Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

Paperback - 18 March, 1998 - Hill and Wang
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By: Peter Demetz
ISBN: 0809016095

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Reviews by readers

A comprehensive piece on Czech people and history

I have just returned from my first trip Prague and Ostrava. The history of the region is a bit confusing to us who are not familiar with this part of the world. This is an important part of the world, after all the genesis of the First World War is connected to the Bohemian Prince who was also a successor to the Habsburg throne.

Professor Demetz provides a comprehensive background to the history of the country, the intrigues and policitical fights that went on this part of the world. He provides a lively discussion of a serious subject. Prague went through a great number of battles and the people here were well involved with many events that rocked the European politics and religion.

Demetz is from Prague where he grew up and was a victim of anti-semitic tide that swept across Europe. This makes his story so human. This is not a dispassionate history book. I recommend this book to you, if are interested to know a bit more about the Czech republic and its people.

Prague: More Black than Gold

Professor Demetz is especially strong in exploring the religious history of the city. I wondered how he could be so erudite in explaining both the Hussite revolt against Catholicism and Rabbi Loew's conflict with the Jewish establishment. He explained in his beautiful, elegiac afterword that his father's family was Christian; his mother's, Jewish. He spent time in a Nazi labor camp for half-Jews. My suggestion would be to read the afterword first. The bibliography is also very helpful, with rather blunt appraisals of cited works.

Wandering bit of storytelling

What, I wonder, was the point of Prague in Black and Gold? The back cover actually refers to Peter Demetz's book as a city guide - why I have no idea, since it certainly is not even close to that style of writing. It looks suspiciously like a history text, and so I shall treat it, but problems remain.

I don't know who the audience is for this book. I know very little about Prague's history, and although I know more than I did before starting it, most of what Demetz covered went right past me. This is, I suspect, because few people who don't already know something about the history of Prague will be able to pick it up here. It's as though it was written for readers who start out highly knowledgeable. But the style is all wrong for that. It doesn't feel like an advanced monograph for expert researchers, it reads like an attempt at an intelligent and demanding book for lay readers that remained intelligent, but was too demanding. There are too many skips and jumps. Between each chapter we get a gap of at least eighty years, and sometimes several centuries. This is not a general history.

Within each chapter Demetz tries to tell a story about some aspect of Prague's history. These are hit and miss. At times the reader can follow along, though some background is often missing. At other times he simply steps through the anecdotes and woe to the reader who doesn't already know the tale. Part of the goal apparently was to demystify Prague. Fine, but it was never clear to me what the mystery was in the first place.

So once again, who is the reader supposed to be? My suspicion is that readers who already have a good grasp of east central European history, particularly of the Czechs, will and ought to be happy with Prague in Black and Gold. Demetz seems to be bringing to life aspects of Czech history. For the rest of us, though, I would say pass on this book. It's not a true history book, and it has fallen into the common trap of erudite works that remain dangerously close to incomprehensible. The lack of structure and the shallowness of depth makes for tough and ultimately unsatisfying reading.

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