justiciaeigualdad

Trumping the Unbearable Darkness of History

A series of spans, including the Charles Bridge, second from bottom, cross the Vltava River in Prague, the setting for Milan Kundera’s novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”

By NICHOLAS KULISH

The New York Times

THAT history has not been just a string of kindnesses and gifts of beauty for the ancient, golden city of Prague is far from apparent at first glance.
The blows of World War II and the heavy hand of Communist construction — so apparent in neighboring capitals — are barely discernable there. It is nothing like the wholesale reinvention of Bucharest, the scars of Warsaw or the division of Berlin.
“The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to those other cities,” Milan Kundera wrote in his now-classic novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” “Old Town Hall was the only monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share.”
The hall is in ruins no longer, and the city’s Old Town begs a postcard from almost every angle. On a crisp fall day, the flagrant yellows and reds of the autumn trees on the lesser bank of the Vltava gild the city’s already rich skyline. The Charles Bridge remains in a permanent tourist traffic jam long past the summer high season.
The streams of visitors are not disappointed by the Gothic Tyn Church or the Art Nouveau Municipal House. But the result of so much beauty is a visual amnesia that lulls even the historically versed visitor into a kind of forgetting, encouraging a Disney castle version of the city and rendering Prague’s recent wounds almost invisible.
As Tereza, a principal character in the novel, climbs the grassy Petrin Hill, Mr. Kundera wrote, “On her way up, she paused several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and bridges, the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most beautiful city in the world.”
But “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” first published in a French translation from Czech in 1984, is no love letter to the city; it is a message from a time of oppression, and one worth carrying for perspective on a trip through Prague. Mr. Kundera submerges the reader in the undercurrents of political life, the rough passages of far-too-recent vintage and the personal repercussions of an invasive, claustrophobic time.
Tereza is climbing Petrin in a dream — a dream in which she will be executed, but only if she convinces the executioners that she seeks death of her own free will. The novel returns again and again to Tereza’s harrowing dreams, simultaneously erotic and morbid.
She and her husband, Tomas, are living through a most tumultuous period for what was then Czechoslovakia: the crackdown by the Soviet Union after Czechoslovakia’s attempt at liberalizing reform. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a brief flowering of openness behind the Iron Curtain; what followed was a trauma hidden inside the city. The novel provides a key to remembering.
Mr. Kundera writes of a time when a former ambassador could be consigned to the reception desk at a hotel, when private conversations were not only recorded by the police but broadcast on state radio and when the cinematographers of authority would set up bright lights and film cameras at a funeral to record the mourners’ faces for study. In the novel, Tomas, a superior surgeon, is consigned by the authorities to wash windows because of a politically provocative essay he once wrote about Oedipus and the guilt of unknowing crimes.
Today, scenes of surveillance and harassment play on a permanent loop in the small video room at the Museum of Communism. The visitor is also confronted by unforgettable images of tanks on the streets outside, armed forces in Wenceslas Square and protesters’ being sprayed by hoses and beaten with clubs.
Much is held at the arm’s-length distance of black and white. But the scene shifts to the demonstrations in 1989 that led to the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. Suddenly the faded jeans and bad haircuts are distinctly recognizable as — for all but the youngest of us — coming from our own time. The blows of the clubs seem to land that much harder with the realization that it could be you.
Though moving and informative, the Museum of Communism has a strangely amateur feel. Busts of party heroes are collected in one corner haphazardly and without explanation, like knick-knacks in a grandmother’s attic. The texts on the walls are at times quaint, like the one that declares: “From the very beginning, Lenin pushed forward the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness,” which earns a laugh but also cuts through the typical staleness of academic understatement.
But perhaps most surprising is that the museum itself is hidden on a commercial strip of Na Prikope, tucked, as the museum’s own literature puts it, “above McDonald’s, next to Casino.” Decades of a dictatorship for an entire country, a dictatorship within the lifetime of most Czech people, is squeezed into a space smaller than another pleasant enough museum devoted to the Slavic Art Nouveau pioneer Alphonse Mucha.
There is no question that Prague has chosen — at least for its public face — not to dwell on the Communist era. In the Kundera novel, Sabina, Tomas’s lover and an artist, detests when she or her work are revered or adored for her country’s trauma: “The trouble was that Sabina had no love for that drama. The words ‘prison,’ ‘persecution,’ ‘banned books,’ ‘occupation,’ ‘tanks,’ were ugly, without the slightest trace of romance.”

