translations fromCzechsourcesin this paperaremy own. 13 FranzKaRa, "AnIntroductory TaLk on the YiddishLanguage", in his Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings, trans. Ernst Kaiserand Eithne WiLkins (New York, 1954),p. 382. The talk was delivered on 11 February 1912.Neitherthe title nor, strictlyspeaking, the text is KaRa's;the manuscript is lost andthis text is based on detailed notesmadeby ElsaBrod,who waspresent.

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little comic(not to herself,becausewe arein Germany), we give a Jewish womanthe nameof a German mother,but forget the contradiction that sinksinto the emotionsso muchthe more heavily."Mutter" is peculiarly German for the Jew,it unconsciously together withthe Christian splendour,Christiancoldness also, contains, the Jewish woman who is called "Mutter"thereforebecomesnot only comic but strange.l4

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When KafkadescribesGermanas his "mother-tongue",he means it quite literally. It was the language that his to him from his infancy. Not, however, mother Julie spoke his father. From the evidence of the few surviving postcards in his hand, Herman Kafka'scommandof Germanwas poor. Julie Kafka, nee Lowy, hailed from a prosperous Germanspeakingfamily in Podebrady,a small town east of Praguein the Czech heartland of central Bohemia. Julie's father was a drygoods merchantand owner of a brewery; both her grandfather andher great-grandfather had been respectedTalmudicscholars. These were not poor Ostjuden of the sort found in Galicia(and whose Yiddish theatre so captivated Bukovinaor Franz), but a comfortableupper-middle-class Bohemian family. Before her marriage, Julie lived on Prague's Old Town Square. Since 1895 ithas been known in Czech as Staromestske namesti, before that it was simply Velke namesti (the big square); but Julie would havecalled it Altstadter Ring. Then as now, it was no mean location.CertainlyJulie was socially a cut above her husband Herman, whose father was a kosher butcher in the small Czechspeaking village of Osek (or Wossek,as it is incongruously called, German-fashion, in most of the English-language works on Kafka) near Strakonicein south Bohemia. The 1890 census lists 381 inhabitantsfor Osek, all of them Czechs.l5This that they listed Czechas their "languageof everyday means only on the census return, though Czech nationalists intercourse" at the time took this as a surrogate declarationof national identity. The village had twenty Jewish families in 1852, with their own synagogue.l6 Herman moved to Prague in 1881, where he established himself as "HerrmannKaRa, linen, fashionableknitted ware, sunshades and umbrellas,waLking sticks and cotton goods, sworn consultant
Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Brod,p. 88 (24 Oct. 1911).Wemightalso,in passing, register anotherpeculiarity in this passage.In what sense, in 1911, was Prague"in Germany"? 15 August Sedlacek, "Osek",in Ottuv slovniknausny [Otto'sEncyclopedia], 27 vols. with 1 suppl.vol. (Prague,1888-1909), xviii, p. 906. 16Anthony Northey,Kafka's Relations: Their Lives and his Writing (New Haven, 1991), p. 4.
14

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to the Commercial Court".17 He marriedJuliein 1882, and Franz, their first child, was born the next year. His shop was on Celetna ulice, off Staromestskenamesti. In 1912 he moved to the Old Town Squareitself, openingup on the groundfloorof the Kinsky palace. The sign over the shop read Herman baroque Czech, not the Germanspelling of his name. Kafka, Kafka;the by the way, is not an uncommon Czech surname, nor an exclusively Jewish one. Unlike his more genteel wife, Hermanalways est in plebeianCzech. Apartfrom anythingelse, remainedhappiit helped him in his business.His shop was sparedin at leastone localKristallnacht (Praguesaw severalin these years) as a consequence. The governessMarie Wernerova(as she signed herself, not family Werner, as in most of the Kafka literature),who was also Jewish, spoke only Czech.18But like most Jewish children in Prague at the time,l9Franzwas educatedentirelyin German, beginning in 1889 at the German Boys' Elementary School on the Fleischmarkt (which Marie Wernerovawould have called Masna ulice) and movingin 1893 to the AltstadterGymnasium,which was also in the Kinsky palace. He completed his studies at the KarlFerdinand German University of Prague, graduatingin law in
17 Prague Trade Directory, as quoted in Jiri Grusa, Franz Kafka of Prague, trans. Eric Mosbacher (London, 1983), p. 18. 18 Editorial footnote, in Franz Kafka, Lettersto Friends,Family and Editors, p. 465. Kafka discusses "Slecna" [Miss], as she was known to the family, in his letter to Felice Bauer of 8 Nov. 1912: Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice, ed. Erich Heller and Jurgen Born, trans. James Stern and Elizabeth Duckworth (New York, 1973), p. 32. She is also frequently mentioned with affection in the recently discovered letters from Kafka to his parents from the last two years of his life: Franz Kafka, Dopisy rodicVum z let 1922-1924 [Letters to Parents, 1922-1924], ed. Josef Cermak and Martin Svatos (Prague, 1990). A letter to his parents of 20 February 1924 makes it clear that he was himself in correspondence with Marie Wernerova; she would have written to him, of course, in Czech (ibid., p. 93). 19 In 1884-5, around one-third of Jewish children in Bohemia in elementary schools were pupils in 114 private schools, all but one of which Prague, most Jewish children went through the municipal instructed in German. In school system; in 1890, 97 per cent of them were in the German track. In 1914 the figure was still as high as 82.2 per cent; after independence it fell rapidly, from 61.2 per cent in 1920 to 29.3 per cent in 1926. Of Jewish children in secondary schools in 1883-4, 83 per cent were in German schools. By 1912 this figure had fallen to 69.4 per cent. In 1900, the German University had 413 Jewish students, 31.4 per cent of its student body of 1,162; the Czech University 74 Jewish students, 2.4 per cent of its student body of 2,805. See Hillel J. Kieval, The Making of Czech 3tewry: Society in Bohemia, 1870-1918 (New York, 1988), pp. National Conflictand 3'ewish 40-6; Josef Siska, "Populacni a bytove pomery" [Demographic and Housing Conditions], in Vaclav Vojtisek (ed.), Praha v obnovenem statev ceskoslovenskem [Prague in the Renewed Czechoslovak State] (Prague, 1936), p. 75.

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1906. Prague'sancientuniversity,foundedby CharlesIV in 1348, had formallysplit into separateCzechand Germanwings in 1882. The ancientKarolinumand Klementinumwere ing walls, and when it was unavoidable,as severedby dividat share facilities, the two institutionsused them convocations, to at differenttimes. At the time Franz studied there, close on a third of the German University's student body was Jewish. A further minority (20 per cent in 1890) was Czech. Even substantial at this date, for some Czechs German still remained a language of social advancement. Linguistic tensions were also evident in a change in the city's street-signs the year Franz entered the gymnasium.20 From 1893 they were in Czech only, with the black-on-yellow lettering of the Habsburgempire replaced by the Czech national colours of red and white. From 1787, when the indefatigable JosephII made the display of street-signs mandatory,they had been in German and Czech, with the Germanname first. This orderof precedence was reversed by Prague city council in 1861, the year Czechs gained a majority for the first time in over two Czech was made an official languageof all city centuries and offices. The last Germanson Council resigned in 1882 in protest TomasCerny's pointed descriptionof the city as against Mayor "our hundredtowered,our ancient, our beloved, golden, Slavonic Prague" in hisinaugural speech of that year.2lThe 1893street-sign unleashed a bitter legal battle and predictablyheatedordinance comment in the press. Franz might have come across the cartoon "A ModernTourney in our Old Prague" in the satiricalmagazine Sipy(Arrozvs), which depicted two jousting knights under the banners "Na prikope" and "Graben",alternative names for the avenue that runs along the moat that had once divided Prague's Old and New Towns. If so, he could hardlyhave failed to register the stereotypically Jewish features of the top-hatted and business-suited Germanchampion,and the Star of David on his saddle-cloth.22
20 Roughly equivalent to the Englishgrammar school,a gymnasiumis described in the Dictionaryof the Literary Czech Languageas "a selectivemiddleschoolof general education, originally six year,theneight":Bohumil Havrinek(ed.), Slovnikspisovnetho jazyha ctesketho, 8 vols. (Prague,1989),i, p. 555. 21 Quoted in Jindrich Solc, "JUDrTomasCerny,cestnymestan prazsky"[Doctor of LawsTomasCerny,Honorary Citizen of Prague], in Almanachkralovsketho hlasniho meVsta Praky, xiii (1910),p. 269. (Emphasis in original.) 22 "Novodobe turnaje v nasistarePraze",Sipy, 12 May 1894, reproduced on cover of Res Musei pragensis,iv, no. 2 (1994).

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One major source of Czech resentment towards Jews in this period was their linguisticidentificationwith the German"overlords", and in particulartheir opting for Germaneducation.The monumental Czech national(ist) encyclopedia Ottuv slovnzk nausny,gloating in 1903 over the "second Czechization of Prague" (the first being during and after the Hussite wars of the fifteenthcentury), tartlyobservesthat things would be rosier still if only "PragueJewry, who were mostly born in Czech regions, would at long last stop seeing material advantagein declaring their language of ordinary use to be German upon moving to Prague".23But for Czechs too the stakes were material; state funding of Bohemia's linguistically divided public schools, for one thing, was determined by numbers of Czech and German speakersas measuredin officialcensuses. The future poet Oskar Baum was blinded (by being hit over the head with a pencil-box) in one of the many fights that took place between Czech and Germanschoolboys. Gustav Janouch's Conversations withKaflea is perhapsnot an entirely reliable source, but the words he puts in Kafka'smouth are accurateenough whetheror not Kafkaever actuallysaid them. "The Jew Oskar Baum lost his eyesight as a German.As somethingwhich in fact he never was, and which he was never accepted as being".24 Kafkaencouragedhis favouritesister Ottla in her marriageto Josef David, a Czech Catholic, againstthe opposition of parents and relatives, and wrote affectionatelyto his new brother-in-law in fluent Czech.25Josef was an official in Sokol, a muscularly patrioticCzech gymnasticsociety founded by MiroslavTyrs and JindrichFugner in 1861, whose aim was "the physicalas well as in part the moral education and improvementof all the nation, its nurturing for the enhancement of its strength, bravery, refinementand defence".26By 1920 Sokol had more than half a
23 Anonymous entry"Praha", subheading "Statistika", in Ottuv slotnik nausny, xx (1903),p. 488. 24 Janouch,Conversations with Kafka, p. 68. Max Brodfound these conversations totallyplausible(see his Introduction to the volume);Janouch's reliability has subsequentlybeen questionedby others. Josef Skvorecky puts Janouchin his Czech context:J. Skvorecky,"FranzKafka,Jazz and The Anti-Semitic Reader", in his Talkin'MoscowBlues, trans.PaulWilson(Toronto,1988),pp. 157-62. 25 See the facsimile of KaRa'sletter to Josef David of 22 or 23 August 1921, in Kafka,Letters to Ottla and the Family, ed. Glatzer, Plate21, betweenpp. 78 and79. 26JosefScheiner (ed.), Paty slet vsVesokolsky porVadany v Praze . . . 1907 [The Fifth SokolJamboree in Prague. . . 1907](Prague,1907),p. 6.

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Tomas Cerny, the SlavophilePrague Mayor millionmembers.27 Franz's mentionedearlier, was one of its founding members.28 Jewish public first the in sister Valli, meanwhile, was involved 1920, in Zionists by established elementaryschool in Prague, changing of sign clear a Czech; was whoselanguageof instruction Ottla's marriageto Josef took place in July of that year. times.29 That November there were serious riots in Prague, in which Germanand Jewish propertieswere equally the targets of Czech spleen. The Jewish Town Hall was put under the protection of the American Embassy and the Stars and Stripes flew over its medieval roofs. Franz wrote to Milena in Vienna: "I have been spending every afternoon outside on the streets, wallowing in anti-Semitic hate ... Isn't it natural to want to leave a place where one is so hated? (Zionism or nationalfeeling isn't needed for this at all)".30 Though he was interestedin Zionism (and took some courses in Hebrew)3lKafkacould never summon up the commitmentto Max Brod. Fascinatedby the it of, say, his friend and biographer Jewry, he was deeply scepticalof any cultureof EasternEuropean amonghis own kind. He foundMartin revivalism authenticcultural Buber "dreary.No matterwhat he says, there is alwayssomething He wrote to Milenaa few days after the 1920 riots: missing".32
womenandschoolchil1920,including 27 To be exact, 559,026as of 31 December dren. FrantisekMasek, "Sokolstvo",in Ottuv slovnik nauctnynove doby [Otto's for the ModernAge], ed. BohumilNemec, 6 vols. in 12 (Prague, Encyclopedia Ottav slovniknaucwny to the original supplement 1930-43),vi, pt 1, p. 98. Thisupdated and was occupation, late in the German it ceasedpublication was nevercompleted; not revivedafterthe war. Kafkarefersto Josef David'sSokolwork in his letter to Ottlaof 1 May 1920:Letters to Ottla and the Family, ed. Glatzer,p. 45. The word "sokol"means"falcon". Tallowitz(eds.), Pamatnik vydany na oslavu 28 See Josef Mullerand Ferdinand jednoty Sokola prazskeho [MemorialPublished in dvacetileteho trvani tewlocsicVne Union PragueSokol] of the Gymnastic of the TwentiethAnniversary Celebration hereunder (Prague,1883),pp. 14-23.Alongwith TyrsandFugner,Cernyis profiled the title "OurThreeStars". in schoolinggiven in Jewishlinguisticpreferences 29 See the figureson changing above. n. 19 "Tallowingin 30 Letterof mid-Nov. 1920:Kafka,Letters to Milena, pp. 212-13. here; German of Kafka's translation hate"maynot be the mostfelicitous anti-Semitic bin ich jetztauf den in it ("Die ganzenNachmittage he sayssimplythathe "bathed" FranzKafka,Briefe an Milena, ed. JurgenBorn Gassenund bade im Judenhass"): on Main, 1986),p. 288. Muller(Frankfurt and Michael of 19 December1923Kafkaaskswhenhis two nieces, 31 In a letterto his parents Dopisy rodicumz of his sisterValli,weregoingto writeto him in Hebrew: daughters and Svatos,p. 59. let 1922-1924, ed. Cermak letterto FeliceBauer,16 Jan. 1913:Letters to Felice, p. 157. 32 Kafka,

