A dramatic account of life in Czechoslovakia's great capital during the Nazi Protectorate With this successor book to Prague in Black and Gold, his account of more than a thousand years of Central European history, the great scholar Peter Demetz focuses on just six short years—a tormented, tragic, and unforgettable time. He was living in Prague then—a "first-degree half-Jew," according to the Nazis' terrible categories—and here he joins his objective chronicle of the city under German occupation with his personal memories of that period: from the bitter morning of March 15, 1939, when Hitler arrived from Berlin to set his seal on the Nazi takeover of the Czechoslovak government, until the liberation of Bohemia in April 1945, after long seasons of unimaginable suffering and pain. Demetz expertly interweaves a superb account of the German authorities' diplomatic, financial, and military machinations with a brilliant description of Prague's evolving resistance and underground opposition. Along with his private experiences, he offers the heretofore untold history of an effervescent, unstoppable Prague whose urbane heart went on beating despite the deportations, murders, cruelties, and violence: a Prague that kept its German- and Czech-language theaters open, its fabled film studios functioning, its young people in school and at work, and its newspapers on press. This complex, continually surprising book is filled with rare human detail and warmth, the gripping story of a great city meeting the dual challenge of occupation and of war.

Prague consists of many layers of symbolic sites and buildings which chart the ever-evolving historical relationship between Germans, Jews, Czechs and the imprints left by their many rulers and conquerors, as Demetz reveals in this history of the city.

" ... Demetz begins with the intriguing myths about Prague's origins--told and retold by generations of artists--contrasting them with confirmed archaeological truths about the site's pre-Roman settlements. He weaves together the colorful strands of Prague's literary traditions (Latin, Czech, German, and Jewish) with the story of its scintillating political and cultural advances, and focuses on key moments in its multicultural life: under King Charles, when it was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire; in the turbulent years of the Hussite rebellion; under Emperor Rudolf II, during the Renaissance, when it was home to Europe's best rationalists and most famous occultists; in the time of Mozart; and in the ages of revolutionary nationalism and of T.G. Masaryk, heroic first president of Czechoslovakia. Throughout, Demetz shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews hve lived and worked together in Prague for a thousand years ..."--Jacket.

Prague is at the core of everything both wonderful and terrible in Western history, but few people truly understand this city's unique culture. In Prague in Black and Gold, Peter Demetz strips away sentimentalities and distortions and shows how Czechs, Germans, Italians, and Jews have lived and worked together for over a thousand years.

This is a collection of Jan Neruda's intimate, wry, bittersweet stories of life among the inhabitants of the Little Quarter of nineteenth-century Prague. These finely tuned and varied vignettes established Neruda as the quintessential Czech nineteenth-century realist, the Charles Dickens of a Prague becoming ever more aware of itself as a Czech rather than an Austrian city. Prague Tales is a classic by a writer whose influence has been acknowledged by generations of Czech writers, including Ivan Klíma, who contributes an introduction to this new translation.

In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, Hitler’s troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia—the first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as “good Czechs.” By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s three million Germans and for the Communists’ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.

A treasure house of Gothic, baroque and modernist architecture, Prague is also a city of icons and symbols: statues, saints and signs reveal a turbulent history of religious and cultural conflict. As Kafka's nightmare city and home of the Good Soldier Svejk, the Czech capital also produced two of the twentieth century's emblematic writers. Richard Burton explores this metropolis of theatrical allusion, in which politics and drama have always been intertwined. His interpretation of the city's cultural past and present encompasses opera and rock music, puppetry and cinema, surrealism and socialist realism.