The Cathedral From the North

by Karl, pictures by Kate (mostly)

On the bus coming home from university, or with the boys in the afternoon after school, we get a glimpse of St. Vitus Cathedral in the distance.

When you’re in the tourist heart of Prague, on Charles Bridge heading from Staré město over to Malá strana, the Castle is right there over you to the north of the historic center of the city. There’s the picturesque jumble of baroque facades, rooftops, and church spires spilling up the hill. There’s the line of pastel-colored palaces sloping away to the east along the ridge that the castle occupies. And soaring above it all, the gothic-baroque-neo-Gothic splendor of the cathedral.

A winter's day on Charles Bridge

From the other side, coming home from the university, the castle is far off on the horizon. The terrain slopes gently up from the arterial next to the river, through the Bubeneč and Dejvice neighborhoods until, without having climbed anything steep, you’ve made it all the way to the castle, and if you walk through it and look down the other side, there’s the familiar drop back down to the river, with Malá strana at your feet and Staré město just there across the river.

(from here)

This view from the north is far less dramatic than the one that draws in the tourists. The intervening city is an unremarkable collection of apartment and office buildings from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. You don’t see any of the castle’s palaces or ramparts—only the silhouette of the cathedral, just big enough to be the most distinct thing on the horizon, a gray shape of a roofline and towers. But when the afternoon light is just right, the sun catches the ornament that crowns the cathedral’s highest tower, and above the gray silhouette you see a flash of gold. And you start to understand the symbolism of the structure.

It was started by Charles IV, whom the Czechs call the Father of the Homeland. He built up Prague to be the power base of his extensive central European realm, commissioning the bridge that now bears his name, founding the university that likewise honors him, creating the vastly ambitious urban project of Nové město (New Town). And for his capital city’s crowning glory, he brought in French and German architects to build a Gothic cathedral that would be a worthy counterpart to the ones he knew from his upbringing in France and his travels through Germany.

He was in many ways a great ruler, as such things are measured, but he spent a lot of money, and he was followed by a son who didn’t come close to filling his father’s shoes. The Hussite reformation in the early 15th century caught the great building less than half finished and the civil war and crusader invasions that followed didn’t favor great national construction projects. In the late 15th century the Jagellonian kings restored the castle’s royal palace, but there was never the energy to finish the cathedral.

And after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Prague became a decidedly secondary city. It was still the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, but that kingdom was merely a part of the multiethnic empire the Habsburgs had cobbled together through fortunate marriages with a spot of war where necessary. And the Czechs themselves were troublesome subjects, many of them inclined to the heresies of either Hus or Luther, which were now firmly stamped out. Those Czech nobles who’d taken the losing side in the religious wars fled the country, to be replaced by a new set of carpet-bagging aristocrats who accepted the religious dictates. The rights of even this new aristocracy were limited, and the political standing of the cities, so important in Hussite times, was eliminated completely.

The Czech language itself retreated to the countryside. German had long been an important language in Bohemia, but always alongside Czech. After White Mountain Czech was degraded to a secondary language, not required in state business. Josef II, an avowed follower of the Enlightenment who ended serfdom in the Habsburg Empire and reduced the legal disadvantages of his Jewish subjects, also promoted the wider use of German during his reign in the late 1700s. His conscious intention was probably not an ethnocentric one of imposing his language on others out of pride, but rather, a desire to rationalize the administration of his diverse realm. Ethnic Germans made up only about a quarter of the population but they were still the largest single group, and German populations could be found in cities and towns throughout the empire. Since German was already used in administration and in addition was understood in Germany and many places throughout central Europe, it was the most rational language to impose, if you were going to impose one. But still, it had the effect of pushing Czech even further into the background. What would be the fate of a language in the modern world if it were used on a daily basis only by peasants, without playing a role in literature, in science, in higher education, in urban trade? It seemed plausible that Czech itself might disappear.

When the Slavs first came into central Europe in the 6th century or so, they pushed pretty far west. By the 8th century they had reached a line that ran more or less straight north-south, from the German coast just east of Denmark to the head of the Adriatic. A significant piece of what is now Austria, most of what is now eastern Germany (the late lamented East Germany), a little bit of northeast Italy—all of it had Slavs.