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Afterall, we both know numerous typicalexamplesof the Western Jew; as far as I am concernedI'm the most Western-Jewish of them all. In otherwords,to exaggerate, not one secondof calmhas been grantedme; nothinghas been grantedme, everythingmust be earned,not only the presentandfuture,but the pastas well.3

When Kafl<awrote these words he was living in his parents' apartmenton the top floor of the Oppelt House on the corner of Staromestske namestiand Mikulasska(since 1926 Parizska)trida, the most elegant boulevardin all Prague, and the showpiece of a spankingnouveaurichequarterwhich had sprung up since 1897 on the ruins of the centuries-oldJewish ghetto. Reflectingwider pan-Slavistenthusiasmsof the time, the street had been named Mikulasskaafter the RussianTsar Nicholas II. The Kaflna family had moved there in 1913. In the seventeenth century a small street had run more or less on the same spot, by name Zidovska ulicka: Jewish Lane.34By 1920, all that visibly remainedof the area'sJewish past and culture were a few synagoguesdeemed of "historic" value and the Jewish Town Hall. The "slumclearance"(asanace)of the previous two decades had been one of the most ambitious in Europe.3sIt is a location that speaks volumes. In the end these ambivalenceswere to be resolved violently, and, as so often in the Czechlands, from the outside. FranzKaflna himself died of tuberculosis in 1924. He is buried beside his parentsin the family plot in Prague'sNew Jewish Cemetery.His sisters Valli, Elli and Ottla were less fortunate. All perished at the hands of Germans in the Holocaust. To protect her two daughters (and to allow them to inherit the elder Kaikas' property) Ottla Davidova, the most Czech of Herman Kafl<a's children,divorcedher husbandPepa in 1942. She then registered with the local police as a Jewess and was promptly shipped to Terezin (Theresienstadt). Her daughtersVeraand Helena, known
Kafka,letterof Nov. 1920:Letters to Milena, p. 217. 34 JiriCarek et al., Ulicemimetsta Praky od 14. stoleti do dneska[Through the Streets of Praguefrom the Fourteenth Centuryto Today] (Prague,1958), p. 289. Unless otherwisestated,all information on Praguestreet-names in this papercomesfrom this source. 35 See JiriHruzaet al., Prazska asanace [The Prague Slum-Clearance], Acta Musei Pragensis,xciii (1993). This is a specialissue of the magazine published for the one hundredth anniversary of the asanacelaw. The bestsourcefor whatthe ghettolooked like beforethe asanace is still to be found in the superbseriesZmizela Praha, ed. Emanuel Poche,6 vols. (Prague,1945-8),iii: HanaVolavkova, Zidovskemewsto prazvske [The Prague JewishTown].
33

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to their Uncle Franz (or possibly Frantisek)36 as Veruska and Helenka37 Czech being an affectionatelanguage pleaded to join her there, but permissionwas denied. Under the laws of the Protectorateof Bohemia and Moravia they were not Jewish. In October 1943, Ottla volunteered to accompany a transport of children to Auschwitz; that is the last we know of her.38After the war, her name was inscribedon the walls of one of Prague's few ancient Jewish buildings to have escaped the asanace, the Pinkas synagogue, whose foundations date from the late thirteenth century. Ottla was one of 77,297 Bohemianand Moravian Jews known to have perished in the Holocaustwho was remembered there. It was the largest grave inscriptionin the world.39 I say "it was". The Pinkas synagogue was closed, allegedly for renovations, shortly after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakiain 1968, and remained shut for twenty years. When it was reopenedto the public after the "Velvet Revolution" of November 1989, the 77,297 names had unaccountablydisappeared.40 Along with this went a posthumousdenialof any claims they might have had to a distinctive nationalidentity. The catalogue of the StateJewishMuseum,of which the Pinkassynagogue now formed a part, assuredCzech visitors in 1979 that:
the historical development of the Jewishreligious communities is comprehendedas the development of a religiousgroup,formingan integralpart of the populationof the Czech lands, and thus not as the historical development of membersof the so-called"worldJewishnation",which was artificially constructed by the ideologues of Zionism.4

II

At this point, a sociologicallyminded historianmight reasonably ask how many Czechs, Germansand Jews there were in Franz
36 Kafka concludes his postcard to Ottla of 13 October 1923, which is otherwise written in German, with the words "Frantisek greets you and is well" in Czech ("Frantisek pozdravuje a je zdrav"): Letters toOttlaandtheFamily, ed. Glatzer, p. 81. 37 These are Czech diminutives. See Kafka's letter to Ottla of April 1921: ibid., p. 68. 38See Introduction, ibid.,pp. iX-X. 39According to Ctibor Rybar, Zidovska Praha Jewish Prague] (Prague, 1991), p. 306. 40 See my note (which appeared anonymously under the title "Fact of the Issue") in yl Hist. Sociology, v (1992), p. 291. Since that date the full restoration of the memorial has begun. 41 Anonymous authorial collective of State Jewish Museum, Statnizidovske muzeum v Praze [The State Jewish Museum in Prague] (Prague, 1979), p. 7.

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Kaflna'sPrague, and how these numbers were changing over time. Regrettably,the answercannotbe a simple one. The seemingly straightforwardcategories of "Czechs", "Germans" and "Jews" were not those used by the relevant censuses. More importantly,these identities were themselvesneither stable over time, nor alwaysmutuallyexclusive. The first Czechoslovakstate census of 1921 did count people, among other things, according to nationality(narodnost) as declaredby respondents.Nationality here did not mean state citizenship. All but 13,362 of Prague's 676,657 inhabitantspresent on the night of the 1921 census were Czechoslovakcitizens (obsane).Of these, 624,744 declaredthemselves to be "Czechoslovak"(94.2 per cent), 30,429 "German" (4.6 per cent) and a paltry S,900 "Jewish".42Prague's ethnic demography was not representativeof that of the country of which it was symbolicallyas well as administratively the capital. Germansthen made up 23.3 per cent of Czechoslovakia's population, and 32.6 per cent of Bohemia's one in every three people.43There are considerableproblems in comparing these figureswith earlierones. Pre-1880 surveyswere consistentneither with regardto the populationsthey counted nor in the questions they asked. From 1880, to the ire of Czech nationalists,AustroHungarianstate censusesasked not about nationalityas such, nor even "mother-tongue",but "languageof everydayintercourse" (Umgangssprache, obcovacz' rec@). Yiddish, for these purposes, was considered to be a dialect of German. Vienna had no desire to providegrist to nationalistmills by essentializing ethnic identities. The picture also alters depending upon whether we calculate populationson the basis of Prague'sadministrative boundariesin the nineteenth century, which excluded the large suburbs of Karlin, Smichov, Vinohrady and Zizkov44and other outlying communities, or back-project within the borders of Greater Prague as established in 1922. The latter gives a superficially more realistic representation,in that it reflects both the mushroominggrowth and the progressiveeconomic integrationof the conurbationduring the period; by 1890 the suburbanpopulation
Siska,"Populacni a bytovepomery",p. 74. Emil Capek,"Ceskoslovenska republika" [Czechoslovak Republic],subheading "Obyvatelstvo" [Population], in Ottuv slovniknausny nove doby, i, pt 2, pp. 1082-3. 44TheseprVedmeVsti were legallyand administratively independent citiesuntil 1922. In 1890, therefore,the list of the five biggestcities in Bohemiaread, in declining orderof magnitude, Prague,Plzen [Pilsen],Zizkov, Vinohrady and Smichov: Jiri Hruza,MeVsto: Praha [The City:Prague] (Prague,1989),p. 189.
42 43

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exceeded that of Pragueproper. But it also obscuresthe qualitative issue of what, for (different) contemporaries,the city of Pragueactuallysignified.This has implicationsfor how we regard were concenits ethnic composition, because German-speakers trated in the central, historic sections of the city, whereas the suburbswere overwhelminglyCzech. In one of the rare passages in his writingsexplicitly dealingwith Prague,Kafkapuzzles over this great divide at the heart of his city:
live there without We accept foreign cities as a fact, the inhabitants penetrating our way of life, just as we cannotpenetratetheirs . . . The suburbs of ournativecity, however,arealsoforeignto us . . . Herepeople darkedge of the city live partlywithinour city, partlyon the miserable, that is furrowedlike a great ditch, althoughthey all have an area of interestin commonwith us thatis greaterthanany othergroupof people outsidethe city. For this reasonI alwaysenterandleavethe suburbwith of sympathy, of curiosa weakmixedfeelingof anxiety,of abandonment, of fortitude,andreturnwith pleasure, ity, of conceit,of joy in travelling, from Zizkov.45 seriousness, and calm,especially

namesti,but Kafka's Zizkov is a baretwo miles from Staromestske enough. By 1900 this feeling half-foreignthere is understandable part of town hada mere 824 Germanoverwhelminglyproletarian speakersamid 58,112 Czechs.46 Of the five areas which made up historic Prague, by contrast, Staremesto (the Old Town) was 22.35 per cent German-speaking in 1880, Nove mesto (the New Town) 16.31 per cent, Malastrana (the Little Quarter)20.42 per cent, Hradcany9.21 per cent and of Josefov-the former ghetto 38.71 per cent. Incorporation Czech-speakingboroughsof Vysehrad(1883), the predominantly Holesovice-Bubny (1884) and Liben (1901) altered Prague's ethnic balance significantly,but still in 1900 the "Germanelestrong in the city centre: in ment" remained disproportionately Staremesto it was 10.43 per cent, in Nove mesto 12.51 per cent. Unsurprisingly, Josefov was still 20.5 per cent Germanin 1910.47 these boundary changes were themselves politically contentious issues. To abstractfrom them in the interestsof achievingstatistical consistencyover time is to ignore the spatialco-ordinatesnot which Prague's only within which, but also in part through "national" character was articulated by and for its various
45Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Brod,p. 119 (18 Nov. 1911). xxvii, p. 884. 46Antonin Jirak,"Zizkov",in Ottuv slovniknaucwny, 47Anonymous entry "Praha"[Prague],subheading"Statistika"[Statistics],in Ottuv slovnik nauctny,xx, p. 488; Gary B. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: 1981),p. 92. Germansin Prague, 1861-1914 (Princeton,

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TABLE
CHANGES IN PRAGUE'S "ETHNIC" COMPOSITION 1880-1921* Czech
, A ,

German
>

No.

No.

1880 266,333 86.2 42,453 13.7 1890 350,279 89.3 41,808 10.6 1900 474,226 93.1 34,197 6.7 1910 573,008 93.8 37,417 6.1 1921 624,744 94.2 30,429 4.6 * Source: This Table is reproduced from Josef Siska, "Populacni a bytove pomery" [Demographic and Housing Conditions], in Vaclav Vojtisek (ed.), Praha v obnovenem state ceskoslovenskem [Prague in the Renewed Czechoslovak State] (Prague, 1936), p. 74; note that it chooses the boundaries of Prague most favourable to emphasis on the Czech character of the city in the later nineteenth century.

inhabitants.Thus the city council'salmanacfor 1922, the first to be published since 1914, begins with a preface entitled "Prague the Great". It representsthe previous few decades as a history of unending conflict between "those who had Prague's welfare in mind [and]strove for her to join with neighbouring settlements . . . to lay new foundationsfor the well-being and good fortune of the whole nation" and "the animosityof Viennaand the state, as well as the Germans [who] created obstacles and sought to breakthe naturaldevelopment".The metropoliswas administratively unified, it argues, in the course of "repeated hard battles with the wrath of enemies", and only throughits integrationhad the city finally become "ideally Czech, faithfullyrepublicanand really democratic".48 If, ignoringsuch niceties, we were to take "languageof everyday intercourse" and "nationality" as rough equivalents, and standardize on Prague's1922 boundaries,the Table indicateshow we could chart changes in Prague's "ethnic" composition over the forty years from 1880. The overall trend is clear enough: a steady growth of the Czech part of the populace, by more than 8 percentagepoints over the period; a relentless decline in the German, not only in relative terms but in absolute numbers. Were we to backtrackfurther into the nineteenth century, we would find this pattern to be a long-term one. A city census in 48Vaclav Vojtisek, "Velika Praha", in Almanachhlasniho mestaPraXy, xviii (1922),
p. 5. This year-book had been published annuallyfrom 1898-1914 by the City Council; from 1922 to 1939 it appeared biannually.

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1869 gave the Germanpopulationof Pragueas 17.9 per cent, the Czech as 80.5 per cent. Jews were included within these overall numbers; as identified by religion, they then formed 8.28 per cent of the city's inhabitants.49 An earlier (if less reliable) headcount in 1851 had 56 per cent Czech and 33 per cent German. This latter also separately reckoned 11 per cent of the city's populaceto be Jewish, and broke this figure down into 8 per cent German-speakersand 3 per cent Czech-speakers.50 On these figures,then, the German-speaking proportionof the city's population fell in the seventy years between 1850 and 1920 to little more than a tenth of what it had been. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Prague's Czechspeaking populace undoubtedlydid grow massively by comparison with the German,largely because of in-migrationfrom the Bohemian countryside. German-speaking peasants were leaving the land too, but tended mostly to move to Vienna. We cannot begin to understandlanguage politics in Prague in these years except with reference to this fact, any more than we can do so without reference to the way the demographicsintersectedwith economics. Prague's working class was overwhelminglyCzech, and largely consisted of rural incomers. So, increasingly,was its flourishingprofessionalmiddle class. Czechs were also far from absent from commerce and industry, as the great Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 which German businesses boycotted triumphantly testified.5l But heavy industry and large finance remainedlargely in Germanor Jewish hands. Conversely(as the city council's self-congratulatorytome Prague in the Renezved Czechoslovak State was to express it in 1936), "both Prague's national minoritieslack a popular (lidova)base; the worker and small businessmanis, so to speak, universally of Czechoslovak
49JosefErben(ed.), Statistika kralovsketho hlasnz'ho mewsta Praky [Statistics of the RoyalCapital Cityof Prague](Prague,1871),pp. 124, 128. This was a civic survey (obecnipopis) rather thana statecensus;thoughthe reportpointsto severalproblems in the data on nationality, it considers them superiorto any previousfigures.The countdid not includethe city's suburbs. 50 Ibid., pp. 124-5.Like the obecnz' popis of 1869,this censuswas of the five historic boroughs only.It counted onlylegalresidents (domacz' obyvatelstso)rather thanactually presentpopulation (skutecne' obyvatelstso). 51 See the impressive commemorative work:J. Kafkaet al. (eds.), Sto let prace: zprava o vsteobecne' zemske' vystavev v Praze 1891 [OneHundred Yearsof Work: Report on the Universal LandExhibition in Prague,1891],3 vols. (Prague,1892-5).On the German boycott,see Frantisek KolarandMilanHlavacka, Tubileini vystava 1891 [The 1891JubileeExhibition] (Prague,1991),esp. pp. 14-24.

