Marciana Marina, Isola D’Elba—It might be well to begin with some words of writer/critic Kenneth Tynan, written in April of 1967 after a trip to Czechoslovakia: “The Hungarians showed their hand too soon, and were savagely slapped down. The Poles embarked shortly afterward on an artistic insurrection that had its moments of glory on stage and screen but before long the authorities flexed their muscles and it was safely quelled.
“The Czechs were biding their time,” Tynan continued. “Historically, their culture had always looked westward, and they waited until Soviet policy had decisively turned its face toward a reconciliation with the West. Then—and only then—the Czech artists began to raise their voices, secure in the knowledge that the days were past when retributive Russian tanks might rumble through the streets of Prafrue.”
Most people felt about like the Czech artists and Tynan did: the world was changing, the Soviets were mellowing, the moment to start some long-needed reforms had arrived. I never got to Prague during the intoxicating period of its “Spring,” when the wine of freedom was being drunk in gulps rather than little sips. I was there for the hangover time. And the morning after seemed very drear indeed.
But to go back to the beginning…
“You must go to Prague,” friends told us when they discovered we were to spend a year traveling in Europe. “You must go…” “You mustn’t miss Prague…” That was the refrain from friend after friend who had been there.
“The jewel of the East,” one described it, waxing lyric over its fabled roof tops, sun-drenched spires and surprise-filled, meandering streets and lanes. Memories of steaks sizzling over charcoal at luxurious Carlsbad and Marienbad were recollected; the Tatra mountains and rolling Bohemian plains idyllized. Prospects looked good; it was “Spring” in Prague and we had generous friends living there who invited us to share their apartment. Before we even went to Europe, we had boned up on the Karel Plicka photograph albums of legendary Praha.
Judas-Kiss
We were ready to go around the middle of August—and were in fact due in Prague sometime on the 18th. The news from Czechoslovakia (the “Warsaw Letter” had been followed by the meetings at Cierna and Bratislava): Brezhnev had embraced Dubcek in the eyes of the world that watched—whether he actually delivered the Judas-kiss, I forget. We were ready to go, but something intervened. Not just the Russians and their cronies (that came later), but simply a premonition, coupled with the inconsequentially gray news coming out.
We were in Stockholm at the time. At a beach several miles from the city one afternoon, I made up my mind to wait on the Prague trip. I said to my wife: “Let’s wait on Prague, it just doesn’t sound right somehow. Let’s go down to Germany.” Some days later, we cruised into the charming university town of Freiburg im Breisgau, a gateway to the Black Forest only 20 minutes from the French border. We stayed for four months.
Housing Problems
Finding a place to live in student-packed Freiburg proved difficult. We stayed in a wonderful modest hotel and concentrated (to the exclusion of everything else) on locating some quarters. I don’t think I read a newspaper for days. I remember feeling, in a trough of depression, that since we were planning to spend some time in Paris, I had better get the jump on the housing situation there and phoned up a colleague in my paper’s Paris bureau.
I phoned him early on the morning of August 20. After exchanging cordial salutations, the gentleman asked me what he could do for me. If he had a minute, I replied, could he suggest a good agency for renting a flat or lead me to someone who could.
There was a slight pause on the Paris end of the line.
“Uh, do you think you could call me back later sometime,” he said politely, “things are pretty tied up around here right now.” “Oh. Really,” I returned, ever the newshawk, “something going on in Paris?” He then informed me that the Warsaw Pact forces had invaded Czechoslovakia, accepted my burbled excuses and apologies and we rang off. So, they caught me by surprise too.
Hotfooting over to the local newspaper office, I found people clustered around the window in which the bulletin reporting the invasion was posted. A bookstore down the street had a window display that afternoon featuring books about Prague, the bulletin and black bands of mourning. The SDS people, with others, organized a march—in which American Imperialism in Vietnam shared honors with the Warsaw invaders.
