Read Your Way Through Prague

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

Few could doubt the literary bona fides of the Czech Republic, a country that elected a dissident playwright, Vaclav Havel, as its first post-Communist president. Literature is at the center of the Czech heart because it created us and liberated us.

As Austria-Hungary strove to make us German, writers and poets worked to create and preserve the idea of Czech language and national identity. When the Communist Party fought to purge intellectual rebellions, dissidents met in Prague’s legendary smoke-filled pubs to discuss and smuggle their banned work through the samizdat network.

Famously, Prague, known as the City of a Hundred Spires, was the foremost muse for the troubled mind of one Franz Kafka, despite his uneasy relationship with the city. (Communist authorities tried to erase Kafka from Czech history for decades.)

While Prague hasn’t escaped the commercialization befalling many European metropolises — Gothic cathedrals now share space with luxury fashion brands and golden-arch fries — its literary life cannot be snuffed out. Literature and myth live in every cobblestone, leading down narrow alleyways in the city’s Old Town toward medieval alchemic mysteries, techno parties in centuries-old basements and astronomical clocks tracking the paths of stars.

What should I read before I pack my bags?

The secret to Prague’s lasting beauty is as arbitrary as it is straightforward: Neither the Allies nor the Axis felt the need to destroy the city during World War II. Prague held on to its shimmering rooftops and medieval bridges built by Holy Roman emperors. Though war didn’t change the city’s looks, it did reshape the soul of its people.

The protagonist in Jaroslav Hasek’s novel “The Good Soldier Svejk” is greasing his rheumatic knees in a Prague apartment when the news of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination reaches his ears. Svejk had been let go from the army when he was officially certified as an idiot, but the outbreak of World War I hurls him into the conflict. Around one million Czechs fought for Austria-Hungary, often with little understanding of why they should risk lives on the empire’s behalf. The loss of individuality to conflict is at the heart of the Czech experience: a country trying to build, constantly usurped by its larger neighbors.