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nationality".52 But this absence, too, can be exaggerated.It had elements of a self-fulfilling prophecy, reflecting both Czech images of themselves as a "popular" nation and the selfdemarcationof Prague Germansociety as a cultural elite. Gary Cohen'sanalysisof census datafor 1910 concludesthat one-third of all German-speakers in Prague in fact "fell into the laboring or lowest lower-middle-classstrata".53 It was exactly they, however, who proved most likely to assimilateto the Czech majority. They tended to live in the poorer, Czech areas of the city, and were effectively excluded from the formal institutions and the informalintercoursethroughwhich Prague Germansociety then defined itself. But such games with numbers can also obscure as much as they reveal; for census data, here as elsewhere, are not simple facts but complex artefacts. Take, first, the vexed question of being Germanand/orJewish. Prague'sJews were extraordinarily fickle, it seems, in questionsof language(giving rise to criticism on the part of Czechs, then and later, of their "lack of national character"of any sort).54In 1890, 74 per cent of them declared their "language of everyday intercourse" to be German. Ten years later, that proportionhad fallen to 45 per cent.55In part thismay be explainedby in-migrationfrom Czech-speaking rural areas, but only in part. As important was the way in which languageitself had become politicizedin the interim. Czech boycotts of German and Jewish businesses, like the Svuj k svemu (Each For His Own) campaign of 1892, were powerful persuaders;so were riots like those of November 1897, in which, even-handedly,Czech mobs broke every window in both the Neues Deutsches Theater and the synagogues in Zizkov and Smichov. The occasion for these disturbanceswas the fall of CountBadeni's ministry in Vienna after a storm of Bohemian52 Siska,"Populacni a bytovepomery",p. 78. 53 Cohen, 54 See, for example,Siska, "Populacni a bytove pomery",p. 74:

Politics ofEthnic Survival, p. 122.

"Although the Jewish minorityin Praguelives compactly, at a high economic,socialand to some extent cultural level,onlya smallelement withinit hasanydefined national awareness. Scarcely a fifth of PragueJews (5,900) declaredthemselvesas being of Jewish nationality . . .". Siskasees Jewishdesertionof Germanschoolingafter 1918something whichCzechnationalists had been urgingon Jewsfor decades as "an accurate barometer of the powerof politicalconditions as well as a contribution to the studyof national character". The clearimplication is thatJews changenational affiliation with the political wind. 55 Cohen,Politics ofEthnic Survival, p. 102.

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Germanprotest over his ordinancerequiringall civil servantsin Bohemia to prove themselves bilingual by 1901. Over the same period, we might note, the same proportionof non-Jewsin Prague had also purportedly changed the language in which they conducted their everyday intercoursefrom Germanto Czech.56 In 1921, in deferenceto Zionist sensibilities,the Czechoslovak government acknowledged "Jewish" as a national identity and allowed its Jewish citizens to describe themselves thus on census returns. It is on this basis that the figure of 5,900 Jews in Prague given above for 1921 is derived. However, these 5,900 people of those who in that same census described were barely a fifth themselves as being of the Jewish faith. A quarterof these latter declared themselves to be Germansby nationality(7,426), over a half as "Czechoslovaks"(16,342). These people are, of course, included in the overall totals of Czechoslovaksand Germans, meaning that nearly a quarter of Prague's self-declared "German"minority at that date was Jewish. In 1900, almost a half of Prague's"Germans"had beenJews. Measuredby religion, in 1921 there were 31,751 Jews in Prague, not 5,900, makingup This is not to take into 4.7 per cent of the city's population.57 account those Jews who, like the writer Jiri Weil, were neither believersin Judaismnor consideredtheir nationalityto be Jewish. We simply have no way of counting such people. Twenty years later the Nazis did, and they were quite clear that German and Jewish were mutually exclusive identities. In Jiri Weil's case, "the arrivalof the Germansthus means for him a thorough shock: he is suddenly and publicly designateda Jew, and he cannotunderstandwhy he is somebodyother than he was before".58 Having contractedthe last "mixed marriage"permitted in occupied Bohemia, Weil faked suicide from Prague's Hlavkabridgeto escapehis transportto Terezin (Theresienstadt), where Czech Jews were interned en route to the extermination was dismembered campsof Germanyand Poland. Czechoslovakia and Bohemiaand Moraviainvaded and made into a protectorate of Hitler's Third Reich on 15 March 1939. According to laws passed in June and July of that year a Jew was any person "who
is the fact that despitethe shift from Germanto 56 The basis for this inference of the sameproportion CzechamongJews between1890 and 1900,Jews remained (46 per cent) in both censuses. all German-speakers a bytovepomery",pp. 71-8. 57 Figures givenin Siska,"Populacni to Jiri Weil, 58 Petr Novy, "JiriWeil:clovek"Jiri Weil:The Man],introduction (Prague,1991),p. 11. Moshva hranice [Moscow The Border]

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by race is descendedfrom at least three wholly Jewish grandparents", a Jewish grandparentbeing defined as a person who belonged to or had belonged to the Jewish religious community. Also "consideredto be Jews" were a "half-caste"(mz'senec) with two wholly Jewishgrandparents, who had belongedto the Jewish religious community in September 1935 or had been accepted into it afterwards;a "half-caste" married to a Jew on or after that date; and a "half-caste" born of marriagewith a Jew after that date, or out of wedlock after 1 February1940.59 Hence Ottla Davidova'sdaughterswere not Jewish. Had she lived in the other successor state to the Czechoslovak Republic, independent Slovakia,on the other hand, they would have been.60 Beforewe leave the virtualrealitiesof socialstatistics,we might pause to note two instructive remarksmade by census officials themselves. The first dates from late in 1919, when the Prague governmentsurveyed newly acquiredSlovakiain order to determine how many schools functioning in Slovak it would need to provide. The Slovaksof what had until 1918 been upper Hungary had been subjected to sustained Magyarizationfor fifty years, and nowhere more trenchantlythan in education.Less than onetenth of the schoolteachersin Slovakia at independence even spoke Slovak;Ministerfor SlovakAfEairs VaclavSrobarinformed parliamentthat "we found there perhaps three hundred Slovak elementaryschoolteachers and perhapsthirty Slovakhigh-schoolteachers who were faithful to their origin''.6l Historically, Slovakiahad been part of the kingdom of Hungaryfor a millennium.Linguistically,however, Slovakis extremelyclose to Czech, and Czech nationalistshad on this basis claimed Slovaksfor the nation for more than half a century. It was, therefore (in the wordsof one of the census enumerators):
NaucVny slovnikaktualit [Encyclopedia of Current Affairs](Prague,1939),p. 608.

59ZdenekTobolka,"Zidovsky majetek"[JewishProperty],in Z. Tobolka(ed.),

60 According to the Slovaklaws of April 1939,a Jew was anybodywho either(a) was or hadbeenof the Jewishfaith,evenif theyhadjoinedsomeChristian denomination after30 October1918,or (b) wasor hadbeenof no religionandhadat leastone parent of Jewish faith, or (c) was descendedfrom a Jew thus defined,with the exception of thosedescendants who had themselves joineda Christian denomination before 30 October1918,or (d) hadmarried a personof Jewishfaithafterthe law of April 1939hadcomeintoeffect,forso longas the marriage lasted: Jaroslav Hendrych, "Zide na Slovensku" [Jewsin Slovakia], ibid., p. 607. 61 Speech in the Czechoslovak parliament,18 Oct. 1919: Narodm shromazdeVm' cveskoslovenske v prsnim roce republiky[The Czechoslovak NationalAssemblyin the First Yearof the Republic] (Prague,1919),p. 198.

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with the greatesteagerness[that] we anticipatedthe responseto the nationality question.Exceptingone villagethe answereverywherewas: "I speak both Slovakand Hungarian". "I did not ask which language you speak, but whetheryou are a Hungarian or a Slovak". . . Often a horrifying answerwouldcome: "It's the samedifference! If the breadis butteredon the Hungarian side, I am a Magyar,if it is butteredon the Czechside, I am a Slovak".62

Based on various ad hoc criteria (the language used at home, languageof prayer, etc.), the enumeratorsthemselves ended up ascribinga nationalityto their respondents.What price, then, the nationality"Czechoslovak" a ratherimportantcategoryin the new republic's legitimation as a Slavic state, since Czechs by themselvesformed a bare 51 per cent of the population in the 1921 census?The Slovakswere before long to resist this hyphenation to the Czech nation; but that is an issue beyond the scope of this paper. This enumeratorwas appalledby his respondents'unconcern (or cynicism) over national identity; he equated their plight to that of poor wretches on death row. Had he read the first Report of the Statistical Commission for the City of Prague (1871), though, he might have been surprised. This behaviour merely echoed the none-too-distant Czech past. Comparingfigures for the Czech and Germanpopulationsin the city censuses of 1851 and 1869, the Report tries to explainwhat it sees as overstatement of Germannumbersat the earlierdate. It cites deficienciesin the "conception and execution" of the 1851 survey. But its main conclusion is that attempts to ascertain nationality (narodnost) were "premature", because "a clear consciousness of national identity (narodnz pribuzenstvz', literally"nationalkinship") among the majorityof Austro-Hungarian nations was, so to speak, still in its infancy".63 This is almost certainlycorrect.The inhabitants of mid-nineteenth-centuryPrague spoke languages rather than belonging to them; and many routinely spoke more than one language,or a hybrid of both, in their "everydayintercourse". Max Brod famously described the "Old AustrianPrague" in which he grew up as "a city of three nationalities", and that description has become a cliche.64But none of these national
62 Unnamed enumerator's report, cited in Ferdinand Peroutka, Budovani statu[The Building of a State], 3rd edn, 4 vols. (Prague, 1991), i, p. 135. Translated by Alena Sayer. 63 Erben (ed.), Statistika kralovskeho hlasniho mesta Praky,p. 122. 64 Max Brod, Zivot plnybofu[A Life Full of Conflicts] (Prague, 1994), p. 7.

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were timeless. The situationBrod depicts is a product identities of the later nineteenth century. Gary Cohen has elsewhere told during thestory of the ethnicizationof Prague'sGerman-speakers German-speaking "the concludes: thisperiod more than ably. He middleand upper strata only transformedthemselves into selfconsciousGermangroups, distinguishedby a sense of German ethnicityand exclusive social relations, in response to demands for power and status by insurgent Slavic elements".65Hillel Kievalhas equally capablyreconstructedthe tortured dilemmas struggle, and of BohemianJews caught up in the Czech/German theirvariedresponses:Austrianliberalism,Czechassimilationism, My concernin what follows is with Cohen's Zionistnationalism.66 "Slavicelements" and their "insurgency".For a Czech national identity was no more self-evidently given in the mere fact of speakinga languagethan was a Germanor a Jewish identity. It, too, is a nineteenth-century construction, albeit one that laid claim to a more distant past. This story of the making of the modern Czech nation, like that of others, is one of imagined This should not be taken communitiesand invented traditions.67 is anything less than identity to imply, however, that a Czech out of thin air. concocted simply was real, or that it emphatically but with fictions, ideological with here We are not dealing social facts. III In 1783 Count Frantisek Antonin Nostic-Rieneck, who a year in Bohemia, opened before had become the highest state oiEficial p. 274. of EthnicSurvival, 65 Cohen,Politics

66Kieval, Making of Czech ffewry. See also his chapter "Autonomyand (ed.), in DavidAltshuler Legacyof CzechJewry", The Historical Interdependence: (New State Collections fromthe Czechoslovak Treasures 3tudaic Legacy: ThePrecious York,1983),pp. 46-109. and Spread on the Origin Reflections Communities: Anderson,Imagined 67 Benedict and TerenceRanger revisededn (London,1991);Eric Hobsbawm of Nationalism, 1983).See also, out of a vast field of (Cambridge, of Tradition (eds.), TheInvention (Cambridge, Europe in EarlyModern Culture relevantstudies,PeterBurke,Popular of EthnicSymbols 1978;rev. repr., Aldershot,1994);TamasHofer, "The Creation and Diversity in PeterF. Sugar(ed.), Ethnic Culture", fromthe Elementof Peasant (Oxford, 1980), pp. 101-45, 463-72; and Eric R. Wolf, Europe in Eastern Conflict xv (1988), pp. 752-61. Less obviously Ethnologist, "InventingSociety",American takenin this paper the approach workswhichhavenonethe less influenced relevant S. Cohn,"The Command (New York, 1979);Bernard Said,Orientalism are Edward of Languageand the Languageof Command",SubalternStudies, v (1986), pp. 276-329.It is fromthe latterthatI adaptmy title.

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in Prague the Count's National Theatre on what was then Konigsgasse,but has since 1870 been the Fruit-Market(Ovocny trh). Mozart's Don Giovanni had its world premiere there, on 29 October 1787. Inscribedon the portico is the motto "Patriae et musis": To the Fatherlandand the Muses. Nostic (or Nostitz) was a representative of what Czechhistorianscall land patriotism, a championof the historicrights of the kingdomof Bohemia;not againstthe Habsburgswho wore the Bohemiancrown, but against erosion of its powers and privilegesto Vienna. The same impulse was responsible for the foundation of the Royal Society of Bohemiain 1784, the Society of PatrioticFriends of Art in 1796, and the Patriotic(later National) Museum in 1818. This did not, however, make Nostic a Czech nationalist. Apart from Italian opera, his new theatre (renamed the Stavovske divadlo, Estates Theatre, after it was purchasedby the BohemianEstatesin 1798) played mostly in German.68 The standardHistory of the Czech Theatre comments on the "paradoxicality" of the fact that "the first representivestage of the Bohemiankingdom was erected as a German national theatre".69But this is to speak very much with hindsight, and inaccurately.In the Bohemia of the 1780s language did not connote or divide nations, but social classes. The languageof culture and civility was German.Czech was the lowly tongue of the fields, the stables and the kitchens. It is necessaryto say something here about earlier Czech history, not simply to explain this state of afEairs, but also because that history was to become central to the "revival" of Czech nationhoodin the nineteenth century. In the Middle Ages there had existed a sovereign Bohemian state, which had been ruled for four centuries (to 1307) by an indigenousCzech dynasty, the Premyslids. The pinnacle of its medieval glory came under the Holy Roman Emperor CharlesIV, known to Czechs as the
68After the theatrewas boughtby the Bohemian Estatesin 1798, performances tookplacein CzecheverySunday afternoon. By the mid-nineteenth century numbers of performances in Czechand German were "almostequal":JiriHilmera,Stavovske narodu! [TheEstates Theatreto the Nation!](Prague,1991),p. 13. The firstproduction at the Stavovske in Czech,a translation of a German play,took placein January 1785, the firstoriginalCzechproduction in January 1786:J. Divis et al., "Prahav obdobi narodnihoobrozeni(1784-1849)" [Praguein the Period of the National Rebirth, 1784-1849],in ZdenekMika et al., Dewjiny PraXy v datech [A Historyof Praguein Dates] (Prague,1988),p. 153. 69 Miroslav Kacer, "Pocatky ceskeho mestanskeho divadla (1785-1812)" [Beginnings of CzechUrbanTheatre(1785-1812)],in Frantisek Cerny(ed.), DeVjiny ceskehodivadla [A Historyof CzechTheatre],4 vols. (Prague,1969-83),ii, p. 18.