Reaction
I brought a portable radio. French news coverage of the invasion was far superior to anything I heard in English. With my crippled German, I caught only snatches of the German reportage and reaction; but the tempo and tone cast an unmistakable atmosphere: the bear is at the door. Weeks later, a young German girl asked me in all seriousness: “I know they won’t invade us, but if they did…Would you help us if they occupied Germany?” Interesting question.
The initial shock and surprise over the invasion refused to wear off for weeks. Reports and pundit’s columns in the English and American papers, written quite often in that tone of wounded gravity journalists reserve for just such unforeseen moments, struck me as a bit illogical in light of Eastern Europe’s history—though the audacity and callousness of the Czech invasion, even for the Russians, was at first astonishing. Yet the weeping went on for so long so unabated, it appeared that much of the Western press felt somehow personally responsible for the cruel repression meted out by the Russians.
How Could They?
How could they do it, went the submerged refrain, when things were going so beautifully in Czechoslovakia? How could these well-meaning, hard-working, visionary men who postulated “socialism with a human face” have been so utterly betrayed? And just when they—with much encouragement from the liberal Western press—were about to produce a materialist ideology palatable even to the most benighted Kiwanis Club anti-Communist. The warts of Stalinism, however, proved not so easy to remove from the face of socialism.
It seemed a little like a husband who had married a woman of exceedingly questionable virtue going to pieces when he was finally betrayed. Europeans reacted with more equanimity; they had been that route before and appeared to be looking ahead for signs of the consequences of the invasion. Germans with whom I spoke—mostly older people—exhibited neither tantrums of wounded faith nor the “you can’t trust the Russians” line. They simply froze into cold logic, no doubt remembering what real confrontation and real consequences mean.
Younger Germans were outraged with that edge of blustery impotence that signaled their sudden distrust of the regime whose slogans and concepts spring so easily from their lips. The Mao-and-Marcuse folks, after a dutiful expression of condolences quickly played up the invasion as proof that the “revisionists” were corrupt, imperialistic—no better than the Americans. But they were Germans, too, and everyone was anxious. As one young man, whose political stripe remained to me vague intoned somberly: “This situation has for all of Germany the gravest implications.” We tried not to laugh.
The radical strains of Taoism or Castroism (or Marcusism) were winners in the Czech matter among Europe’s politically switched-on young. Its effect on the older generation of left-leaning voters or Communists will be interesting. Knowing what the Hitler-Stalin Pact meant for so many American Communists in the 30s, the changes in Communist solidarity in the West will be fascinating to observe—if any indeed do occur. Perhaps we in the West have come to a point, exacerbated by years of Cold War, guerilla war and the nuclear trump-threat, where we can witness what has been called “the rape” of Czechoslovakia and assimilate it in several months.
Deal Theory
At the time of the invasion, what intrigued me most was the West’s resort to all sorts of covering, or palliating, mechanisms in the face of its total inability to do anything to affect the situation. The paralyzing shock was warranted, and the invasion was a great coup of propaganda for the Pact countries’ military ability. Months later, rumors of a deal between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. (we did nothing because we agreed secretly to “spheres of interest”) crept into the news, demonstrating a powerful European anxiety—in some a conviction: that America and Russia will run the world in the future, freezing China out.
Beyond the “rape” emotionalism and the cynicism of the “deal”, theory, the invasion was a powerful, demonstration of ‘Russia’s and her allies’ military might, logistical capabilities and pragmatic callousness. As to logistics, I remember the recollection of an English girl who was studying German at the Goethe Institute in Stauffen we were attending. She was camped, with her parents, near the Prague airport the night the country was occupied.
Bloody Clockwork
Her father, she recounted, had been awakened shortly after midnight by the sound of planes. Being an old military man, he lay awake and began to count what seemed to be increasingly regular landings. He lay awake far into the morning, as it happened, ticking off a plane every 30 seconds, for hours. Like bloody clockwork and etc., he reported when the family awoke. One hopes that, in emergency, our NATO forces could do as well. The accounts of post-invasion NATO communications and alert did not strike many Europeans I asked about it as very hopeful.