I found this map here

But in the following centuries there was an immense population growth among Germans, with German-speaking settlers moving back east, reversing the flow of their tribes from centuries before, in what was known as the Drang nach Osten, the “drive to the east.” Sometimes they were invited in by kings to settle sparsely inhabited woods or to found cities or to bring with them mining skills. Many cities in the Czech Republic date from this wave of colonization in the 13th century.

By the end of the 18th century, the Slavs to the north and south of Bohemia were gone or had been absorbed into the German-speaking population. The Czechs were left as a salient thrust westward into the Germanic world, as if protected by the low mountains that ring Bohemia on the northeast, northwest, and southwest (though the mountains themselves were inhabited primarily by Germans).

The image is from here

With the exception of a few Jesuits and teachers, the Czechs had been stripped of their literate elite. Why wouldn’t the Czechs go the way of the Lusatians or the Sorbs, other western branches of the Slav family tree that had once been neighbors to the Czechs but had now been swallowed up in the enveloping German world?

And then a peculiar thing happened, best captured by an excerpt from Pavel Kosatík’s essay “The dream of language,” from his book České snění (Czech Dreaming) (pp. 289-91):

In 1785 amateurs opened a Czech theater in Prague, and eight years later the Czech nobility in the capital celebrated the first Czech wedding at which participants were dressed in traditional Czech costume and spoke in Czech. The turn of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the slow spread of a movement of patriotic teachers who, of their own will (for free) taught Czech in high schools.

Today, the turn away from practical and widespread German in the direction of a language buried in the past seems like a decision whose meaning and prospects would call for long deliberation. But maybe that’s not how it was. In 1801, when Josef Dobrovský asked the Zbislav pastor František Vambera why he decided to correspond with him in Czech, he got the following answer: “I vowed strongly—strongly—that with someone who knows Czech, no longer would I write, no longer would I speak, other than in Czech. If od našich pronárodù we Czechs are mockingly charged with speaking and writing amongst ourselves so much in foreign languages, why should we not break ourselves of that habit? Is it such a hard habit to break? I think not, and therefore have I made my vow.” Anyone who doesn’t see an explanation in this is blind: many people didn’t need a special reason for their decision, for they themselves were that reason.

…

Antonín Jaroslav Puchmajer, who would later found the first modern school of Czech poetry and was the author of Ode to the Czech Language, originally planned to be a German poet. But in 1791 in the Prague university library he ran into another future Czech poet, Šebestián Hněvkovský. When he saw that his friend was leafing through some sort of old Czech book, he began to express his surprise at the dross he was picking up. According to František Černý, who retold the story of the two men’s encounter, Hněvkovský then surprised Puchmajer with the accurate observation that Germans would hardly be grateful to him for bringing coals to Newcastle [“carrying wood to the forest”], whereas Czechs would greet even the smallest new undertaking with thanks. “He spurred Puchmajer on more and more, and in short order made of him a zealous Czech, and Puchmajer, feeling a poetic gift in himself, tried writing poems in Czech when he was still a theology student and urged his fellows to it as well.”

Even for Jungmann and Palacký, the first spur to their patriotic work was, according to their biographers, shame at not knowing Czech well. Jungmann captured the beginning of his awakening in a well-known passage from his Journals: whenever he had to get into a debate among his own Czechs in the village near Beroun [west of Prague], he sooner thought of nine possible expressions in German than a single Czech one. The result was that he stuttered. Some relative then made fun of him in front of the others: “I always heard that people only stuttered in Otročinoves (where she was from), but I find it here in Hudlice as well." The joke, which was clearly irresistible to those present, filled Jungmann with shame—so he swore that he would get so good in his mother tongue that he would make his aunt rub her eyes.