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"Father of the Homeland" (Otecvlasti),who made Prague his imperial capital. Charles was a member of the house of Luxemburg, but his mother was a Premyslidprincess. His own comments on languagehave a certain poignancy, in view of the status of Czech in Bohemiahalf a millenniumlater. He had spent the last eleven years abroadwhen he arrivedin Bohemiain 1333, aged seventeen, and found that:
severalyearsearlierour motherEliskahad died . . . Also we had completelyforgotten the Czechlanguage, but laterwe againlearned it, so that we spoke and understood it like every other Czech.By God'sgracewe were able to speak, write and read not only Czech, but also French, Italian,German and Latin,such that we had equalcommand of all these
languages-70

The Bible was first translatedinto Czech in the 1370s-80s. Of 44 known books printed in Bohemiabefore lS00, 39 were in Czech. In the next hundredyearssome 4,400 titles followed. The earliest Praguepublishinghouse, Melantrich,employed eleven people in 1577. In its thirty-yearexistence it published 223 books; 111 of them were in Czech, 75 in Latin, and only three in German.7l There is plentiful medieval evidence that the Czech language was alreadya focus of loyaltyand a locus of identity. The Hussites were seemingly as much concerned with defence of the Czech language as they were with defence of God's truth. A "Call to Arms in Defence of the Truth" issued in 1469, fifty years after the Hussite wars began, is typical of its time. Addressed"To all faithfulCzechsand Moravians,genuine lovers of God's truth and disciples of your own Czech language", it sets out the issues in the conflict thus:
70 Charles IV, "Vlastnizivotopis"[Autobiography], in Kroniky doby Karla IV. [Chronicles from the Age of Charles IV], ed. MarieBlahova(Prague,1987),p. 27, translated by AlenaSayer.Charles assiduously cultivated his specifically Czechheritage. See, for example,the use of Czechsymbolism at his coronation, the orderof whichhe wrotehimself:KarelIV., "Obrady korunovacni, jakje stanovil KarelIV." [TheCoronation Orderas Established by Charles IV], in Ljuba Horakova (ed.), Ceske korunovacm klenoty [The Bohemian Crown Jewels](Prague,1993),p. 40. 71 Thesefigures aretakenfromJosefKrasa,"Zlatyvek kniznimalby"[TheGolden Age of BookIllustration], in Mirjam Bohatcova et al., Ceskakniha v promenach staleti [The CzechBook throughthe Centuries] (Prague,1990), p. 70; Pravoslav Kniedl, "Ceske a moravske prvotisky" [Czech andMoravian Printed Books],ibid., pp. 121-3; Mirjam Bohatcova, "Rozsireni knihtisku v Cechach a na Morave do roku1620"[The Expansionof Book-Printing in Bohemiaand Moraviaup to 1620], ibid., p. 155; Mirjam Bohatcova, "Prvniceskynakladatelsky dum" [The First CzechPublishingHouse],ibid., p. 216.

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Havingin mind above all God's glory and the preservation of his holy truth and the calmingof this Czechand Moravian thatthe Pope)who shouldprotectanddefendthat land, we understand holy truthto his death, to the contrary,as a disobedient servant of his Lord, wants to destroy that holy truthand moreoverto destroy,wipe out and utterlysuppress the Czechlanguage, merelyto preservehis pride,his avariceand the rest of his irregularities ... He inflamesand incites all the nations and languages of the surrounding landsagainstus . . .72

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Thereis abundant testimony in medieval sources of Czech resentment at the growingwealthand power of Germans) who had been settling in Bohemiafor two centuriesat the behest of Premyslidkings seekingto encourage crafts, cities and commerce.73 A senseof Czech nationhood is not anexclusively modern phenomenon. But nor, in any straightforward sense, is the modernCzech nation the linear descendantof its medieval predecessor.74 The "Hussiteking"Jiri of Podebrady (1458-71)was the last Czech to sit on the throneof St Wenceslas. In 1526the crown passed to the Habsburgs. The followingcenturysaw growing political and religioustensions. The Czech nobility resented attempts to translate the personal unityof crownsinto a centralization of powerin Vienna,and the spreadof Lutheran ideas fromGermany on to fertile Hussitesoil ensuredthat by the beginning of the seventeenth centurya majority of Czechswere Protestant. The eventualshowdowncame in the risingof the
72 ''Provolam k boji na obranu pravdy", in Husitske manifesty [Hussite Manifestos], ed.Amadeo Molnar (Prague, 1986), pp. 229, 233; translated by Alena Sayer. Today C'pravda') means truth; then it also had connotations of "right>' or "justice"73 See, for example, the complaints of Czech lords to Charles IV's father Jan Lucembursky in 1315, recorded by the chronicler Frantisek Prazsky in the 1340s: "FrantisekPrazsky: kronika", in Kroniky doby Karb IV., ed. Blahova, p. 84. 74 I touch here on an issue much debated in Czech historiography (when political circumstances permitted). Notable were the polemics over Tomas Masaryk's Ceska otazka [The Czech Question] (Prague, 1990), originally published in 1894. Masaryk saw the "meaning" of Czech history as lying in the Hussite and Protestant legacy, but also regarded the nation as such as a distinctively modern phenomenon. His most distinguishedcritic, the Catholic historian Josef Pekar, held the superficially paradoxical position (with which I would generally concur) that a sense of Czech nationality asrecurrent a motif of Czech history, but that its content has varied enormously over the centuries; the implication being that the national and social movements of the nineteenth century had little in common with their medieval counterparts other than being linked to some notion of "Czechness': J. Pekar, ;'Smysl ceskych dejin [The Meaning of Czech History], in his O smyslu ceskych deiin (Prague, 1990). Pekar's writings were banned in their entirety under the communists, who recycled the nineteenth-century nationalist narrative for their own purposes; see the "catalogue of formerly banned books' in the Narodni knihovna v Praze (National Library, Prague).

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Czech Estates of 1618, which startedthe Thirty YearsWar. The revolt was defeated at the battle of Bila hora (the "White Mountain")outside Pragueon 8 November 1620, beyond doubt the most fateful date in Czech history. When, in 1627, the Bohemian Land constitution was "renewed", the powers of the Bohemiandiet were severely curtailed;Catholicism was made the sole legal religion; and Germanwas given equal status with Czech. The landsof the mostly CzechProtestantaristocracy were confiscatedwholesale,and given (or sold cheaply)to often foreign Catholics.The lesser nobility and gentry suffereddisproportionately; so too did Czechburghers.Protestants serfs excepted were given the choice of exile or conversion,and huge numbers chose the former. Among the emigrantswere many of Bohemia's leading intellectuals, like the humanist pedagogue Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius),the last bishop of the Union of Brethren (7ednotabratrska). Prague University was put under Jesuit control in 1620 and merged with the Jesuit Klementinum in 1653 to become the Karl-Ferdinand University. Forcible re-Catholicization continuedwell into the eighteenthcentury;all Czechbooks publishedbetween 1414 and 1635, accordingto rule 21 of the Index Bohemicorum librorum prohibitorum, contained heresies.75The Jesuit Antonin Konias boasted of personally burningupwardsof 30,000 books in his thirty-yearcareer.76 By 1800 the Czech lands were again overwhelminglyCatholic, andmuch of the urbanpopulationspoke German.In the Prague census of 1770 Czech names predominated only among "the lowest social strata".77Land-patriotism notwithstanding, the upperclasseshad little organicconnectionto the Czech past, and mostlyorientedthemselvesto Vienna.Even so eminentlypatriotic a figure as Count Frantisek Josef Kinsky, co-founder of the Bohemian Royal Society and authorof one of the earliestmodern "defences"of the Czech language(1773), chose to be buried in the cemetery of the Military Academy in Vienna's New Town,
75JosefDobrovsky, DeVjiny ceskerVeci a literatury[A History of CzechLanguage and Literature], trans.Benjamin Jedlicka from the first (German) edn of 1792 (Prague, 1951), p. 125. 76SeeMirjamBohatcova, "Koniasuv Klic" [Konias's Key], in Bohatcova et al., Ceska kniha v promenach staletz, pp. 273-6. 77Popis obyvatelstva hlasniho mevsta Praky z roku 1770 [A Descriptionof the Population of the Capital City Praguefromthe Year1770],ed. Eduard Sebesta and Adolf L. Krejcik (Prague, 1933),p. xix. Thoughthiscensus coversthemalepopulation only, and thesedatarelateonly to Staremesto,thereis no reasonat that dateto see them as unrepresentative of the linguistic make-upof the city as a whole.

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of which he was the founderand firstdirector.78 Czechhadlargely ceased to function as a languageof learningor state; indeed, as a written language it was in a condition of apparently terminal decline.79Spoken Czech had survived in the villages, but in so far as any Czech patriotismwas nurturedthere it was a Catholic patriotism. Bohemia's socio-linguistic splits were reproducedin the church; while the hierarchy was German-speaking,parish priests were the sons of Czech peasants, and it was in no small part due to their efforts that a literate Czech culture was kept alive at all while the towns were being linguisticallyand culturally "Germanized".Bila horafracturedCzechhistory, and in so doing vastly complicated the question of Czech identity for later generations. The first real stirrings of what Czechs call their "national rebirth" (narodna obrozeni) date from the same decade as Colnt Nostic's theatre, the 1780s. Joseph II's reforms reined in the power of the church and lightened censorship, permitting publication of long-proscribedCzech literatureand new expressions of Czech patriotism.But they also affectedthe languagequestion in more complex ways. When Prague University's syllabus was modernized in 1784, the language of instruction changed from Latin to German.Germanwas the principallanguageused in the elementaryschools that were beginningto cover Bohemia,as well as in the EngineeringSchool set up in 1784, which was to form the nucleus of Prague Polytechnic (1806). It also became the lingua francaof the imperial bureaucracy;a bureaucracywhose reach Joseph extended mightily. Sometimesthis had paradoxical
78 For a fascinating portrait of the land-patriotism of the Czech aristocracy in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including Kinsky, see Josef Hanus, Narodni museuma nase obrozeni[The National Museum and our Rebirth], 2 vols. in 1 (Prague, 1921-3). Hanus summarizes "the patriotism of our aristocracy" thus: "[they] were of a Czech disposition and laid claim to Czech historical traditions [they were] Palacky's 'in blood and heart faithful Czechs' but [they] spoke and for the most part also read and wrote only German and French" (bk ii, pp. 36-7). 79 According to Frantisek Palacky, Josef Dobrovsky, who might be considered the father of modern Czech, "had long abandoned hope for the revival of a Czech national literature and was also always later of the opinion that at best it might evolve only as a general popular literature": F. Palacky, "Josefa Dobrovskeho zivot a pusobeni vedecke" [The Life and Scientific Pursuits of Josef Dobrovsky], in his Dilo Frantisvka Palackeho [The Works of Frantisek Palacky], ed. Jaroslav Charvat, 4 vols. (Prague, 1941), iii, p. 266. See also Josef Jungmann's famous dialogues on the state of the Czech language, published in Hlasatel cwesky (The Czech Courier)in 1806 and republished under the title "O jazyku ceskem" [On the Czech Language] in his Vybrane spisy3tosefa 3tungmanna [Selected Writings of Josef Jungmann], ed. Karel Hikl (Prague, 1918), pp. 41-68.

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consequences,in that to produce an educated professionalclass in sufficient numbers local vernacularsoften had to be used. There were actuallymore school texts in Czech publishedin the decade of Joseph'sreign than in the entire preceding 150 years.80 But the overall effect of Josephine state-buildingwas simultaneously to open up new socialopportunitiesand yet structurethem in a way that systematically disadvantaged non-German-speakers. The first modern newspaperin Czech, Kramerius's Royal and ImperialPatrioticNews, started publication in Prague in 1789, and its editor Vaclav Matej Krameriusopened the first modern Czech publishinghouse, Ceska expedice, the next year. In 1786 Czechplayersnot permittedto performin CountNostic's theatre started up their own, called The Shack (Bouda), on what has since 1848 been WenceslasSquare (Vaclavskenamesti) but was then the Horse-Market.Abbe Josef Dobrovsky, a former Jesuit priest, published his Geschichteder bohmischen Sprache und Literaturin 1792. Though written in German, this is the first modernscholarlywork seriouslyto attendto Czechlinguisticand literary history. Dobrovsky went on to compile both a Derailed Grammarof the Czech Language(1809) and a Czech-German Dictionary(1802-21). A chair of Czech languageand literature was establishedat Prague University in 1792. Three years later, Antonin Puchmajerpublished the first modern almanacof new Czech poetry. During the first half of the nineteenth century these modest beginnings were consolidated.Josef Jungmann,a masterat the Old Town Gymnasiumwhere a centurylater Franz Kafkawas to be a pupil, translatedinto Czech Schiller, Goethe, Chateaubriand and, most famously,Milton'sParadise Lost(1811), helpedfound the first Czech scientificperiodical,Krok (1821),81 pennedthe first modernhistory of Czech literatureactuallyto be writtenin Czech (1825), and crownedhis life's work with a fivevolume, 120,000-entryCzech-Germandictionary(1834-9). The playwrightJosef Kajetan Tyl was a tireless advocate of Czechtheatre;he also edited one of the oldest of Czechmagazines, Kvetyceske(CzechBlooms,1833). By the 1820s there were Czech operas; Tyl wrote the libretto for FrantisekSkroup'sFidlovacka
80 See JosefHaubelt,Ceske osvicenstvi [The CzechEnlightenment] (Prague,1986), pp. 412-13. 81 The word"krok" meansa "step"or "stride"; it wasalsothe nameof the father of thelegendary Czechprincess Libuse,whomarried theequally legendary ploughman Premysl, supposed founderof the Premyslid dynasty of Bohemian kings.Libusealso famously prophesied the gloriesof the futurecity of Prague.