Ad Nauseum Schweik
After the initial shock wore off, the West picked up on the nature of Czech “resistance,” and we were treated to ad nauseum Schweik. The funny stories were scarcely consoling but at the time they were all we, and the poor Czechs, had. The sly and wily inheritants of the Good Soldier’s cunning methods and delivery system manifested itself in a number of winning ways.
Yet all the anecdotes of how confused the dumb Russians were, how with street signs painted and markers removed they wandered to and fro, did not mask one central, crushing fact: they invaded and occupied with fair efficiency and caught Western defense mechanisms flat-footed. This unpleasant fact was faced in various ways. One of the most fascinating, and pernicious, was the reaction of former Defense Department official (under JFK) Adam Yarmolinsky, who wrote:
“The Soviet moves in Czechoslovakia have no significant long-run strategic consequences. They do not affect the underlying nuclear threat to Western Europe.” In this writer’s view, our primary worry should have been about the effect on arms limitation talks with the Russians. This logic, by which all political acts should be viewed only by their effect on nuclear matters, is akin to giving Rosemary’s baby carte blanche because we so fear Dr. Strangelove.
Note, however, that the Warsaw Pact forces did not invade and occupy Czechoslovakia with an affidavit attesting to their nuclear power, but with conventional armaments of force—planes, tanks, artillery and troops. Nor did they ever threaten nuclear warfare. Yarmolinsky’s sort of reaction, which may be lofty Realpolitik, does not inspire our European friends with confidence.
Electric Eyes
The crying need to extract some vitiating humor from such a tragedy was understandable and irrepressible. The best story I beard concerned invasion tank crews landed at Prague airport, which features a modern steel-and-glass terminal building. The tanks, it seems, were driven from the tarmac right through the central lobby, which meant they had to pass the automatic glass doors. The second tank through the doors got no benefit from the electric-eye technology: the first tank’s crew, apparently startled by the doors opening, magically, shattered them with machinegun fire. Evidently, the Sputnik sophistication does not filter down to all the people in the U.S.S.R.
We met a number of young Czechs at the Goethe Institute who had been caught outside the country and probably needed some “official” reason for staying out. They were resplendent in Western clothes (we found out later, by contrast to the couture in Prague, which is neo-Khrushchev). Every day during the morning break from language classes, a group of Czech girls would huddle around whomever had mail from home. I saw tears shed over a postcard, followed by sheepish laughter as the girls (literally) hugged one another.
One girl in her early 20s told me, almost with a look of disbelief, how she had news of the tanks crunching down the Prague streets, tearing aside trees and caving in parked autos, of the shooting and raking of public buildings. She was obviously using these facts as metaphor to express what she, a young student, felt: hopes and hearts were being crushed by the tanks. But she didn’t want to say it that way. The Czechs were still marking time with the dative and accusative cases in German when we left Freiburg.
Not One Day
There is no need to recap the news of post-invasion months; the period has been written to death. Certain little nuggets, though, stick in the mind. One was several slogans (of many) that appeared in Prague. These two appeared before the invasion: “With the Soviet Union forever, but not one day longer” and “Long live the Soviet Union, but at its own expense.” There was a joke going around before the Warsaw Letter about Dubcek: he went to a fortune teller to ask about the country’s two main problems, housing and food. The food problem was simple, the seer said, just close the eastern border to Russia. The housing problem wasn’t much more difficult: just open the western frontier.
The humor flagged rather quickly. “Cain and Abel were brothers too” was one slogan remarked after the invasion. “They have tanks but we have the truth” rightly expressed the doomed, last-ditch faith of the victims whose special brand of resistance, a la Schweik, works best only after the tanks are gone. It remains to be seen if the truth shall make the Czechs free, as their national motto promises. The relativity of modern “truth” and “freedom” will not be working in their favor.