The influence of German was so pervasive that some of the first “awakeners” had to write their defenses of the Czech language in German—their own education was in German and the Czech language was poorly suited to the times, not having been in widespread literary use for 200 years. But they kept at it. Josef Dobrovský kicked off the scholarly study of Czech, but didn’t think it was practical to revive it. Josef Jungmann built on Dobrovský’s work but he really meant to make it a usable literary language again. He compiled dictionaries. He created new words for the language, borrowing or taking inspiration from other Slavic languages or piecing together older Czech words. He and other awakeners pored through the great Czech writers of the 16th and 17th centuries to try to distill the grammar and vocabulary of “pure” Czech. They went to the countryside, where Czech was still the primary language for many people, and drew from that well to pour fresh life into their language.

They worried about German vocabulary and grammatical structures sullying the native beauty of Czech. Sometimes they went overboard in this, seeking the chimera of a pure language. But some of them also realized that language is a living thing that needs to change over time, under various influences, and it was impossible to go back to some golden age when people spoke and wrote the “true” language. And all in all, their efforts worked. High school education in Czech spread, and eventually university education revived. The first Czech newspaper died for lack of interest, but later efforts got traction and soon there was a lively Czech press. Essays, stories, novels, historical works all came in time, until by the end of the 19th century there was a complete Czech cultural life. Even a single word could represent a worldview; in the right context, the greeting “Nazdar!” (literally “To success!”) came to signify allegiance to the national cause.

There's a scene in Švejk capturing a conversation between two Czech officers in the Habsburg army.  They are both loyal soldiers, but you have the feeling that the younger one is also a Czech patriot--it's just that he knows that when you're in the military you need to keep a rein on your expression of such sentiments. At the end of the conversation, the older one says goodbye with the words, "Well then, nazdar." That is, we won't talk about this openly, but you understand that I'm on your side.

Paralleling these cultural developments was the transformation of the capital. Prague makes much of Mozart’s connection with the city; he had great success here and even premiered his opera Don Giovanni at the Estates Theater (then the Nostitz Theater). Czechs are fond of his remark that, “My Praguers understand me,” but Prague was linguistically a very different city in Mozart's day. There were servants and perhaps tradespeople who spoke Czech, but the administration of the city and its cultural life were entirely in German, whether the people involved were Germans or Czechs. Describing the arrival of the historian František Palacký in Prague in 1823, the historian Jiří Morava writes

Among the 92,000 residents it was merely a handful of idealists with whom Palacký began his contacts, for the condition of the Czech nationality was nearly hopeless. It wasn't that Czech wasn't spoken (you could find old women who were unable to express themselves in any other way), but anyone who wore a slightly more respectable coat was ashamed of his native language. Anyone who wanted to be or appear educated used German, and those few [who used Czech] were viewed as crackpots and eccentrics, if not with disdain, then with pity. [Jiří Morava, Palacký: Čech, Rakušan, Evropan, pp. 53-54]

And then came the 19th century and modernization. As elsewhere in industrializing Europe, Prague grew primarily with immigration from the countryside as farmland got overpopulated and the growing factories needed ever more workers. But the peasants who made their way to the city were mostly Czech and they fundamentally altered the linguistic character of the capital. The “awakeners” gave educated Czechs in Prague the possibility of having a cultural life in Czech, and the peasant immigrants brought Czech with them as the only language they really knew well.

By the end of the 19th century, Prague was overwhelmingly Czech. German was still important—there were still newspapers, theaters, and part of the university (it had been split into a German university and a Czech one). The ethnic Germans weren't necessarily reliable, with some of them having an unsettling tendency to gaze fondly toward Berlin and the German Empire it had created, and they would dream of creating a Great Germany by adding to it Austria's Germans, or even all of the Habsburg Empire. But the government in Vienna trusted the Czechs even less, with the lingering suspicion that a tendency to communicate in Czech was a marker for a desire to have a Czech state and not be ruled by Habsburgs. So the government favored the Germany minority—but Prague itself had become a Czech city.

And the Czechs were wealthy, relatively speaking. Bohemia became the industrial heartland of the Habsburg Empire, rivaled only by the area around Vienna. Coal from North Bohemia, steel works, machine shops, tool makers, locomotives, electricity—engineering of all kinds thrived in this corner of the empire. A lot of it was owned by Germans, and many of the workers were German, but plenty of the new wealth was in Czech hands, and plenty of the engineering and physical work was done by Czech minds and Czech hands.