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(The Shoemakers' Fair, 1834),82 one of whose arias, "Kde domov muj?"(Whereis my Home?), was in the courseof time to become the nationalanthemof independent Czechoslovakia. KarelHynek Macha took Czech poetry on to an altogether higher plane with his Maj (May, 1836), though it was not well received in patriotic circles at the time. More typical of Czech poetic output were FrantisekLadislavCelakovsky'sEchoof Russian Songs(1829) and Echo of Czech Songs (1839), which claimed their inspirationin folk-song. Prague'sfirst city archivist,KarelJaromir Erben, and others began systematicallyto collect and publish such songs. The Slavist scholar Pavel Josef Safarik who wrote in Czech, even though he was (by modern reckoning) a Slovak was the mosteminent of those who made belongingto the Slavic "family of nations" into a significantstrand in modern Czech identity; his Slavic Antiquitiesappeared in 1836-7. Jan Kollar, another Slovakwriting in Czech, gave poetic voice to pan-Slavistsentimentsomewhatearlierin his Slava's Daughter of 1821. Central to the obrozenz' were the writings of the historian Frantisek Palacky. Czechs call Palacky, and with good reason, the"Father of the Nation" (Otecnaroda). The title he chose for his magnum opusis revealing.His is a Historyof the Czech Nation in Bohemia andMoravia,not a historyof the kingdomof Bohemia and its inhabitants.Palacky's object was "to serve my beloved nation by giving a faithful account of its past, in which it would recognize itself as in a mirrorand wake to consciousness of what it needs".83The Historyrelates the story of the Czechs only up to 1526, and representsthe Hussite era as the summit of Czech glory and the essence of Czechcharacter. Palackysees the Hussite wars as both a struggle for freedom of conscience in which the CzechsanticipatedLuther by a century, and proudly held oS the united assaultof CatholicEuropein defence of their beliefs and as but one episode in a millennialconflict of martial, aristocratic "Germanic" and peace-loving, democratic "Slavonic" worlds, whose cockpit has perennially been the Czech lands. Thereby he neatly makes the fifteenth century a "mirror" for the strugglesof the nineteenth, while giving the latter enormous (apparent) historical depth and legitimacy. He restores its lost
An annual popular spring festival organized by the Shoemakers' Guild, and held in the (then) village of Nusle on the southern outskirts of Prague. 83 Frantisek Palacky, Deiiny naroductesketho v Cechacha v Moravev, 6 vols. (Prague, 1939), i, p. vii.
82

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continuity to Czech history; from this perspective the centuries that had elapsedsince Bila horaare but an extraneousinterruption within a much longer nationalpilgrimage.The other side of this, of course, was to make the Germansinto perpetualintrudersin the Czech lands. IV The achievementof these buditele (awakeners),as they are known, is to have (re)constitutedthe Czech nationas a historicalsubject, possessed of a past and entitled to a future. Intellectually,if for the time being nowhere else, they succeeded in weaving together narod (nation), lid (people) and vlast (homeland) in a way that had not been done since 1620. The terms on which they did so drove a wedge through the Bohemia that had been the object of Nostic's kind of patriotism, redefining the patria as quintessentiallyCzechand in the processextrudingits established upper classesas spiritualforeigners.The "rebirth"of the humble Czech language itself was central to this. It was as a linguistic community above all that the reborn nation was identified. RootingCzechnessin languageenabledthe centuriesto be vaulted over; on the ground of language, and perhaps on that ground alone, descent could be claimed from Hussite warriorsand the Union of Brethren, without the cultural discontinuities consequenton Bila hora being too closely examined.A master-image of the obrozeni is of the nation slumbering,waiting like Sleeping Beauty to be woken up, unsullied and unchanged; the term buditelecomes from the verb budit, to awaken (someone). Languagebecame the repositoryof that hibernatingidentity, "a cathedralas well as a fortress", as another Prague Jew, Pavel Eisner, was to describe it.84 With this the simple rural people, who had kept the tongue alive through the centuries after Bila hora, came to be seen as the living embodiment of Czechness. Oneconsequenceof this (which communistswere to exploit later) was that Czech nationalismacquireda decidedly populist, even plebeianhue. Equally entailed in this identificationof the nation throughits language was a pregnantconceptualrelocationof the Czechlands.
84This is his title for what may be the best work ever written on the Czech language, originally published in 1946:PavelEisner,Chrami tsrz (Prague,1992).It was Eisnerwho firsttranslated FrsnzKafka'sThe Castle into Czechin 1936.

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Since the tenth century, the history of Bohemia had been integrally bound up with that of the lands of the Holy RomanEmpire. Regroundingidentity in languageallowed the Czech lands to be disentangledfrom their "Germanic"surroundsand reconceived as the most westerly outlier of an imagined Slavic civilization, whose spiritualheartlies in Moscow (to which Palackyand others made an ostentatious"pilgrimage"in 1867 on the occasion of a grand ethnographic exhibition). Linguistic kinship thus supplantedhistoricalexperience,or ratherbecamean instrumentfor its dismissal. The painter Mikolas Ales, who is conventionally consideredto be "the founderof the nationaltraditionin painting, our most Czech artist",85spoke for many when, later in the century, he expressed the opinion that "it will be well with us, when the cossacks are in Staromestskenamesti".86Closer to home, communalitiesof languageallowed Hungary's Slovaks to be reconfiguredas a lost fragment of a primeval Czech nation; for Czech and Slovak are so close as to be mutually intelligible. The WashingtonDeclarationof 18 October 1918 demanded"for Czechsthe right to be linked to their Slovakbrothersin Slovakia, which was once part of our nationalstate [and] was later torn oS from the body of our nation and fifty years ago annexed to the Hungarianstate of the Magyars".87 The "nationalstate" referred to here was the Great MoravianEmpire, which perished at the hands of Magyarsin the first decade of the tenth century. Josef Pekar's Czechoslovak History, the standardgymnasium textbook in the first republic, gamely tries to include Slovaksin the Czech nationalepic, but the task is a hopeless one, for the simple reason that (in his own words) "Slovakiawas lost for nationalunity for more than ten centuries".88 This did not stop "the Czechoslovak language" an entity whose very existence both Czechs and
85 Prokop Toman,Novy slovnikcveskoslovenskych vytvarnychumevlcu [New Dictionary of Czechoslovak Artists],4th edn, 14 vols. (Ostrava,1993;unaltered reprintof the 3rd edn, Prague,1947-50),i, p. 10. 86Quotedin Jaromir Neumann,"Mikolas Alesa pokrokove tradice ceskychdejin" [Mikolas Alesandthe Progressive Traditions of CzechHistory],in Mikolas Ales, Boj nageholidu za ssobodu [The Struggle of Our Peoplefor Freedom],ed. LuborKara (Prague,1952)p. 22. 87 "Washingtonska deklarace", in Deiiny cesketho statu v dokumentech [The History of the CzechStatein Documents],ed. ZdenekVesely (Prague,1994), pp. 311-12. Issued in Paris over the signatures of Tomas Masaryk,EdvardBenes and Milan Stefanikin the nameof the provisional Czechoslovak government, this is reckoned one of the foundation documents of independent Czechoslovakia. 88 JosefPekar,DeVjiny cVeskoslovenske (Prague, 1991),p. 19.

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Slovaks are apt indignantlyto deny from becoming the sole "state, officiallanguage"of the CzechoslovakRepublic.89 A lot more was involved in the nineteenth-century resurrection of Czech as a written languagethan a simple transcription of oral realities; here as elsewhere the buditeledid much to constitute that which they purported merely to "awaken". To this day written and spoken Czech differ considerablyboth in vocabulary and grammaticalforms, and there are multiple dialects of the spoken language.Codifyingthe languageabstractsan ideal community, one described and inscribed in dictionaries,grammars, all the canonicalartefactsof written culture,from multipleshades of difference. It establishes internal homogeneities and defines external boundaries. It also creates an instrument of power, through which those who have masteryof the written word can claim to representthose they have linguisticallysubsumedunder its mantle. For his celebratedtranslationof ParadiseLostof 1811 Josef Jungmannwent well beyond the spoken Czech of his time, drawingwidely from medievalCzechliteratureandother Slavonic languages, and coining many neologisms of his own. These in turn found their way into his dictionary.Antonin Puchmajer,for one, objected that "this will no longer be a Czech dictionarybut a general Slavonic dictionary";90 but it was Jungmann,inspired by the pan-Slavist dream "that we Czechs too might slowly embracea universalSlavonicliterarylanguage'',91 who did much to give modern Czech its authoritativewritten form. Vaclav Hanka, librarian of the National Museum for forty years, went so far as to endow the nation with a forged early medieval poetic literature, in the interests of providing a level playing-fieldwith the Nibelungenlied. "Discovered" in 1817-18, Hanka'smanuscriptswere not finallydiscrediteduntil the 1880s. By then, Palackyhad used them as a source in his History,Manes
89 "Jazykovy zakon" [Language Law], 29 Feb. 1920, in Deviiny ceskeho statu v dokumentech, ed. Vesely,p. 351. This language lawformedpartof the constitution of 1920."National andlinguistic minorities" (primarily Germans andHungarians) were permitted to use their own languages in dealingswith the state in districts(ohresy) wherethey formedover20 per centof the population. A seE?arate writtenSlovak was firstdifferentiated fromCzechandformalized by L'udovitSturin the 1840s,against the opposition of Kollarand Safarik amongothers. 90AntoninPuchmajer,letter to Josef Jungmann,1816, cited in Jan Jakubec, "Jungmann, Josef", in Ottuvslovnik nausny, xiii (1898),p. 671. 9lJosefJungmann,"Predmluva" [Foreword] to the first edition (1811) of his translation of Milton'sParadise Lost, in Vybrane spisyffosefa ffungmanna, ed. Hikl, p. 155. (Emphasis in original. )

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and Ales had lovingly illustratedthem, and their invented heroes had inspired statues from the National Theatre to the Palacky Bridge. Hankawas the first Czech in modern times to be buried, in 1861, in Vysehrad cemetery in Prague, which thereafter became "a burial-placefor the most notable men, those excelling above all others in their eSorts for the Czech nation".92Bozena Nemcova followed him there the next year. The one-time Premyslid seat of Vysehrad is a location central to old Czech legend, but it is also one which Hanka's own manuscriptshad done much to revivify. Above Hanka'sgrave is a pillar with the inscription"Nationswill not perishso long as the languagelives". It is not unfair to see Hanka as thoroughlyrepresentativeof his period. He was a pupil of Dobrovsky, whose dictionaryhe helped Snish, and a friend of Jungmann;he devotedly served the panSlavistcause with indifferenttranslations of popularpoetry from Serbian, a voluminous Slavonic correspondence,and textbooks of Polish and Russian;he was instrumentalin the modernization of Czech spelling; and in 1848 he was president of the patriotic club Slovanskalipa (The Slav Linden)93 and a delegate to both the Land and imperialparliaments. Many buditeleborn before 1850 did not speak Czech as their first language. Though nobody could reasonably question his fluencyin Czech, KarelHynek Machawrote to his girlfriendLori in German.94 As a young man the composer Bedrich Smetana kept his diaries in the same language. As late as 1860 he gives pencil drawings in his sketchbook titles in German (Nusslebei Prag for the suburb, then still the village, of Nusle is one).95The journalistKarel Havlicek Borovsky, whose Narodninoviny(The NationalNezvs) was to play a prominentrole in the "stormyyear" 1848, wrote, aged 18, to a friend in 1839 that he "desired to be
92 Petr Fischer,mayorof Smichov, describing the burialvault (Slavin)he funded there, built in 1889-93;cited in FrantisekRuth, Kronika kralovske Praky a obc sousednich[A Chronicle of Royal Pragueand Neighbouring Communities], 3 vols. (Prague,1903-4),iii, p. 1147. 93 The lindenis the Czech"national tree". 94 K. H. Macha to LoriSomkova, mid-May1834and2 Nov. 1836,bothin Intimm' Karel Hynek Macha [The Unexpurgated KarelHynekMacha],ed. MilosPohorsky (Prague, 1993), pp. 100, 134-5. Machaalso wrote poetry in Germanas well as in Czech. 95 These sketchesare reproduced in Kresby Bedrwicha Smetany [The Drawingsof BedrichSmetana], ed. ZdenekNejedly(Prague,1925;catalogue for an exhibition of the Umelecka beseda).The originaldiariesare on displayin the MuzeumBedricha Smetany on Smetanovo nabreziin Prague.

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a Czech in speech and actions. To this end I take the magazine Kvety and read only Czech books, althoughas you will see from my spellingmistakesI have had scant successin this".96Havlicek copied out and learned by rote all the words in Jungmann's dictionary.97 Josef Manes, who is described in a recent Czech biographical dictionaryas "one of the greatestEuropeanpainters of his time, for us in addition a painter national in his very being",98 patriotically illustratedCzechfolk-songs;their texts are riddledwith elementarylinguisticerrors.99 Palackyhimself spoke German at home with his wife and children.l??Neither of the founders of Sokol, the patriotic gymnastic associationof which OttlaKaflna's husbandwas a member,grew up in Czech-speaking homes. Miroslav Tyrs was born Friedrich Emanuel Tirsch and camefrom a familyin Decin in the Sudetenland which had spoken Germanfor generations.In 1860 he was still signing his name in its Germanform.l?l When Jindrich, formerly Heinrich Fugner, was asked by his six-year-old daughterRenata(who herself went on, as Tyrs's wife, to become an expert on Czech folk art) whether he "had been a German" when younger, he replied: "No, little one, I wasn't a German,I was a Praguer,a Germanspeaking Praguer''.l02 These born-againCzechs spoke together,
96KarelHavlicekBorovsky,letter to M. Priborsky,1839, quoted in Slavomir Ravik, K H. Borovsky: portrettbojovnika[K. H. Borovsky: Portraitof a Fighter] (Prague,1991),p. 13.
97 98

Ibid.