Jabberwocky
What intrigued me in a black sort of way about post-invasion Czechoslovakia was the pathetic spectacle of Dubcek (often referred to as “your friendly street-corner politician” I was told) carrying out the sentence of measured self-destruction imposed on him from the moment he was whisked off to Moscow like a common criminal. Stumbling through obscene speeches of apology and confessions replete with the twisted jabberwocky of Communist rhetoric, he resembled a man who quite literally had been commanded to destroy himself and was loyally attempting to carry out the sentence.
Dubcek’s treatment, and sad submission, was a grim reminder. The Soviets have a special talent, almost oriental, for scripting an individual’s self-humiliation, or destruction. Like handing a man a gun and ordering him to “do it now.” The gun turns out to be empty but the command is the same, “do it now.” After all the tears and burbling, excruciating speeches, beneath the bland headlines reporting Dubcek’s latest humiliation (“Dubcek declares it’s hard to be a friend of the Soviet Union,” said one), the image remained for me of a swamped, sad man with his hand at his throat, trying diligently to strangle himself—for the good of his countrymen.
Tanks Again
The next time we made ready for our Prague pilgrimage, the Czechs had beat the Russians in those fabled hockey games (the scores were chalked everywhere when we finally got there). A crowd sacked and burned the Aeroflot office on Prague’s main street leading up to Winceslas Square, and the heat was on again. On April 4, I picked a London Times to find the following story under the headline, “Soviet threat to use tanks in Prague:”
“Russia has given warning to Czechsolovakia that if steps are not taken to prevent further anti-Russian demonstrations the Soviet Army will intervene without the approval of Prague (sic). Demonstrators would be run over by tanks.” We were scheduled to fly to Prague April 7 and decided on a che sera, sera attitude. And I had never seen a Russian tank before, so…
We flew from Zurich on that sunny Monday morning, leaving the jagged, ice cream alps glistening in golden, rosy light. We passed over manicured, patchwork farms of Switzerland and Germany, shimmering clustered village and town in which steeples caught and splintered the sunlight. The earth, quite literally, changed suddenly to great expanses of brown soil, obviously fertile but seemingly fallow. We had the impression of desolation and depopulation, save for clutches of factory-like buildings and, scattered houses at points along the meandering silver of a river.
Our Swiss Air flight touched down smoothly at Prague airport, taxied past Czech and sleek-looking Aeroflot jets; a ruddy-faced young air hostess with lumpish legs smilingly beckoned us into the right entry; an impassive face waited for our visas and passports, studied the documents with infinite slowness, stamped us in.
Wedding-Cake In The Boondocks
Our friend’s wife was waiting. I cashed my minimum obligatory dollars into Czech crowns (16 to the dollar; Czechs get 7 to the dollar; a black market yields as much as 15, and in Vienna some refugees were paying 72 to the dollar) and off we went. Highway signs were virtually non-existent; the roads were no worse than Portugal’s; the colors gave a general impression of buff parchness. A fine dust permeated everything, lending both the bleak rows of post-war block housing and the surrounding countryside an overall sepia hue. We passed, in the distance, the big Soviet-built “luxury” hotel, Stalinist wedding-cake in the boondocks, which our friend informed us is a major butt of humor among Czechs for its ugliness and vulgarity. The mention of it can evidently make a Czech worker spit.
As we neared the city, my impression was of a post-war city which had not been badly damaged and not yet begun to repair what damage it sustained. Nothing dramatic, of course; just a general atmosphere of over-use and little maintenance—a Prague streetcar conveys the feeling perfectly: tired things, worn things.
Our friends live above the city, close to an Army barracks commandeered by the Russians during the invasion but turned back to the Czechs when the Soviets decided on less conspicuous occupation. I am told the Russians are back again, in spades.