It is easy to understand why residents would just as soon forget the entire episode. And tourists can be forgiven for concentrating on the city’s grandeur rather than hunting for odd remnants of Communism.
As much as it cherishes the decorative finery of Mr. Mucha, the city unabashedly embraces Franz Kafka as its literary laureate, with Kafka tours, Kafka cafes, Kafka restaurants and Kafka hotels. But it is a branded Kafka commodity, stripped of the dread of “The Trial,” a quaint Kafka tailored to match the charms of old Bohemian beer halls and castle views.
The alleyways and courtyards of the city still embody the disorienting quality of Kafka’s work. As cold night descends, the twisting little lanes seem to mock the city plan clutched in a traveler’s numbing fingers. Prague defies maps. Prague is a place to get lost.
Mr. Kundera recounts how ordinary people across Czechoslovakia tried to foil their invaders not with cannons but by tearing down the street signs to slow and confuse their oppressors. The act feels distinctly Czech in its mixture of defiance, creativity, pacifism and even the hint of oddness.
With Mr. Kundera’s work as a point of reference, the city takes on a different aspect. It is as if Tomas, reduced to window washer by the regime, were wielding the squeegee on the plate glass fronts of the luxury boutiques off the Old Town Square and winking at the shoppers inside.
Though Wenceslas Square is topped by the equestrian rectitude of its patron saint, it is anything but upstanding. Preservationists would no doubt love to wipe away Casino Happy Day’s light-studded facade, its neon palm tree and incongruously colored dollar signs flashing red and yellow. The square is home to drug pushers and strip-club panderers, solicitous to members of the roving packs of stag party celebrants who descend upon the city each weekend.
The novel — and the movie made after it — is best known for the erotic contradiction of Sabina, stripped down to her underwear and wearing an old-fashioned bowler hat. This single object is slowly weighted down with a series of meanings, from the functional article it was for Sabina’s grandfather, a 19th-century mayor; to the sexually charged plaything it became to the lovers; and eventually as a monument to their affair after it had ended.
“Each time the same object would give rise to a new meaning, though all former meanings would resonate (like an echo, like a parade of echoes),” Mr. Kundera writes, “enriching the harmony.”
The same could be said for the city. The monumental misfit of the former Federal Assembly building, where the Slovak and Czech delegates once met, squats near Wenceslas Square, one of the lonely examples of Communist-era architecture downtown. Its colossal overhang seems to me like a giant chin stuck out for an uppercut from architecture critics.
It was built on top of the old Prague stock exchange without destroying the original building, a project heavy with symbolism. In another layer of historical irony the building became home after the Velvet Revolution to Radio Free Europe, the United States-financed service.
The city is ripe with such turnabouts. The national martyr Jan Palach died after setting himself on fire in 1969 to protest the Soviet occupation. Now, the one-time Square of the Red Army Soldiers bears his name.
“The history of the Czechs and of Europe is a pair of sketches from the pen of mankind’s fateful inexperience,” Mr. Kundera wrote. “History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.”
From his exile in Paris, Mr. Kundera was less prescient about the imminent collapse of communism, writing of “the forfeit of their nation’s freedom for many decades or even centuries.” The Communist era may have begun to seem like one of those passing sketches in the flipbook of history, but four decades after World War II the Iron Curtain seemed of unshakable permanence.
That is a memory worth holding onto, one that gives depth to, rather than contradicting, the city’s beauty, as a place that survived its trial and came out, if not unscathed, strong and fair.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
Delta flies direct from Kennedy Airport in New York to Prague, on a code share with Czech Airlines, starting at around $800 round trip for travel in April.
WHERE TO GO
The Museum of Communism, with displays on schooling, industry and sports of the era as well as a model interrogation room, is at Na Prikope 10 (420-224-212-966). For a slightly more aesthetic experience, visit the Mucha Museum (Panska 7; 420-224-216-415; www.mucha.cz), devoted to the Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha. To pick up a copy of “Unbearable Lightness” or any of Milan Kundera’s works in English, stop by the Globe Bookstore (Pstrossova 6; 420-224-934-203).
WHERE TO STAY
The Four Seasons Hotel Prague (Veleslavinova 2a/1098; 420-221-427-000) is a landmark of luxury by the banks of the Vltava River, with rooms starting at 370 euros, or $592 at $1.60 to the euro (hotel rates in Prague are commonly posted in euros). For a boutique hotel with a more modern touch try the Hotel Josef (Rybna 20; 420-221-700-111), a sleek, centrally located, minimalist building designed by the Czech-born architect Eva Jiricna, who herself lived in exile after the Soviet crackdown in 1968. Doubles start at 149 euros a night.
WHERE TO EAT
Also steps from the Vltava River, V Zatisi (Liliova 1; 420-222-221-155) mixes international cuisine with local specialties to delicious effect, with a playful, artistic décor that includes an entire wall made from yellowing stacks of books, the blank edges of the pages facing outward rather than the spines. Try the duckling and herb dumplings for 495 koruna, or about $30 at 16.25 koruna to the dollar. For a traditional Prague pub, grab a beer and a sausage at the famous U Zlateho Tygra (Husova 17; 420-222-221-111).