P[avel]A[ugusta], "Manes Josef", in PavelAugusta et al., Kdo byl kdo v naiich deVjinach do roku 1918 [WhoWas Who in our Historyup to 1918] (Prague,1993),
p. 193. 99 Dopisy ffosefa Manesa [The Lettersof Josef Manes],ed. Jan Kuhndel (Prague,

1968),has254pagesof letters,onlyfourof whichwereoriginally written in (appalling) Czech. The distinguished art historianAntoninMatejcekelsewherewrites: "The struggle with the Czechlanguage wasManes's chiefdifficulty in the realization of his artisticplan.In the [18]50she mastered Czechonly in ordinary conversation, in the following decade he considerably extended his vocabulary. However, he neverlearned to writewell to his death,lackinga knowledge of the language grounded in cultural literacy":Dilo 3rosefaManesa [The Workof Josef Manes],ed. AntoninMatejcek, 4 vols. (Prague,1923-8),i (2ndedn, 1928),p. 42. 100 See "Podiven"[pseudonym for PetrPithart,Petr Prihoda, MilanOtahal],Cegi v deVjinach nove doby [The Czechsin Modern History](Prague,1991),p. 71. lOl See ZoraDvorakova, Miroslav Tyr+:prohry a vitesstvi [Miroslav Tyrs:Defeats andVictories] (Prague,1989),pp. 7, 23. On Tyrs'sstruggles with Czech,see alsothe reminiscences of his wife:Renata Tyrsova, Miroslav Tyrf:jeho osobnost a dilo [Miroslav Tyrs:His Personality andWork](Prague,1932),pp. 34-5. 102 Quoted in Dvorakova, Miroslav Tyrf, p. 29. Dvorakova alsoquotesFugnerhere as sayingthat his readingof VaclavHanka's manuscripts in German translation was "a hugeexperience" which"helpedme discover the roadto the Czechs".In neither case,unfortllnately, does she give her original sources.

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for the most part, in German,becauseFugner's "kitchen Czech" (as he himself reckoned it) was inadequate for the elevated subjects of their discussions.l03 The reconstructionsof identity entailed in the Czech "nationalrebirth" extended first of all to its authorsthemselves.
V

Palackyand his circle succeededin taking over the Royal Society and the National Museum in the 1820s, a position they used among other things to launch the first Czech historical journal (CasopisCeskehomusea, 1827) and a fund for the support of publication of scholarly literature in Czech (Matice ceska, 1831).1?4 Their wider social impact, however, was very limited. It puts things in perspective when we realize that Celakovsky's Echo of RussianSongs, later canonized as a seminal work of the obrozeni,was printed in an edition of only five hundred copies, and that at Celakovsky'sown expense. Several years later more than half this print run remainedin his hands, unsold.l05It was a key symbolic moment, as Karel Havlicek Borovskyrecognized, when on 31 January 1846 Palacky, Safarikand Jungmannwere guests of honour at the inaugural banquet of the (Czech) Burghers' Club (Mestanskabeseda), and "the Prague burghers for the first time stepped out in greater glory in a completely Czechspirit, takinga bravestep towardsthe unceasingprofession of their nationalitybefore the world''.l06The "stormy year" of 1848 demonstratedsomethingof the potentialof Czech nationalism for mobilizing wider social aspirationsand resentments,but bore little tangiblefruit. It was only after 1860 that the imagined
pp. 24-5. See also Tyrsova,Miroslav Tyrs9, pp. 34-5. l04See Stanley B. Kimball,"The Maticeceska,1831-1861: The FirstThirtyYears of a Literary Foundation", in PeterBrockandH. Gordon Skilling(eds.), The Czech Renascence of the Nineteenth Century(Toronto,1970),pp. 53-73. 105 Pravoslav Kniedl,"Nakladatelska svepomoca Maticeceska"[Publishing SelfHelp and the Maticeceska], in Bohatcova et al., Ceska kniha v promeVnach staleti, p. 357. For an analysis of the socialbasisof Czechpatriotism in the earlynineteenth century, see MiroslavHroch, "The Social Composition of the Czech Patriotsin Bohemia, 1827-1848", in BrockandSkilling (eds.), CzechRenascence of the Nineteenth Century,pp. 33-52. 106 K. H. Borovsky,"Otevreni BesedyMestanske v Praze"[The Inauguration of the Burghers' Clubin Prague],in PrazVske noviny, 1 Feb. 1846,as cited in Frantisek V. Schwartz (ed.), Pamatnik Besedy mevitvanske v Praze na oslavu padesatiletecinnosti
103 Ibid., (cont. onp. 196)

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community mapped out by the buditele was materializedin and as a popularculture of nationality. I am not unduly concerned here with the causes of this sea-change. The fact of the transformationof Czech-speakers into a nation was to be far more consequentialthan whatever class aspirationsmay have fuelled it in the first place. Bozena Nemcova's Babicka; Bedrich Smetana's Prodana nevesta (The Bartered Bride, 1866)and Ma vlast(MyHomeland, 1879);Mikolas Ales's illustrations for children's primers, Alois Jirasek's Old CzechLegends (Starepovesticeske,1894); the martyredJan Hus, the one-eyed Hussite generalJan Zizka, the terriblefield at Bila hora, the gentle Komensky dying in farawayNaarden;the folksongs collected by Celakovskyand Erben, the village costumes so painstakinglyportrayedby Josef Manes; the soft sonoritiesof the Czech language itself these things came culturally to demarcate the territory zvithinwhich Czech political struggles were subsequentlyfought out, and to define the people who were their subjects.Little in twentieth-centuryCzech(oslovak)history can be understoodexcept againstthis background. It was modernizationthat both generateda populationcapable of being nationalizedand provided the practicalinstrumentsschoolsand universities,newspapersand magazines,theatresand museums,public buildingsand public spaces with which this projectcould be accomplished.Some of the reasonswhy nationalism triumphed after 1860 where it had not done so earlier are perhapsobvious enough. They include the great influx of Czech peasants to the cities, which did not gathersteamuntil the second partof the century (GreaterPrague grew from around 150,000 in 1851 to over half a million by 1900); the increasednecessity forCzech-speakers of all classesto interact,on a daily basis, with a multiplicity of state agencies, from police to schools, which madethe languagein which they did so an immediatelypractical question; the rise of a Czech middle class, both professionaland commercial, and the linguistic obstaclesthe Habsburgstate continued to put in the way of their advancement; and the continuing economic and state-supporteddominanceof Germanand Jewish capital. No less importantwere the reformsin the politicalorganizationof the Empire which allowed space for an autonomous
(n. 106 cont.)

spolku 1845-6 -1895-6 [Memorial of the Burghers' Clubin Prague,in Celebration of

Fifty Yearsof the Society'sActivity](Prague,1896),p. 9.

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Czech cultural and political life to flourish, beginning with the fall of Alexander Bach's authoritarian and centralizingministry in Vienna in 1859. The fate of Slovak nationalism over the same period is an instructive counter-examplein both respects. The Slovaks too had their buditele, L'udovlt Stur and others. But upper Hungary, as it then was, modernized much more slowly than the Czech lands: in 1921, twice as many Czechs (45.7 per cent) as Slovaks (23.9 per cent) lived in settlementsof 2,000 or more people, and over 60 per cent of the employed Slovak population, as against 29.6 per cent of Bohemia's, still worked in agricultureor forestry.l07Pressburg(which was renamedBratislavaonly in 1919) had a population of 52,411 in 1890, only 8,707 of whom were Slovaks;l08 (Greater)Pragueby then alreadyhad 397,268 inhabitants.l09 Where Czech nationalism benefited from the limited political freedoms permitted by the October Diploma of 1860 and the February Patent of 1861, Slovakia, after the establishment of Dual Monarchy in 1867, was subjected to concerted Magyarization.In 1874-5 the Hungariangovernment closed the only three Slovakgymnasia because of their "unpatrioticspirit"; by 1902, the use of Hungarianas the medium of instructionfor eighteen hours per week was mandatory in all schools; after further legislation in 1907, only 344 Slovak elementary schools survived in Slovakia,as against 3,242 Hungarian.ll?The Matica slovenska, founded in 1862 on the model of the Matice ceska, was abolished in 1875, and its assets turned over to a Magyar patrioticsociety, on the groundsthat "the Slovaknation does not exist''.lll The degree to which this became a self-fulfilling prophecy is clear from the 1919 survey discussedearlier. At the beginning of 1848 there were only two political
107 1921census data.The figures for settlements aretakenfromJanHavranek et al., 'sPrilohy'' [Appendices], suppl. 6: "Zakladni data z historicke demografie Ceskoslovenska" [BasicData on the Historical Demography of Czechoslovakia], in Miroslav Buchvaldek et al., Deviiny Ceskoslovenska v datech [A History of Czechoslovakia in Dates](Prague,1968),p. 481;thosefor employment, fromCapek, "Obyvatelstvo", p. 1084. l08Figurefrom 1890 census:Anon., "Prespurk", in Ottuv slovnik nauctny)xx, p. 653. l09Figurefrom 1890 census data, calculatedon GreaterPragueboundaries as established in 1922:Siska,"Populacni a bytovepomery",p. 72. 110 Bohumil Bydzovsky, "Ceskoslovenska republika", subheading "Skolstvi" [Education], in Ottuv slovnzknauctny nove doby, i, pt 2, p. 1239. 1llBuchvaldek et al., Deiiny Ceskoslovenska v datech, p. 272.

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newspapersin Czech, a year later thirty. But this brief flowering of Czech journalismwas easily crushed. Havlicek was exiled to the Austrian Tyrol. Throughout the long decade of the "Bach absolutism"not a single non-governmentalpaper was published in Czech. Only from the 1860sdo we get a regularand independent Czech press, with the daily newspapersCas (Time),Narodni listy (The National) and Pohrok(Progress). In 1875, there were 195 periodicalsbeing publishedin Bohemia,99 of them in Czech; by 1890therewere 418, of which 253 were in Czech.As important as the numbers is the range of subject-areas, because it is a measureof the growing variety of walks of life in which it was becomingpossible routinelyto function in Czech and as a Czech. A partiallisting includespolitics, the nationaleconomy, tradeand business, education and youth, military affairs, literature and entertainment,music and theatre, diocesan life, law, medicine, science and local news.ll2 The first Czech women's magazine, Zenske listy (The Women's Paper),was startedby the feminist (and ardent patriot) Eliska Krasnohorska in 1875; alongsidethe cause of women'seducation,it defendedwith equalvigourthe authenticity of VaclavHanka'smanuscripts.ll3 Magazineslike Zlata Praha (GoldenPrague), which appeared weekly from 1884, gave the rapidly broadeningeducated Czech publicthe opportunityto participatein literateculturein its own tongue, and provided a forum where that culture could be developed. In its first twenty years (as it boasted in 1903) Zlata Prahacarried2,171 original Czech poems. Of its 9,205 illustrationsover the sameperiod "therewere no less than3,819 pictures by domestic artists ... From these numbers it is evident that ZlataPraha always placed the chief weight on indigenouswork. It was always,above all, origlnal,Czech''.ll4In 1885, a year after its launch, Zlata Praha already had a circulationof over 8,500.
112 The figuresare taken from Jan Srb, entry "Cechy", subheading "Literatura vedecka a odborna: casopisectvi" [Scientific and Specialized Literature: Periodicals], inOttuv slowniknausny, vi (1893), p. 358. The subject-matter classification is his. Srb's contribution is a separate note at the end of the section,whoseexplicitpurpose isto showthe ever-growing strength of Czechas against German periodical literature. 113 EliskaKrasnohorska, "Slovonasimctenarkam o Rukopisech kralovedvorskem azelenohorskem" [A Wordto our LadyReaderson the Dvur Kraloveand Zelena Hora Manuscripts], originallypublishedin Zenske listy (1886), pp. 94-6, repr. in Drahomira Vlasinova, ElisVka Krasnohorska (Prague,1987),pp. 187-9. Krasnohorska was alsothe librettist for severalof Smetana's operas. 114 L. K. Zizka,untitled columnin Zlata Praha, xx (1902-3),pp. 143-4. This was the onethousandth issueof the magazine, whichwasdevotedto celebrating its history.

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Week in, week out, it manifestedthe existence of a Czechliterary and artistic culture, regularly reviewing Czech books, plays, exhibitions and musical performances;it reoriented conceptual geographiesby treating Bohemiaand Moravia,which were then still administrativelydivided within the Habsburg state, as a unifiednationalspace, whose wider Slavicintegumentit concretized through its regular column "The Slav World" and its frequent special featureson Russia, Serbia, Bulgariaand other Slav lands; it gave face and body to the nation through its birthday tributes and obituaries;and it resolutelyignored GermanPrague and all its works. Zlata Prahawas publishedby Jan Otto, who built his firm into the largest Czech publishing-house before World War I. Otto also published several other influentialmagazines,including the literary journal Lumir and the current affairs review Svetozor (Worldwatch). He popularizedCzech authorsin series with titles such as "The Enlightenmentof the People" and "The Affordable National Library"; he also pioneered translationinto Czech in his "World Library", "Russian Library" and similar series, a crucialmatterif Czech were ever to rival Germanas a "language of the educated". From the 1880s the firm began to put out lavishly illustratedpatrioticsouvenirs, notably the multi-volume Cechy(Bohemia)and weighty mementoes of the opening of the NationalTheatrein 1881 and the Czechoslavic[sic]Ethnographic Exhibition (Narodopisna vystava ceskoslovanska) of 1895.115 This spectacle attracted over two million visitors to Prague's Stromovkapark that summer to consume a satisfyingabundance of representations of themselves. The brief of the exhibition was "to depict in a wide variety of appropriate ways, strictly in accordancewith reality and truth, the life and state of the Czech nationat the close of the nineteenthcentury'',ll6but the prevalent imagery was anything but urban or contemporary.On display were nostalgic reconstructionsof farmsteadsand cottages, mills and churches, and village magistrates' houses; a multitude of Bohemian, Moravian and Slovak local village costumes (which had now become narodni kroje,national costumes);ceramics,glass,
v

llSFrantisek Adolf Subert,Narodni divadlo v Praze: deVjiny jeho i stasba dokoncena [The National Theatre in Prague:Its History and Completion](Prague, 1881); Frantisek Adolf Subert(ed.), Narodopisnavystava ceskoslovanska v Praze 1895 [The Czechoslavic Ethnogravphic Exhibition in Prague1895](Prague,1895). 116 Frantisek AdolfSubert,Doklady a poznamky [Documents andNotes], in Subert (ed.), Narodopisnavystava ceskoslovanska v Praze 1895, p. vi.