Their apartment is near a square through which the occupiers’ tanks rumbled on the invasion morning. My friend is convinced he narrowly missed being shot (or shot at, as it turns out) that morning. Apprised of the invasion by a long-distance call from New York at around four a.m. (a nice MacLuhan-cum—Kafka touch), he hied himself outside and arrived at the strategic square just in time to meet a tank on its way down to the city. In the pre-dawn emptiness, he watched a Russian soldier emerge from his tank to take a shot at what appeared to be a fleeing taxi.
“Mellowed”
The Russian’s aim was unsteady and the taxi fast retreating out of range, and so Ivan turned his gun on my friend, waving it back and forth in the rhythm of someone about to hose down a suspect doorway. Whether this was a sign for my, friend to make tracks or not, he made them. And that was his first introduction to the “mellowed” form of Soviet Communism hailed so long and so certainly by so many intellectuals in the “warfare” state of America.
Naturally, the housing situation (our friends’ apartment was to be ours for the duration of our stay) interested us. We had heard that around half a million Czech families still had no houses or apartments adequate to their numbers, and that space allotments still required many families to share one dwelling. The waiting time for housing is on the order of ten years or more; the length of the list is staggering. Yet the Czechs wait patiently and hope in terms of decades.
Luxury Living
By such standards, their apartment was luxury living: a two-bedroom flat, with large living-room and kitchen, ample bathroom (the fixtures were Yugoslavian, the best available in the East) and even a small, glassed-in study where my friend worked. Actually, the apartment had been a three-bedroom flat, but a charming Czech couple had been allotted the third bedroom as their “house,” and shared kitchen and bath facilities. They showed us their new quarters with obvious pride. We sat down to thick Turkish-style coffee, toasted with plum brandy and some cognac we had brought in.
With great consideration, our friends had made plans for us and had figured out an itinerary for sightseeing that was an improvement over the guide books. But we are ruthlessly unschedulable people. Our GOP on arrival in any city is to head for the railway station, pick up a city plan, leave the car and begin exploring on foot. Whether in London or Munich, Freiburg or Lausanne, we always start out just walking around, getting a feel of the cityscape, the architecture, the people, shop windows and vistas as well as the general flow of traffic, shoppers and strollers in their own environment.
This we did in Prague, after visiting—albeit on roller skates—such tourist essentials as the Strahov cloister, St. Vitus cathedral, Hradcany castle, the Loretto cloister, Gold Lane’s quaint, tiny houses, the Old and New Town halls and the Tyn cathedral with its twin gothic towers. The Charles bridge, most famous of Prague’s 14, was a jumble of metal scaffolding, its stones and statues blackened by the soot and coal dust that permeates the Prague air when there is not a coal shortage. To Praguers, it is a welcome odor.
As one stands on the bridge looking down-river, one sees on a distant hill a huge concrete platform perched above flights of steps leading up to it. Monumentally empty, the platform conveys a curious impression of something missing. Something is: a giant statue of Stalin which brooded over the heart of Prague until it was decided (after Novotny’s ouster, I believe) that Uncle Joe would have to come down. The problem was how to get the massive sculpture down without a lot of commotion, how to avoid a “provocative” spectacle.
Best Show In Town
It was cunningly decided that the dismantling would be executed with dynamite by night. Stalin, however, proved ever the tough old bird. After the first night’s hardly clandestine labors, the best the sappers had achieved was to blow off Stalin’s head. They melted with morning’s light, and there, to the surprise and amusement of Praguers, was headless Joe. No explanation or mention of the curiosity appeared in any of the news media. But word naturally got around, and that night the Stalin sappers had company—and so on, for succeeding nights (how many I forget, but something like a week) until the “secret” demolition became Prague’s most popular evening entertainment, the best show in town.
