by Peter Hitchens
For
most of us, Prague is an idea before it is a city. Mention of the name calls up
a series of monochrome images, most of them violent and distressing, boding
little good for those involved. Imperial delegates are hurled from a high
window into a dungheap and the Thirty Years War begins. Women weep as the
German army tramps by in the March gloom. Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler’s personal
favorite, is assassinated on a street corner (the first killer’s gun jams, but
the second hurls a hand grenade), and hundreds have to die or suffer horribly
in the furious retaliation. Jan Masaryk, a liberal who tried to work with
Stalin, is pushed to his death from yet another window, his fingernails
scrabbling on the sill as he discovers for certain that democracy is
incompatible with Communism, or was it the other way round? Rudolf Slansky and
Vlada Clementis, guilty of being Jewish at a time when Stalin was displeased
with Jews, are hanged by their revolutionary comrades, swiftly cremated, and
their ashes spitefully used to grit the snowy roads. Russian tanks crawl
through sullen crowds, their crews puzzled because they had expected to be
welcomed. The affronted people hold up signs, in good, grammatical Russian,
saying politely, “Go Home.” When this fails, they try Molotov cocktails, and
Jan Palach burns himself to death.
After
too much of this, enormous peaceful multitudes demand and achieve the return of
their lost liberty. It is a happy ending, though too late for several million
people unlucky enough to live and die in all the unhappy eras. We have heard
and read Prague’s name in ancient newsreels and history books. We know it as
the scene of Franz Kafka’s hopeless Trial and perhaps as the home of the Good
Soldier Schweik, who responds to authority by having another drink. Like Rome
or Jerusalem, its name sounds in the mind like a bell or a snatch of music,
plangent and melancholy.
So
it is, in any case, for me. Prague the city is as mysterious and somber as you
might expect, if not more so. Something about this dark bend on the Vltava
River seems to attract melodrama and woe and inspire people to futile but
admirable acts of resistance to historical inevitability.
I
was advised to travel there more than three decades ago by someone who had been
a courier for Stalin’s Comintern in the years before 1939. This wife of a prominent
British labor union leader had carried messages to Moscow and gold to London,
often passing through the Czech capital on her secret travels, lodged in the
best hotels, clad in couture clothes and provided with the smartest luggage,
for in those less egalitarian days rich voyagers attracted less attention from
customs men than the shabby poor. Thanks to her continuing sympathies with the
Soviet empire, she had been back since.
In
those days, Eastern and Central Europe were barely visited by British people.
They did not, she said, know what they were missing. “Go now,” she urged.
“There is nowhere in Europe where you can still feel and see what the Continent
was like before the Second World War.”
So
it proved. There were no guidebooks or reliable street plans to be found. The
official railroad map of Europe ended at the Iron Curtain. The booking clerks
had to unearth special procedures to obtain our tickets. Our passports were
sent off to Prague to be unstitched, reassembled, and photocopied by the
Secret Police. But we persisted. The train, once it had crawled past the
dragon’s teeth and barbed wire coils of the frontier, slowed to the pace of
half a century ago. Through the somnolent afternoon, elderly waiters in the
dining car served a weighty lunch of pork, dumplings, and beer as we wound past
decayed spas and sad, dispossessed castles. We fell at last into the dark
gravitational pull of Moscow, passing dispirited industrial cities hung with
red banners and then, in the Prague suburbs, vast sidings full of Soviet
rolling stock marked with the hammer and sickle. Then we were there.
The
stone crown of Central Europe was improbably lovely but also black and cold,
unspoiled only because nobody could afford to spoil it, unbombed only because
it had been handed over captive. Even so, it was all still there, though much
of it was prevented from falling down only by large baulks of dirty timber
jammed against sagging walls. It was full of genuine fear, something the
Western visitor could selfishly enjoy, much as one enjoys a good ghost story
because he knows that the evil is contained within secure borders. There were
no tourists, only perplexed North Korean exchange students, their hair
massacred in the style later indissolubly associated with Kim Jong Il, gaping
at the sooty spires and mad, triumphalist Baroque churches of the Old Town. I
even acquired a personal Secret Police escort, who took me out to meals and
drove me around in the mistaken belief that I was more than I seemed to be and
would somehow reveal myself if given enough Pilsner beer. I was approached on
trams by sad men who thanked me (as if I were responsible) for the BBC Czech
service, their only source of truth. I was approached in hotels by Anglophile
black Cuban students who wanted to drink rum with an Englishman.
But
Englishmen have a special difficulty with Prague, the place we merrily betrayed
in 1938, hoping to save our own bacon by cooking the Czechs’ goose. In a way,
we betrayed it again in 1948 and 1968, when we peaceably abided by the unspoken
agreement that we could live as we pleased in Western Europe if we let the
Russians do what they liked in the East.
I
went back again and again while Prague languished under the stupid rule of the
Communist Party, until the astonishing week when all that stopped.
Then
I didn’t return for almost 20 years. I could not quite bear to. After the
impossible sweetness of November 1989, when the forces of good just for once
appeared to triumph completely over the forces of wickedness, I thought it
could never be any better. I was swept along the great streets in the snow,
under icy blue skies, in a great triumphal festival of the newly liberated, and
it seemed as if Christmas had arrived early.
I
heard in the years afterward that it had not been quite so sweet, that the KGB
themselves might have had a hand in the all-too-easy overthrow
of Communism. It was even revealed that the student whose death we had all
been protesting so righteously hadn’t actually died or even been seriously
hurt. Vaclav Havel, like so many revolutionaries, gradually transformed himself
from a tribune of liberty into a slightly tiresome figure of woolly, modish
liberalism.
Parties
of British youths, attracted by cheap beer, infested the ancient city, yelling
and spewing among the monuments. The previously untouched facades began to wear
the universal livery of global branding. Czechoslovakia itself fell apart. Both
segments were gobbled up by the European Union.
I
went back, a little reluctantly, by the route Adolf Hitler liked to take from
Berlin down to Dresden, now living proof that you can put the clock back, as
its lovely domes and towers rise again from the wreckage of bombing and the
grimy neglect of socialism. The journey is a poignant one, past the glum
fortress towers of Pirna where the Third Reich pioneered the slaughter of the
mentally handicapped (“we do it in the womb and so get away with it”) and then
along the melodramatic gorge of the Elbe, not unlike the Potomac as seen from
Harpers Ferry. Like Hitler, I had no need to pause at the Czech frontier. Along
with all the borders of continental Europe, it has ceased to exist, smashed not
by tanks but by the mighty decrees of the European Commission.
The
Vienna Express roars on regardless, and the traveler must look closely at inn
signs and such things to make out that he has passed from Germany into the
Czech lands. Or has he? For this is the very Sudetenland that provided the
pretext for the Munich crisis, in those days a German minority enclave in the
invented state of Czechoslovakia. It is now ostensibly restored to Czech rule,
but the Czech Republic is only a feeble vassal of the mighty European Union,
which differs from all previous empires in not having an emperor—at least not
yet.
