Prague Castle

Prague Castle is a big lump on the hill overlooking the city. The castle is really a complex of different buildings that accreted around a site up on the hill, so it is a hilarious jumble of architectural styles. The cathedral is crunchy gothic on the outside with creamy baroque on the inside.


The Basilica of St. George is frothy Baroque on the outside with chewy Romanesque on the inside. St. George slays his dragon left and right, and the palaces are filled with reproductions, the originals of which appear to all be located in Vienna. There were never really kings at this castle: it was full of minor officials who did the bidding of kings in...other places like Vienna. So this was a small tower of bureaucrats, the really dangerous people. Kafka talked about that. He said that bureaucracy was dangerous because they hid the punishments and made torture a depersonalized mechanical process. He said the worst thing is that they made oppression efficient. Well, this "castle" seems to have been all about this.

It is a big warren of buildings that makes lot of money for the state. Several thousand people per day must pass through the doors of this stone island. The passage ways are jammed with people rain or shine, and there are a lot of languages to be heard. Most of them waddle at a glacial pace, and they stop suddenly to photograph each other. Americans just stand where they are and smile, but the European tourists have special poses. It is great fun to watch the various poses they take: it is like low level voguing for all ages.


The cathedral is properly huge, but all the buildings of the "castle" complex cluster around it's knees and rather dampen the effect by hemming it in. It peeks out over the tops of the bureaucratic buildings in a kind of irritated way. Inside, it recovers its dignity since it doesn't need to compete with the scribes on its own territory. The windows are painted with art deco scenes, and there are statues of dead bishops in all the little chapels. The principal grave that is the highlight of the visit is the grave of St. Nepomok, a religious person who was martyred by being thrown off the Charles Bridge. There is a plaque on the bridge now that people rub for good luck.

I also noticed that there is a plaque with a dog on it on the bridge that is also very shiny so people must pet the bronze dog as well. If you look at the statue of Franz Kafka in the Jewish Quarter, people seem to rub the tips of his boots.


The most exciting room of the main "castle" building, where there were audiences and records and replica crown jewels (which are in Vienna), was the room of defenestration. In a Catholic/Protestant dispute, three castle officials were thrown out the window of this room, but they landed on a compost heap and survived. Some versions of the story say it was angels, others say it was just providential poop, but either way it was not a short fall. We stood in the little, fateful room and marveled at how small it was and how it was essentially a dead end. The castle regents were totally cornered. It must have been a terrifying time. Look under the windows: you will see a monument to the regents where they landed on the compost pile.

The palaces one can tour seem like they were cold and dark. They seem like they were grim places to live, but with all those aristocrats and their bureaucrats, there had to be servants, and theses servants lived in little houses along the castle wall on a street called Golden Lane. The houses were one and two room affairs with low ceilings and small windows that look out on the royal gardens.


They seemed like they were quite cozy. Kafka's sister owned number 22, and Kafka wrote "The Country Doctor" there. It is a bookshop now, but it was delightful to go into that small space after all the big spaces of he cathedral and palaces because it was such a human scale. It was comfortable and cheery, though quite small. It was easy to understand how Kafka could write in this space.

The insight of the day came from visiting the portrait gallery and the national gallery. Both places have extensive collections of neoclassical 19th century paintings, and it is a rather second rate collection. As we walked through the collections, I realized that I was bored by the neoclassical style. It felt stati and like nothing was happening. Sure it was pretty, but it didn't really speak to the moment. I was not interested in the moral education of a bygone era that was harking back to a bygoner era. Then, around a corner, we hit the paintings of an impressionist, and it was lovely. There were only three in this sea of Right and Proper neoclassicism, but I suddenly understood why people got fed up with it and why the expressionism of the early 20th century seemed so radical and so necessary. The past was no longer the guide, what was important was the experience of the present. Intellectually, I has understood that, but trudging through the neoclassical doldrums of the national gallery to suddenly drift up on the impressionists was a jolt of personal recognition of the problem. It was so exciting I had to sit down for a moment and recover. This is what gothic lit is about: throwing off the chains of a restrictive past and transgressing the old mores for more free expression. This old dog has finally learned how this trick works.


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