The statue may have been gone, but Stalin’s spirit still pervaded Prague of April 1969. It was on the Charles bridge that the first of the “money changers” approached us, wanting to exchange Czech crowns for hard currency at a fabulous black market rate. Throughout our stay in Prague, we were constantly pitched by these currency “speculators” on crowded, main streets and at historical monuments, sometimes at a rate of one every five minutes. Many student-age men approached us; only one woman did, and numerous work-worn men of all ages asked us in German or broken English to make a deal. We were intrigued by how very many men of working age and mien were walking the Prague streets; whether they were jobless or simply found profiteering more lucrative, we never were able to determine.
Extreme Politeness
Of course, they want the hard currency for various reasons: to stake them if they should manage to get out of the country or for trading on another black market of goods or perhaps for bribes. Their extreme politeness makes it difficult not to succumb. But there can be plants, and why ask for a sticky situation? So I made it a rule never to change, and memorized the Czech phrase meaning “No. I’m very, very sorry, but no.” What haunted me was that, to a man (and to the woman), not once was there ever the slightest expression of impoliteness or even real disappointment. It was either a nod of understanding (they knew you had suspicions of plants too), an “O.K.” or an occasional “think yew.”
Dogged Resolve
They often slid up slyly at your elbow, whispering in an unmistakable tone or came on like rather proud panhandlers. But when refused, you could feel they simply checked you off without malice and off they went, eyes roving, culling out new possibilities from the streams of tourist strollers: the eternal, patient hustle, like standing in lines for hours to buy something that could be ordered and delivered by telephone in any Western country. That atmosphere of dogged resolve, with no trace of resentment, radiated grayly from the Prague populace and became a palpable presence to us. Like certain fishermen and farmers who live with constant wind or steady glare, Praguers seemed to lean into life with that mechanical-posture of plodding patience.
Patience seemed not a virtue in Prague but a sentence. We had to register at the police station (on the famous Bartholomew Street from which the secret police operate most conspicuously), and dreaded sweating a long line while sights unseen awaited us. Since I’ve worked in police stations, I get no butterflies, even in Kafka-country, over walking into the ante-room of “dank cellars” and the third degree.
Padded Doors
But the padded doors (a bulk of cottony substance under sheet plastic) were a bit unsettling. I remembered a journalist friend telling me that the eerie thing about the Prague police station was its doorknobs: you just turned and turned but the latch never opened. The narrow hall was packed with people in neat lines, one facing forward, another facing backward and one in the middle, nervously shifting. These, I learned to my joy, were not people waiting to check in but waiting to check out, standing oddly silent, most of them withdrawn into their own private anxieties or dreams.
Once inside the right padded door, my wife and I were speedily and courteously checked in as official visitors. Handing back our passports and visas, the police clerk smiled and said “think yew.” As we left, it seemed we were walking through a bunch of super-annuated college kids cheerlessly trying to stuff a phone booth. But neatly, in ordered lines.
Lost Hours
How much time, or potentially productive hours, is lost to the Czech economy (or the Soviet consumers) by the constant line-standing would make a fascinating statistical exercise. To buy most items in the shops, my wife was obliged to stand in three sets of lines: one to get her turn to tell the salesgirl what she wanted (or for Czechs, simply to see what is currently available); one to pay for the item chosen; and another to pick up the item by turning over her cash-register receipt. In small grocery shops, such racing from line to line produces a Marx Brothers “Night at the Opera” milling but fails to produce the profusion of “pardons” one would expect from the constant jostling which occurs. It’s every man (or woman) for himself.
In Prague’s “super market” (for Czechs, really super), there were only enough hand-held shopping baskets for a specific number of shoppers: you waited in a line until someone exited and handed you his. Lines for trams are usually long; once inside, the old streetcars are packed to overflowing, but no worse than buses or subways in Yew York. We wondered if perhaps the time lost in line-ups might not be a form of quasi-Parkinsonian logics that the insufficiency of jobs was compensated for by the “work” of line-standing. Or perhaps it was the Czech method, a la Schweik, of sabotaging the Soviet economy.
