Prague: City of Shadows
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Image: Michael Hagedorn / Corbis
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Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive
— Franz Kafka
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’m trying to tell you, the travel writers who call Prague a “fairy tale” city are wrong. Explore the enchanting streets lit by gaslight, they write. Hold your lover’s hand while you stroll across the Charles Bridge, and then off into the sunset. Or so they imply.
What’s conveniently left out is the other part of the fairy tale, the part populated by witches and gargoyles and imps. The part where older versions of the Brothers Grimm — Cinderella murders her stepmother, the Little Mermaid kills herself — ring more true.
Prague is dark, filled with grotesque reminders everywhere of its storied, bloody past. And it will teach you a lot, if you let it. I travelled in and out of Prague for six months, but even in an evening, the city can change you. It can also tear you apart.
Like it did Kafka. Prague’s bleakest fiction writer was haunted not only by his evil father, but also the mysterious city which he tried to leave but never could. Not for long.
Kafka wrote in the bustling Café Slavia, but his nightmarish style of narration comes from his experiences growing up in its brutal, midnight streets. Prague is truly Kafkaesque, a world that is senseless, surreal, and often dangerous. The city made Kafka one of the most influential fiction writers of all time.
Kafka believed that “the world has gone nuts,” and nowhere is this more evident than on the trams of Prague, which ferry the Czech people from their morning thoughts to their office to their evening pints. It’s here that the effect of the communist past of Prague still permeates.
The older generation that crowds the trams with armloads of grocery bags still very much remembers the random persecution of their friends, their family, themselves. They are disoriented, too, by the new, freer lives they are now allowed to live. They still dress in drab, grey clothing — since when have they been told to wear anything else? — and try not to watch the young couples that neck and straddle one another on tram seats, try not to listen to the new music. The most well-loved rock band of the older generation, The Plastic People, was censored, then banned, and put on trial. The music of my childhood, an old woman on the tram tells me. Which music? I ask. She can’t remember.
An underground Plastic People concert we attend is performed with an air of prohibition. I watch a woman shed grey clothing for an orange mini-skirt, spike her hair, and sing loudly to the opening song. Here, it’s clear, she can forget; the public executions, the years of suffering, the sight of Jan Palach, a student of Charles University, lighting himself on fire.
The new generation, however, has learned from their parents. They know what it means to rebel. On May Day in Prague, the Nationalists prepare for battle against Anarchists in Namesti Miru square (literally, ‘Square of Peace’). They look ready to kill, but they just want to be heard. Sticking their chests out, they knock fists against palms in preparation, separated by a double cordon of riot police. The Anarchists wear masks; the Nationalists wear bare faces. The riot police are covered in enough armour to go to war. By evening, the police are still holding both groups back, but I hear a man say: Next year, I’ll kill someone.
But politics doesn’t matter on holidays. The night before May Day is the Burning of the Witches, where hundreds of Czechs (of every party) gather by the river to set broomsticks and giant effigies of witches on fire. We watch and scream in delight as the fire burns higher, and when it gets too hot, we shed our clothes and jump naked into the water. Lovers and teenagers and old women alike are spurred on by an elation that comes only with wickedness.
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