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furniture, religious artefacts, and other manifestationsof "folk art"; and meticulousre-enactmentsof all-but-extinctruralrituals like the Moravian"Ride of the Kings" (jzzda kralu).1l7 Jan Otto's most enduring achievement is the twenty-eightvolume nationalencyclopediaOttuvslovnz'k nausny.Its handsome black leather binding is richly decoratedwith linden-leavesand heraldicmotifs of the Czech lands in gold leaf. In its time it was second in the number of its entries and illustrationsonly to the Britannica. Originally the brainchild of future "presidentliberator" Tomas Masaryk, it is a work of very considerable scholarship;Otto was able to draw on the combinedexpertise of virtually the entire faculty of the newly independent Czech University of Prague. Ottuv slovnz'k nausnyclaimed to compare with the best of foreign encyclopediasin its scientific authority, and doubtless did. But as much to the point, "it was not a copy of a foreign work adaptedto our conditions. It was a work that was Czech through and through, original, written from our nationaland Slavonicstandpoint''.llsThe entry on Bohemiaruns to 572 double-columnedpages in close type, completewith fourteen fold-out colouredmaps and illustrations: it is a compendious representation of land and people, from its geology to its cuisine. We can look up as insignificanta communityas HermanKaiia's home village of Osek, and be confident of finding at least the latest census figures on its inhabitantsand their "language of everydayuse". A two-volume popularabridgementof the large Slovniknausnyappearedin 1905-6.ll9 Mass elementaryeducation had begun in the 1770s, and was (theoretically)compulsoryfrom 1805, but throughoutthe early nineteenth century there was no teaching available in Czech beyondprimarylevel. Only in 1848 did the Ministryof Education decree that the language of instruction in elementary schools wouldhenceforth be the mother-tongue. By 1890, 576,963 elementary-school-children were being educatedin Czech, 332,041 in German.l20There is, perhaps, no more powerful means of
117 For an excellentdiscussion of this exhibition, see AndrewLass, "WhatKeeps the CzechFolk 'Alive'?", Dialectical Anthropology, xiv (1989),pp. 7-19. 118 Bohumil Nemec, "Uvod" [Preface], in Ottuvslovnik nausny novedoby,i, pt 1, unpaginated. 119 Frantisek Adolf Subert (ed.), Maly Ottav slovnik nausny [Otto's Small Encyclopedia], 2 vols. (Prague,1905-6). l20JanSafranek,"Skolstviobecne a mestanske"[Elementary and Intermediate Schools], in Kafkaet al. (eds.), Sto let prace,iii, p. 519. These figuresare for public elementary (obecne) schoolsonly. Brokendown by nationality of pupils,therewere
(cont. on p. 201)

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nationalizing a populationthan compulsoryschoolingthroughthe medium of a "nationallanguage". The first gymnasium to teach in Czech was the Prague Academic Gymnasium,during 1850-3, but it then reverted to German until 1861. Irrespective of any political factors, shortage of textbooks (in 1841 there were still none in Czech) and teachers (the first entirely Czech teachers' trainingcollege opened in Prague only in 1849) precludedwidespreaduse of Czech before the 1860s. During that decade twelve gymnasia changed to Czech as their language of tuition, and a further two used both Czech and German. Laws of 1866 and 1868 dividedgymnasia into either Czech or German;by 1890, the Czechgymnasia and technicalhigh schools had many more pupils than the German.l2lThat same year the first girls' gymnasium in Austria-Hungary,"Minerva", opened its doors in Prague; its founder was the redoubtableEliska Krasnohorska,its language of instructionCzech. PragueUniversityoffered only 22 out of its 187 lecture coursesin Czech in 1861.122 By 1891, nine years after the split, the Czech University had 142 faculty, only ten fewer than the German University, and 2,308 students as against the GermanUniversity's 1,452.123 The (Czech) National Theatre, the fruit of a campaignbegun in 1850 (with Palackychairingthe fund-raisingcommittee), and opened in 1881, was destroyedby fire after only twelve productions, and reopened, phoenix-like, in 1883. Splendidlydecorated with scenes from Czech history and legend by the young artists of what has been known ever since as "the generation of the National Theatre", above its proscenium is written in golden letters "NAROD SOBE": the nation to itself. The statement is literal as well as symbolic; the theatre was funded entirely by public donations,garneredfrom the furthest cornersof the land. MikolasAles immortalizedthe nation'sgift to itself in a touching
(n. 120 cont.)

590,590Czechsand318,414Germans, meaning that 13,627Czechchildren werestill beingeducated in German. The non-attendance ratein Czechschooldistricts was8.6 per cent, in German schooldistricts15.97per cent of all school-age children. 121 In gymnasia and technical (realne) gymnasia there were 10,424 Czech pupils, 5,767 German; in technicalhigh schools(realky) 2,966 Czech,2,786 German: Petr Durdik, entry "Cechy", subheading "Skoly stredni" [MiddleSchools],in Ottuv slosmk nausny, vi, pp. 196-7. 122 Petr Durdik, entry "Cechy", subheading"Dejiny skolstvi" [History of Education], ibid., p. 360. 123 Petr Durdikand Josef J. Koran,entry "Cechy",subheading "Skolyvysoke" [Institutions of HigherEducation], ibid., pp. 198-9.

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drawingof a peasantfamily putting pennies into a collection-box on their kitchen table.l24Semioticallythe Narodni divadlo must be one of the most fascinatingbuildings in Europe, at least for any student of nationalidentity. The Czech Academyof Sciences and Arts was founded in 1891, the Czech Philharmonicin 1894. Prague'sAcademyof CreativeArts, originallyestablishedin 1799, was transformedinto a centre of nationalart in 1887 when Julius Marak,VaclavBrozik,Josef VaclavMyslbekand VojtechHynais, eminent artistsof the Generationof the National Theatre, joined its staff. By the time the Modern Galleryopened in 1902, it was taken for granted that contemporaryart should be exhibited in separateCzech and Germandivisions.l25 Behind these public culturalinstitutionswas a dense network of private clubs and societies. Umelecka beseda (The Artistic Society), founded in 1863, broughttogether leadingrepresentatives of Czech literature, art and music. Its first committee includedKarelJaromirErben,Josef Manesand BedrichSmetana. It organized public lectures, panel discussions and readings, concerts and recitals, and art exhibitions; it published books, magazinesand graphic albums;and it sponsoredmemorialsand commemorative plaques.Among the plaquesit erected in Prague were homages to Celakovsky (1872), Erben (1875), Havlicek (1870), Hus (1869), Jungmann(1873), Kramerius(1868), Manes (1874), Palacky(1885) and Safarik(1875); a nationalcanonwas in the making. An analysisof the "StatisticalOverview" appended to Umelecka beseda's fiftieth-anniversary volume of 1913 would make a long and fascinatingstudy of the tropes of nineteenthcentury Czechnessin itself: suffice it here to record that lectures on literatureare classifiedunder the headings"Czech", "Russian and Little Russian", "Polish", "South Slav", "Slav" and Foreign . By 1888 there were 10,547 registered clubs of one kind or
Reproduced in Subert,Narodni divadlo v Praze, p. 40. On these institutions, see Otto Wichterleet al., Sto let Ceske akademievewd a umeVni [One HundredYearsof the CzechAcademy of Sciencesand Arts] (Prague, 1991);Jiri Kotalik(ed.), AlmanachAkademievytvarnychumeVni v Praze [Almanac of the Academyof CreativeArts in Prague](Prague,1979);Anon., Moderni galerie kralovstvi cesk(eho v Praze [The ModernGalleryof the CzechKingdomin Prague] (Prague, 1907); R. Musil et al., Moderni galerie tenkrat 1902-1942 [The Modern Gallery Then: 1902-1942](Prague,1992). 126 Antonin B. Svojsik, "Statistickeprehledy cinnosti 'Umelecke besedy"' [Statistical Overviews of the Activityof Umelecka beseda],in H. Jelinek(ed.) Padesat let Umeleckebesedy[FiftyYearsof Umelecka beseda](Prague,1913),pp. v-xxx.
124 125

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another in Bohemia. The most popular (2,187) were voluntary fire-fighters'societies;it is quite typicalof the period that in 1891 their national association too split on national lines. The 513 gymnastic societies and 655 choral societies were also crucibles in which a nationalidentitywas forged. The Prague choralsociety Hlahol, founded in 1861, had 609 members thirty years latergl27 its first public engagement had been to sing at Vaclav Hanka's funeral in Vysehrad. The motto on the society's art nouveau building on Masarykovo nabrezi (Masaryk Embankment) in Praguereads:"Let the song reachthe heart let the heartreach the homeland''.l28 Smetana,Janacekand others composed suitably patriotic choruses. Sokol, which in 1888 had 183 with 20,182 members, grew to 194,321 members branches by 1914.129 From 1882 it staged festivals every few years in Prague, whose centre-piecewas mass collective gymnastic displays. Its banner anduniform, a Romanticversion of Czechpeasant costume, were originally designedby Josef Manes. One index of Sokol's tionof Czech life is the way its ritualizedsalutationNa penetrazdar! (To success)-in origin referringto the success of the campaignto raise funds for the National Theatre has passedinto the Czech language as the common greeting nazdar! With all this a nationalmemory, as Palacky had wished, was "recovered",and ubiquitously sewn into the Bohemian landscape. Prague'sbest-known landmarkCharlesBridge was named forthe "Father of the Homeland" only in 1870, more than half a millenniumafter he orderedit to be built. VaclavBrozik painted "Charles IV Follnding Prague University in 1348" on the dome ofthe Pantheon of the splendid new National Museum building erected on Vaclavskenamesti in 1890. Charlesgazes paternally down on busts and statues of the great men and women (two: Nemcova and Krasnohorska) of the Czechnation.His companions onBrozik's and Frantisek Zenisek's lunettes are Premysl the ploughman, the mythical founder of the Premyslid dynasty, St Methodius translatingthe Bible into "the Slav language" in Rome in 885, and Jan Amos Komensky presentinghis pedagogic works to Amsterdamtown council in 1657. A Universita Karlova was born againin Prague-after 267 years in February 1920,
127 These figures areall takenfromJanSrb,entry"Cechy",subheading "Spolky" [Societies], in Ottav slovniknausny, vi, p. 207. '28"Zpevem k srdci- srdcemk vlasti".Personal observation. 129 Srb, "Spolky", p. 207; Masek,"Sokolstvo", p. 98.

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when the Czech University founded in 1882 was declaredby the new Czechoslovakstate to be the sole legal successor to Charles's medieval foundation, and invested with its buildings, archives, registry,"ancientinsignia,seals, books, picturesandother objects of historicalnote which belongedto Prague University. . . before 18821 130 CharlesIV had been a faithfulson of the church.But the heretic Jan Hus, too, became a national saint. Popular archhistories like Karel VladislavZap's Czech-Moravian Chronicle of 1862 (a work which its author thought "should stand immediatelyafter the Bible in the family chest in every home''l3l) made Palacky's visionof Czechhistoryaccessible.So, farmoreso, did the historical novels and plays of Alois Jirasekand many others. There was a well-publicized"pilgrimage"of prominentCzechfigures,among themBedrichSmetana,to the site of Hus's martyrdom in Konstanz in 1868. That same year, a casket containing stones from the Konstanz jailwhere he hadbeen imprisonedwas solemnly embedded in the foundationsof the National Theatre. Brozik's monumental painting"The Sentencingof MasterJanHus" (1883) hangs in Prague's Old Town Hall opposite his "The Election of King Jiri of Podebrady"(1898), in which, takingPalacky's mirrorliterally, the artistpaintsthe facesof nineteenth-century Czechpatriots (Dobrovsky,Tyrs and Fugner, among others) on his fifteenthcenturyelectors. By 1914 there were nine Hus Streets in the Prague conurbation, and working-class Zizkov named its thoroughfares after Hussite battles and heroes. Monuments to Hussprang up throughout the Czech lands. Ladislav Saloun's expressionist allegory of the sufferings of the Czech nation on Staromestske namestiwas unveiled in 1915 on the five hundredth anniversary of Hus's death.l32For three years Jan Hus and the
130 Karel Domin,"Maresuv universitni zakonz 19. unora1920a bojo Karolinum" [Mares's University Law of 19 Feb. 1920and the Struggle over the Karolinum], in Karel Domin,Vaclav Vojtisek andJosefHutter(eds.), Karolinumstatek narodni[The Karolinum, the Propertyof the Nation](Prague,1935),pp. 13-15. The text of the law, fromwhichI quotedirectly,is givenhere in full. 131 KarelVladislav Zap, "Predslovo" [Foreword], in his Cesko-Morasskakronika [The Czech-Moravian Chronicle](Prague, 1862), unpaginated. Zap goes on to acknowledge his debtfirstandforemost to "theimmortal Zapwas also the authorof the firstCzechtourguideto Prague, work"of Palacky. published in 1835. 132 Franz Kafka thought it "mediocre stuff", preferring Frantisek Bilek's"sketches of incomparable quality"for monuments to Komensky andZizka.Typically, he had doubts aboutwhether"this wrongshouldbe rectifiedby Jewish hands":letter to Max Brod,end of July 1922,in Kafka,Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p. 347.