Two Experiences
Lest it seem that we saw Prague through ultramilitantly unrose-colored glasses, let me recount two experiences that will always remain etched in my memory. One was an art exhibit to which we were invited; the other an organ and choral concert we attended in the baroque majesty of St. Nicholas cathedral.
The art exhibit, with champagne and toasted almonds, was a Paul Klee collection, the first Klee to be shown in Prague since W.W. II we were informed—and by implication, the first German exhibit since the war (save for one in the Old Jewish Quarter’s museum which consists of photographs of Nazi depredations). The vernissagewas in the old Sternberk Palace, home of a renowned Czech family in prewar Prague, now a museum which houses a collection of Czech gothic art as well as impressionist and mannerist paintings.
The palace is on the square fronting Hradcany castle—one sector of the city beautifully kept up since it holds many of Prague’s most precious monuments, including St. Vitus’s and other old palaces; farther up, opposite Cernin palace (now the foreign affairs ministry), is the Loretto, also an art museum and famous for its carillon. The Klee exhibit appeared to be “an occasion.” Official cultural Prague was there; members of the diplomatic community dropped in to sip champagne and exchange pleasantries. A neatly manicured garden, with some graceful sculptures, invited us into the sun. It seemed the first time we actually had encountered really green grass in Prague.
Pocket of Pleasure
We spoke with an acquaintance—our host actually—whose previous cordiality was mixed with a palpable anxiety over our reaction to his beloved city. He kept murmuring, by way of submerged apology, what an unfortunate time it was to see Prague. Surrounded by the Klees and French impressionist and mannerist canvases, savoring the sun-dappled, silent garden and gazing into the bubbling bottom of our champagne goblets, we seemed in another world—far from the crumbling streets and blind, pocked facades of so much of Prague. Through the trivialities we exchanged, our host conveyed some between-the-lines sentiments: this is how it can be, he seemed to be saying; this is almost how it was. We worked, we endured, we hoped, we juggled the system for just this sort of brief respite, this pocket of pleasure art, sun, champagne, toasted almonds (quite a luxury). These are our hard-won indulgences, and we know that this could be, could have been. Don’t pity us, don’t patronize us, we’ll keep on trying…
Preoccupied
This is not what he really said…He said, “I think the Klees are very good, don’t you?” They weren’t especially. “Yes,” I said, “some of the early ones really give you a feeling for his development.” He said, “Ah, now it is not a good time; the students are very worried, very unhappy…We met with the workers last night and I think it goes very well.” “Good.” I said, popping almonds. “Very, very encouraging,” he said, fiddling with his pipe. “This champagne is quite good, don’t you think?” he said. It was Yugoslavian, and very good. “Yes,” I said, “excellent.” “Yes,” he replied, “very, very encouraging.”
His preoccupation seemed rather total, and so we excused ourselves, as good fifth wheels should. Before though, we were speaking of the Prague Zoo, where some little Przewalski horses, now virtually extinct in the wilds, are exhibited. The last remnants of the stocky, short-maned creatures used to roam the border area between Russia and China in Mongolia. But Chinese border guards, no doubt applying the pragmatism of Mao thought, found a logical use for the animals: they shot them and ate them. I asked if he knew that story. He smiled wanly, shook his bead and found not a trace of irony in the anecdote.
We admired the champagne goblets and enquired if perhaps he knew where we could find some. He knew, and directed us to what was presumably the only shop in Prague that sold them.
Opulent Violence
The concert we attended one smoky evening was memorable for many reasons. St. Nicholas cathedral is a splendidly “decadent” example of man’s glorification of God. Post art critics consider it one of the finest baroque structures in Europe. Its ornate columns and pilasters, its undulating alcoves in wintered, green and bluish marble are brilliant with swatches and sunbursts of gilt that broadcast the shafts of sunlight penetrating the high windows above the altar. Statues of stern saints, crosses held aloft, cast down devils at their feet to create an odd atmosphere of violence and opulence.
