Prague at the heyday: cosmopolitan, multilingual city, a place of a Czeco-German rivalry which never ceased, or almost, to be peaceful-Bernard Michel’s book opportunely rekindled the memory of an important and unknown page of European culture.
Bernard Michel’s book is devoted to a period that is too often overlooked by the cultural history of the current Czech Republic, which spreads from the end of XIXe century to the end of the 1920s. The choice of these chronological terminals indicated a strong will on the part of the author, that of not reducing the evolutions of the culture of bohemian-moora to a chronology “ Western “, Even French. The choice to include in the same analysis the periods of the pre-war and post-war period is one of the attractions of this work. Indeed, this recounts the scope of the rupture introduced into European history by the First World War. For Czech artists at least, this break was less important than we could think, and if the artistic currents evolve naturally after the war, a number of central artists in the cultural circles of the young Czechoslovak Republic in the 1920s began their artistic or literary career at the beginning of the century.
Prague La Cosmopolite
The book follows a globally chronological approach, by successively exploring the front and then the post-war period, and the author puts a particular care to separate the different components of the Pragoise culture of the time. Prague is then, like most of the large Habsbourg cities, a cosmopolitan city, and its rapid economic boom at the end of XIXe century offers him an important role on the Austrian scene. Prague welcomes Czech, German and Jewish communities in particular, and these three communities are both diverse but deeply interdependent. Bernard Michel thus returns in detail on historical facts too often ignored by those who have been interested in the culture of the aging empire: opposing the too easy vision of closed and antagonistic communities, the author recalls the importance of multilingualism in the Bohemia End of the Century, and the fact that if German and Czechs were politically and economically engaged in an increasing rivalry, reciprocal influences. Returning to a theme that is dear to him, Bernard Michel draws the portrait of an Austrian empire which was neither excessively authoritarian nor drowned under the bureaucracy, but which offered his nationalities a peaceful framework of competition and extraordinarily conducive cultural emulation. Beyond Viennese modernity, which is now widely known and recognized, this book proposed to explore what then made the cultural richness of Prague, then second city in the Austrian part of the Empire. We still too often forget that Prague was then a leading cultural metropolis, the city of Max Brod and Franz Kafka, the city of Alfons Mucha and Egon Erwin Kisch. And if this city was the scene of such a rich cultural life, it was because it offered a privileged framework for the artistic expression of a Czeco-German rivalry which almost never ceased to be peaceful.
The city of Kafka
A literary figure dominates the whole work, that of Franz Kafka, who is undoubtedly the best known Pragian writer, even if too many people still ignore that he lived most of his life in Prague. Returning to what was the city of Kafka, Bernard Michel dissipates certain illusions which still mark the work of many of his biographers: Kafka was neither a Jew persecuted by an increasingly anti -Semitic population, nor a traumatized German of having access only to a provincial language and culture, nor the ferocious critic of an invasive bureaucracy prefiguring the totalitarisms of XXe century. Kafka was rather the Pragian writer par excellence, the most eminent representative of the peak of German bohemian culture who knew how to develop specific themes such as that of the weight of a guilt whose source is elusive (like Joseph K who, in The trialis convicted of a crime of which he ignores everything). Bernard Michel also recalls that if Kafka left Prague after the war, it was not because of fanatic antigermanism that the Czechs are supposed to have shown, but because of his health problems.
The German culture of Prague is indeed declined after 1918, but this phenomenon is more linked to economic considerations (German writers are paid in schillings or marks, two devalued currencies hardly allowing to live in the Czechoslovakia prosperous). Conversely, Czech culture, less brilliant than its pre-war German counterpart, then experienced a spectacular development which makes Prague one of the great cultural capitals of post-war Europe, with figures like those of the Čapek brothers, Jaroslav Hašek or Vitězslav Nezval. Encouraged by the power embodied by the “ philosopher president Thomáš Masaryk, this Czech culture is nourished either, for the Devětsil movement, a revolutionary avant-garde enthusiasm doubled with optimism which distinguishes it from French or German culture, or from a democratic humanism close to the ideas of Masaryk.
In the end, the great merit of this book is to resuscitate an unknown page of European cultural history while offering an inevitably synthetic overview of the richness of currents and artistic universes which then developed in Prague. However, the author has often decided to evoke everything, and for lack of analyzes as well literary and historical pushed further, the book sometimes turns in the catalog of authors and works, and certain chapters resemble a series of biographical notices where developments that would give more sense and consistency to this accumulation of facts. The work is therefore remarkable for its informative and descriptive role, but the analytical aspects are sometimes too lapidary to be fully convincing. Bernard Michel is a great supporter of the history of sociability, but it is clear that in the matter, a lot of work remains to be done to give a global and precise image of interconnection networks, meeting places and places where the Pragoise culture of the Belle Epoles is made.
In short, one can only appreciate at its fair value the author’s work to make this very rich but often ignored culture accessible to the French public, especially for linguistic reasons. Not without regretting that the historiographical project, which aimed to explain the causes of this creative emergence in a specific place over a fairly brief period, too often turns to the juxtaposition of chapters of political history and cultural history, without the links between the two being always sufficiently explored and explained. We cannot therefore advise this reading too much to those who are interested in the center-European or even European culture of the years 1880-1930, while wishing that this reading stimulates in its historical readers the desire to go further and to meet the historiographical challenges raised by Bernard Michel.