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Virgin Mary uneasily shared the square she had presided over since 1650, on a tall column erected in thanksfor the of the city from besieging Swedes two years deliverance 3 November 1918, a week after independence,the earlier. On Mary column was torn down by a Czech mob as a symbol of Habsburgoppression. The statisticalprobabilityis that most of them were Roman Catholics;l33 but religion was no longer what was at issue. A more precise index of changesin the "national" composition of Bohemian society than the census data discussed earlier, because it accurately records the qualitativedimension of the process, the changes in meaning and significanceof language in relationto identity, is the fate of Count Nostic's theatre. Despite its "Germanic"beginnings,by the mid-nineteenth century there was rough linguisticequality in performances.From 1862, however, when the ProvisionalTheatreof the future NationalTheatre was established, the Stavovske once again became a Germanvenue; German, now, in the altered sense of purely being a theatreof Prague's "minority" Germancommunity. Such theatrical apartheid did not, in the end, satisfy everybody. In November 1920, in those same riots that found Franz wandering Prague's streets immersed in anti-SemiticKafka hate, Nostic'stheatre was stormed by Czechs under the banner "The Estates Theatre to the Nation!" The German players evicted,and that night the most "national"of all Czech were operas, Bedrich Smetana'sProdananevesta,was triumphantlyperformed by players from the Narodni divadlo, whose second stage World WarII apart the Stavovskedivadlohas been ever since. VI Ina masterly section of his Stare povesti ceske entitled "Sad Places", Alois Jirasekrelateshow, on 21 June 1621, twenty-seven Czech lords were cruelly beheadedon Staromestske namesti. At the execution site, he says:
133 The 1921censusgave figuresfor religious affiliation (for all Czechoslovakia) of 76.2 percentRomanCatholic, as against 7.2 percentforallProtestant denominations. Over half the latterwere in Slovakia; in the Czechlandsonly 3.7 per cent of the Czech population belongedto Evangelical confessions. In all therewere 10,384,833 Roman Catholicsin Czechoslovakia. Only 525,333 people (3.8 per cent) had defected to the newly established"Hussite" Czechoslovak Church. See Capek, "Obyvatelstvo", p. 1083.

therewereoncesixteengreatstonesarranged in a square.The old Czechs, when they passedthroughthese places, never trod on these stones, nor

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even laid a foot on them. They alwaysavoidedthem or went around them, out of consideration for the sad place and the spilt blood of the Czech lords. In these places, it is said, these executed noblemenand burghers appear,once a year,on the night beforethe day on whichthey met their end at this place of execution.They all assemble,at the head the eldestamongthem,the nearly-ninety-year-old LordKaplEof Sulevice . . . They assembleat the placeof executionand then quietly,withouta sound, crossthe squareto the Tyn church.Therethey kneel beforethe altarandreverently acceptthe bodyof the Lordin both kinds.And then they disappear.

Were these spiritsreallyto have walked, FranzKafl<a would have witnessed their annualcommunion.The window of his boyhood bedroomin Celetnaulice looked directlyinto the nave of the Tyn church. Long ago it had been a Hussite stronghold;the stone chaliceand statueof Jiriof Podebradythat once gracedits western face were destroyedby Jesuit students in 1623. There are twenty-seven crosses in the pavement of Staromestske namesti today.135 One of them commemorates Jan Jesensky(or Jessenius),the outspokenrectorof PragueUniversity from 1617 to 1620, and a successorin that office to Jan Hus. The victors of Bila hora dealt with Jesensky particularlyharshly;his tongue was cut out and nailed to the scaffold before he was beheaded.Accordingto family legend, MilenaJesenska,Kailra's Czech translator and lover, was his descendant. She was the daughterof anotherJanJesensky,a wealthyprofessorof dentistry at the Czech University of Prague, who was a committed,not to say bigoted, Czech nationalist.Her aunt was the novelist, poet and regular contributorto ZlataPrahaRuzena Jesenska, who, Max Brod later recalled, "was held in distaste in our circles because of her chauvinistic Czech attitudes and philistine outlook".136Milena herself was a graduateof Eliska Krasnohorska's "Minerva".Born in 1896, she was a child of all that I have tried to sketch here. She felt, for the most part, unbearably stifledby it. Her life seems one long catalogueof rebellionagainstwhat she
134 AloisJirasek, Stare povesticeske[OldCzechLegends] (Prague,1992),pp. 186-7; translated by AlenaSayer.The rightfor the laity to take communion in both kinds (i.e., breadand wine) was a centralHussitedemand,and the chalice,accordingly, theirsymbol.ThusJirasek rhetorically sewstogether the (quitedifferent) "national" struggles of the fifteenthandseventeenth centuries here. 135 I havebeen unable to ascertain whenthey wereput there,but the largebronze commemorative plaqueon the side of the Old Town Hall facingthe execution-site, whichlistsall twenty-seven victims'names,datesfrom1911:Emanuel Poche,Prahou krok za krokem[Through PragueStepby Step](Prague,1985),p. 140. 136 Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. G. H. Roberts (New York, 1963),p. 222.

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saw as the narrowCzechprovincialism of her parents'generation. In her youth she dropped out of medical school, experimented with drugs stolen from her father's practice, and hung out with the German-Jewish literaryset who frequentedthe Cafe Arco on Hybernska ulice. Whether her father had her committed to a sanatoriumfor several months in order to break up her relationship with the Jewish OskarPollak or to forestallan embarrassing prosecutionon accountof her freedomwith other people's money and property is moot,l37but in any event her behaviourwas an afEront to respectableCzech society. On coming of age she discharged herself, married Pollak, and moved to Vienna. It was duringthis period that she had her (largely epistolary)affairwith Kafka.Her translations of his stories were done for the magazine Cerven(7une), whose editor was the Satanist-turned-anarchistturned-communist poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann. National independencedid not draw her home; she returned to Prague, divorced, only in 1925, and supportedherself by journalism.The next year she met her second husband, the architect Jaromir Krejcar, a leading light of the avant-gardegroup Devetsil. Its 1922 manifesto Revolutionary MiscellanyDevetsil had called for "a socialist society, [and] . . . a new style, a style of all liberated humanity,an international style, which will liquidate provincial nationalculture and art".138Milena and Jaromirhosted Saturday get-togethers for Devetsil in their apartmenton Spalena ulice; among the regulars were Karel Teige, the Marxist editor of Devetsil's magazine ReD and the Prague avant-garde'sleading theoretician,and JuliusFucik, the young editor of the communist party daily Rude pravo (Red Right) from 1929 to 1938. In the 1930s, Milenaherselfbecamean active communistpartymember, until she quit in protest against the Moscow trials. An unlikely patriot, we might think. We would be wrong. In 1938-9, from the time of the Munich crisis through to the early months of the Germaninvasion,Milenawrote a remarkable
137 The former is suggested by MaxBrod:ibid., p. 224;the latterby Milena's friend Jaroslava Vondrackova, in her Kolem Mileny 38esenske [AroundMilenaJesenska] (Prague,1991),p. 23. Kafka andMilenadiscussed her relationship with her fatherin theircorrespondence; see his lettersof 4 August1920and3-4 September 1920:Kafka, Letters to Milena, pp. 135-6, 182-4. 138 Devetsil,svazrevolucnich umelcu[Devetsil,a Unionof Revolutionary Artists], "Velka francouzska revoluce ohlasovala. . . " [The Great French Revolution Announced . . .], Czechtrans.of Russian resumeto Jaroslav SeifertandKarelTeige (eds.), Revolusni sbormkDevewtsil (Prague,1922), repr. in Poetismus [Poetism],ed. Kvetoslav Chvatik and ZdenekPesat(Prague,1967),p. 63. (Emphasis in original.)

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series of deeply patriotic, but utterly unjingoisticarticlesfor the magazinePrz'tomnost (ThePresent).Pritomnost's editor was one of inter-war Czechoslovakia's most distinguished journalists, FerdinandPeroutka;his ffaca' jsme (What WeAre Like) of 1923 had been a devastatingassaulton the mythologiesof nineteenthcentury Czech nationalism.l39Milena's Prz'tomnost articles are among the most moving affirmations of Czech identity known to me. It says a lot for her consistency of moral perspective that when complimented by a man "with whom just a year ago I would certainly have greatly differed in world-views' with the words "let your opinions be what they may, I see that above all, you are a Czech", Milena replied: "I am self-evidently a Czech, but I try aboveall to be a decent human being''.l40But there is more to that "self-evidently" than meets the eye. We are in the presencehere of somethingdeeperand more inner than nationalism as mere politics. A decent human being is something one might aspire to be, an alterable quality. For Karel Havlicek Borovsky in 1839, "to be a Czech" was just such an aspiration. For Milena Jesenska,a hundred years later, Czech is something one simply, self-evidently is. In "The Czech Mother", she locates this Czechness in the smallchangeof everydaylife: "Trifles become big symbols. And since it is woman who wields in her hand the trifles, she also reigns over the big symbols. Czech song and the Czech book. Czechhospitality. The Czech languageand old Czech customs. Czech Easter eggs, little Czech gardens and bunches of Czech roses. . .". She recallsher grandmother, who "lookedlike Bozena Nemcova'sBabicka,just as all your grandmothers did", and who duringWorld War I obstinately kept her household clocks an hourbehind the official imperial summer time, which she held to be an "Austrianinvention''.l4l In the century that separates Havlicekand Jesenskawhat had begun as an eccentric discourse of a handful of priests, poets, professors and playwrights had embedded itself in the landscape of the everyday, and the everydaythings of life in turn became mirrors of its eternal veracity. Everyone'sgrandmotherhad come to resemble Bozena
139 Ferdinand Peroutka, 3taci jsmeI Demohraticky manifest [WhatWe Are Like / Democratic Manifesto] (Prague,1991). 140 Milena Jesenska,"Jsem predevslmCeska?"[Am I Above All A Czech?], Pritomnost, xvi (1939),pp. 283-4. (Emphasis in original.) 141 Milena Jesenska,"Ceskamaminka"[The Czech Mother], ibid., pp. 238-9; translated by AlenaSayer.

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Nemcova's Babicka,and the one inevitablyand invariably recalled the other. In "On the Art of RemainingStanding",Milenatells how, as a little girl, she and her mother, who was grippingher hand "more tightly than was necessary", watched from the window of their apartmenton the cornerof Vaclavskenamestiand Na prikope as whathadbeen a ritualizedSunday-morning confrontation between Czech and Germanpromenadersturned ugly. The police intervened, shots rang out, the demonstratorsfled; at the end of it, beside a fallen Czech, "there remainedstandingbefore the guns one man my dad. I rememberclearly, absolutelyclearly, how he stood. Calmly,with his hands by his side". She continues:
Then, later,I once againwitnessedsomething similar.It was, of course, undercompletelydiSerentcircumstances. It was duringthe war and in the theatre.At that time, Czechsdid not yet have their own sovereignty in mind and nothinglike this was happening. Only their Czechness was wedgedin their heartslike the thornof a mallowfrom a Czechgarden. Tyl's Fidlovacka was on the stage on the whole a naive, out-of-date and unentertaining work. But then suddenlythey startedto sing "Kde domovmuj?"You know, backthen it was not a stateanthem,not at all, but a national,Czechsong. But suddenlysomebodystood up in frontof me. Somegentleman, soundlessly and calmly,with his handsby his side. I don't know what he wantedto express,but the act was as if to honour the Czechsong. In a while anotherstood up. Then severalmore. And thenall of us werestanding. Thenwe weresinging.Thatsongwasplayed severaltimesover then, and it was playedin such a sincereand heartfelt way, like a prayer."Kde domovmuj"was not a song against anyone,but for something. It did not desireanyone'sdestruction, but our continued existence.It is not a warrior-song, but a song of our Czechhome, that land with nothinggrandioseabout its countryside,a land of hills and hillocks, fields and leas, silver birches, weeping willows and broadcrowned lindens,a landof fragrant boundaries betweenfieldsandtranquil little streams.The land wherewe are at home. It was beautifulto stand by her, becauseit is alwaysbeautifulto love one's home.l42

Milena was arrested by the Gestapo very early in the war, in November 1939. She had been active in the resistancemagazine V boj! (ToArms!). She died in Ravensbruckin 1944. Franz Kafkawas right; in the end, Milena Jesenskawas to be found in her entirety only in her native language, with all that by the early twentieth century that implied. Part of what it implied, of course, was Kafka'sown being an eternaloutsider in the city of his birth, even though he lived virtuallyall of his life within a stone's throw of Staromestske namesti. These were two
142 Milena Jesenska, "O umenizustatstat"[TheArtof Remaining Standing], ibid., pp. 205-6; translated by AlenaSayer.(Emphasis in original.)

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sides of one and the same social process. Though it does not look too differenttoday than it did then, the "city of three nationalities" that once united and divided them is long gone. The Nazis murderedthe great majorityof the Jews,l43and Czechoslovakia's three million Germans were in their turn expelled from the country by the Czechs. Communist party leader Klement Gottwald conceptualized this as "redressing Bila hora" and correcting "the mistakes of our Czech kings, the Premyslids, who invited the German colonists here".144 The record of the Germans'presencewas swiftly wiped from the landscape:the Neues Deutsches Theater became the Smetanovo divadlo, the Deutsches Casino was reborn as the Slovansky dum (Slavonic House). In the years that followed, the motifs of nineteenthcentury Czech nationalismwere recycled to facilitatethe relocation of the Czech lands into "Eastern Europe"; communism installed itself with the aid of the Alois JirasekMuseum on the site of Bila hora, the MikolasAles centennial,and the meticulous reconstructionof the Bethlehem Chapel where, five centuries previously,JanHus hadpreached. 145Apartfrom the brief "thaw" of the mid-1960s, Franz Kafkawas officially"forgotten". But he and Milena are remembered,in a mannerof speaking, in Staromestskenamesti today. An elegant and expensive Cafe Milena opened there in 1994, above the Franz Kaika Centre which sells to visiting tourists all mannerof Kafkamemorabilia, from calendarsto T-shirts. The main criterionfor employment as a waiteror waitresswould appearto be knowledgeof English or German. University of Alberta Derek Sayer

143 Manyof thosewho survived the Holocaust emigrated afterthe war,after1948, or after1968.Usinga rangeof sources,TomasPeknyestimates the numberof Jews in Praguein 1950as 3,433, andin the rest of Bohemia as perhaps 5,500;by 1989the figure for Praguehadfallento perhaps1,000,for Czechoslovakia as a wholeperhaps 7,900.Czechoslovak censuses ceasedto recordreligion from 1953.See TomasPekny, HistorieZidu v Cechacha na Morave [A Historyof the Jewsin Bohemia andMoravia] (Prague, 1993),pp. 390-1. 144 KlementGottwald, speechof 23 June 1945in Brno,quotedin TomasStanek, OdsunNemsu z Ceskoslovenska, 1945-1947 [The Expulsionof the Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945-1947] (Prague,1991),p. 60. 145 The logic of this recycling was spelt out at lengthby the communist cultural supremo of the period,Minister of Education (andeminenthistorian of Czechmusic) Zdenek Nejedly,in his 1946article"The Communists, Heirsof the GreatTraditions of the Czech Nation": Z. Nejedly, "Komuniste,dedici velkych tradic ceskeho naroda", in his O smyslucVeskych deVjin [On the Meaning of CzechHistory](Prague, 1953), pp. 217-67.