It is the sort of edifice that never warms up, like the Medici Chapel in Florence. Its pews must have been designed by torturers of the Inquisition, but then you don’t come to church to be comfortable. The floor is chilling stone. When we arrived, early, the cathedral was already crowded; the inflow continued even after the concert began, late. There were works by Slav composers, pieces by Kodaly, Palestrina and the sonorous, soul-stirring thunder of Bach. The people of Prague overflowed the pews, stood leaning against the walls, clustered on the cold stone floor. The sun had just finished its own symphony on the gilt and marble.
Without stretching the imagination, it was an emotional moment. A clear, female voice in solo pierced the utter stillness of the gathering darkness with the precision and pathos of a soul in torment. Later, the brittle-beauty of the clavichord, arpeggios like cascades of gorgeous ice crystals, and finally Bach’s volcanic hymns to the power and the glory of God.
**1. Sun-splashed gilt-and-marble altar of St. Nicholas cathedral where Praguers gathered to hear Bach
**2. Students cleaning up statue of St. Wenceslas where anti-Soviet slogans were posted after invasion
**3. Spires of St. Vitus cathedral, taken from a court of Prague castle, redolent of religion and royalty
**4. Towers and tile roofs make up Prague panorama in early morning haze, from Castle Steps
**5. Schwarzenberks Palace, now a military museum, is one of many that surround Hradcany Square
**6. Spacious Spanish Hall, site of State and Party meetings, occupies north wing of Prague Castle
It took that moment, and that mood, to make apparent to me the grand irony that surrounded us and in which we were participants—as tourists, as wanderers in the cultural landscape of Europe, as contemporary human beings. For months, the irony had enfolded us and was still unrecognized: that the story of Europe has been religion and royalty; that everywhere we went we were confronted by creations in tribute to God, or the works which men of power, by commission or command, had brought to fruition. Kings and the Church, and the princes of both, made Europe what it is physically. And it is still beautiful.
Mini-Monuments
In Prague, the most impressive (and most cherished) monuments are still a castle, cathedrals, cloisters and several palaces. The least impressive, even to Czech socialists, is the Moscow-built hotel. The most depressing, to us, were those mini-monuments to social planning, the blocks of bulk housing that stand like bunkers along the main highway into the city.
Ah, but think on the injustices of these sometimes cruel elites of church and king, one might say. Think of the corruption and coercion, think of the unjust disparity between the jeweled monarch and the struggling peasant! All legitimate, relevant questions. But still one wonders, in light of the great leveling effect occurring in the world today, what overwhelming monuments will be created by the modern power brokers—the heirs of the popes and kings—in the name of, and to the glory of, Man?
Epi-Center
There we were, then, at the epi-center of the movement to soften the system that had violently replaced monarchy and the church with the force of dictatorship and social planning, among the souls gathered in an ancient cathedral to hear music created in the time of kings and to the glory of God.
What monuments are being built in the East? They were building a new brand of socialism to be sure, but the Czech reformers found out quickly how hard it is to change the format. I thought of headless Stalin and “socialism with a human face,” while all around us many people, young and old, had their heads bowed in attitudes of prayer.
And I thought of the wily comment made by some Polish leaders at a party congress in 1961. “Yes, we are for socialism,” they said, “but we are against all the roads that lead to socialism.” That remark serves to illustrate the dilemma not only of the cruelly repressed Czechs but also all the Eastern peoples under Soviet domination.
Behrendt cartoon, courtesy of the artist; cartoon P. 1, from Eulenspiegel (East Berlin); all others, courtesy of defective Japanese camera (Kowa) & SKO.
Received in New York on July 24, 1969.
Mr. Oberbeck is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner, on leave from Newsweek, Inc. This article may be published, with credit to S. K. Oberbeck and the Alicia Patterson Fund.