When patriotic Czechs decided to build a National Theater in Prague to perform works in their revived language, they were able to raise the money without government support. And when the building was gutted by fire as it was being prepared for its opening, they were able to raise the money again in a matter of months. Prague is most famous for its Gothic, Renaissance, and baroque buildings, but an important part of the city’s architectural wealth is the product of this joyous building spree from the later 19th century through the beginning of World War I. The buildings ooze pride, confidence, and wealth. And the dates on them are introduced by “L.P.”, the Czech abbreviation for “Year of our Lord.”

Amidst this revived culture and expanding wealth, it made sense to turn to the unfinished cathedral. Plans were drawn up to complete the building in the style of the original, eastern part from the time of Charles IV, from before the Hussite wars. Money was raised.

(from here)

Finishing a cathedral was more work than building a theater, so it took a lot longer, but the work got started. Famous Czech artists such as Alfons Mucha were commissioned to design stained glass windows for the new part of the sanctuary

The work proceeded westward, culminating in two towers that look as though they could have been built in the 15th century, framing a rose window whose content is early 20th century but whose form harks back to medieval France. Work slowed down with World War I, but picked up again in the newly independent Czechoslovakia, in the context the whole castle being overhauled to make it a more appropriate seat for the president of a democratic country, rather than the neglected third-string palace for a foreign monarch.

In 1929, nearly 600 years after the cornerstone was laid, the cathedral was practically finished and the completion of the building was celebrated on the thousandth anniversary of the murder of Wenceslaus, the patron saint of the Czech nation (though some sources say the murder was in 935). A nation that once again had its own country, where Czech was the dominant language, 300 years after the Habsburgs had stripped away the substance of Bohemian statehood.

Personally, I’m glad Czech came back from near death. There are Czech writers and historians who have helped shape my understanding of the world—Václav Havel, Josef Pekař, Jan Slavík, Karel Čapek, Jaroslav Hašek, Jan Neruda. If this had become merely another part of the German-speaking world, there would still have been writers here, and I might have read some of them. Without the distraction of learning Czech, I might even have put enough time into German to have been able to read them in German. But there would have been something different about their work—not better or worse, just different—and the Czech writings that we have, wouldn’t exist.

Even so, when I’m out walking in the city and I overhear a snippet of conversation or happen to look at signage on a store or advertising on a delivery van, sometimes it strikes me as bizarre that Czech is still here. From a crudely materialistic standpoint, what sense does it make to have this perverse language for all of 11 million people? (That’s adding in some number of people who’ve emigrated but presumably keep in touch with their native tongue; the country’s population is 10.5 million.) If this were a German-speaking country, it would be part of a linguistic community about ten times bigger. If German speakers and Czechs were to have the same portion of their population engaged in translating important works into their respective languages, the Germans would have access to ten times as much of the world’s intellectual output. And if they have the same portion of their populations engaged in creating literature, history, scientific research, journalism, then the German speaker has access to ten times as much material as does a Czech, even without translation. By holding onto this quirky language, the Czechs have imposed upon themselves a mixture of two costs: a greater portion of the population engaged in translating from the world’s major languages, and less intellectual output in their own tongue.

And then there’s the impact on visitors. Surely Kate is not the first foreigner to look up at the statue of Josef Jungmann and think, “Did you have to do it? It’d be so much easier to be trying to get by in German right now.”

"Hey! Who put that Deutsche Bank sign over my head!"

But Jungmann and his fellow awakeners succeeded as much as they could possibly have hoped. Czechs didn’t get political independence until 1918, but decades earlier they had already created the cultural and material wealth to do great works. When you see the cathedral rising above the horizon two miles away to the south, you’re looking at the national revival writ in stone. The fact that it is complete, after centuries as a torso, is a symbol that the Czechs, too, have a place in the modern world, even if they aren't sure what place that is.

Nazdar!