For the short period of 55 years, from 1884 when the city was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to 1939 when the Nazis invaded, Prague was a home to a flourishing coffee shop literature, that brought about writers of lasting literary significance.
Café Slavia was the setting of Rainer Maria Rilke’s first stories, published in Prague in 1899. It was also there that Franz Kafka famously could not stop laughing when he read the first draft of his Trial to his literary friends. At Café Arko Kafka crossed plumes with the likes of Franz Werfel and Max Brod. They and many other coffee shop literates had little in common as writers, were it not for the fact that they all wrote in German. Prague German, to be precise.
It is largely forgotten that until 1945, German and Czech were equally spoken in Prague, albeit in two distinct parallel societies. Czech was the language of the working class. Prague German was spoken by the Upper class, the wealthy, intellectuals, the writers and actors. While the German-speaking literates nursed their coffees in the pompous inner-cities coffee shops, Jaroslav Hasek, who wrote the “Good Soldier Svejk” in his native Czech, downed his beers in the pubs of working class neighborhoods like Žižkov.
A beergarden in the working class neighborhood Žižkov
The Good Soldier Švejk, a down-to earth Czech, had to join the unloved Austro-Hungarian Army in WWI. A job he famously failed at, and a war the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy lost.
Rilke, himself born into a wealthy German speaking family, made the jarring gap and adversity between the German upper class and Czech working class the subject of his Prague Stories, written in Prague German of course. He also seemed to have been inspired to his later transcendental poetry by La Fée verte at Café Slavia. That’s what the highly alcoholic, and back then legal, green beverage Absinth was dubbed.
German was also the language of the Jews of Prague, or at least of the progressive liberals wanting to emancipate from the rigid orthodoxy of the Shtetl. In the Habsburg Empire, Jewish schools were forced by law teach in German, a means to suppress Jewish culture and language, the Eastern European Yiddish. Eventually German became the mother tongue of the educated. Most, but not all of the coffee shop literates were Jewish. Kafka was.
“What do I have in common with the Jews?” he asked, “I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”
Besides Prague German, it was a feeling of alienation the coffee shop literates shared.
“We are not born into our home. Rather it seems to me as if everything great is born in the desire to find a home somewhere, an open-armed home, waiting for our return,”
Rilke wrote before he left the city at 22.
Kafka obviously did not feel too homely in Prague either, even though he never left.
“Prague won’t let you go, the little mother has claws,” he said.
Things were different for Franz Werfel. Born to progressive, German speaking Jews, he was raised and emotionally most attached to his Czech speaking, catholic Nanny Barbara. First drafted into WWI, like Švejk, then driven into exile by the Nazis, he died in the USA a successful and acclaimed writer. He outlived Kafka, Rilke and Hasek by over twenty years. But Prague never let go of him either. At the end of his life, in the 1940ies, he still wrote lovingly of Barbara, and of his native city in his “Ballad to Prague.”
