He experienced interrogation by the Gestapo and Czech revenge against the Germans. Demetz described Prague as black and gold

Peter Demetz, a half-breed according to racial laws, had several near-misses himself during the war, but survived. After February 1948, he emigrated to the USA, where he became a world literary scholar, professor emeritus at Yale University. He followed his mother only last week, when he died at the age of 101. The death was reported by the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for which the native of Prague had long reviewed Czech literature, for example the novels of Milan Kundera and Jáchym Topol.

In Demetz, not only a respected Germanist and essayist, but also a witness of the 20th century is leaving. In September 1937, he accompanied the funeral procession with the coffin of Tomáš Garrigu Masaryk. “A million people lined the street, but all that could be heard was the muffled clatter of horseshoes, the metallic sound of wheels, guns and studded military boots, and the soft sobs of the crowd,” he wrote.

A year later, he enlisted in the National Guard, ready to defend Czechoslovakia from the Nazis. “They gave me a 1918 rifle and chased me up the hill and back again for the last tram so that I would be able to do guard duty in Germany as soon as we occupied it,” he recalled. But the Czechoslovaks gave up without a fight. And Peter Demetz subsequently went through several Nazi prisons, including the Pankrák prison, where he was tortured by guards.

He experienced a cell in Auschwitz, fortunately only at the police station, when the Gestapo took him to Pečkárna for questioning through several stops. Later, in a labor camp in northern Bohemia, he saw the sky covered in shades of red and yellow from the bombing of Dresden. That same evening, a bomb dropped by the Allies on Prague killed Demetz’s protectorate love, Czech German woman Waltraut.

In the last days of the war, Peter Demetz is riding a priest’s bicycle from the labor camp to Prague when three SS men pick him up and lock him in a wooden shed, saying that they will return in three hours and shoot him. Luckily they didn’t come. And so the future professor of literature, at that moment overgrown beyond recognition and without front teeth, uses the parson’s bicycle as a battering ram, breaks down the door and continues home. There he will find out which of his relatives perished in the concentration camp. In the book Prague under threat 1939-1945, which mixes history with a personal narrative, it also describes violence from the opposite side: how at the end of the war the Czechs burned the Germans alive. That they threw an old German woman out of the window. Or how they beat a German philharmonic on the street who came to visit Prague and didn’t speak Czech.

“The Czechs did not face the Germans in an open battle like the Poles in the early autumn of 1939, and I cannot get rid of the idea that the brutalities of the displacement period were a late compensation for the murky ordinariness of the protectorate,” he interpreted his disappointment with the post-war expulsion of the Germans, with the application of the principle of collective guilt and “brutality, which contradicted all the traditions of Masaryk’s Republic”.

In his books on literature and history, Peter Demetz put the transports to Terezín, as well as the expulsion of the Germans, into the broader context of other mass murders in Prague, such as the pogrom in 1389, in which three thousand Jews died, or the mass deportation of Jews ordered by Maria Theresa in 1744. His texts about the Czech metropolis freely run through a series of chapters on tolerance and intolerance. How quickly one thing follows another, when understanding for minorities alternates with burning, looting and murder.

Probably even for everything he saw in it, Peter Demetz had a complicated relationship with the metropolis. “I love my hometown and hate it at the same time,” he writes in his best-known book entitled Praha černá a zlatá, which, like his other publications, had to be translated into Czech. In 1998, Zdeněk Hron took on this task for the Prostor publishing house.

Alchemists somewhere

Demetz wrote the six-page treatise for his American students who went to the Czech capital after 1989 and were only interested in Franz Kafka and Václav Havel. “It seemed to me not enough,” he explained.

But he had another motivation. In the early 1970s, the professor of Slavic studies in Rome, Angelo Maria Ripellino, published the popular book Magic Prague, in which he revived the old romantic myths about the Vltava city favorable to horoscopes and gusts of the irrational, about Prague as magical and mystical, which night after night wanders motley companies of alchemists, rabbis or of Arcimbold’s apparitions, which is lost in the hazy outlines of yellow gas lanterns and in whose grotesquely crooked alleys, half-demolished churches or ancient synagogues one can still see a golem or at least the shadow of Franz Kafka.

Demetz objected to the idea that the Czech metropolis hides more mystique than other European cities. “I got it into my head that I would write a polemic against magical Prague,” he explained, explaining why he also included royal, Hussite, Enlightenment, Cubist and Masaryk Prague in his publication. First of all, it tells the history of the city from its foundation to the 20th century with an emphasis on literary connections. But it also deconstructs the narrative of magical Prague.

The Germanist sees its roots in the wave of German or English travelers who came to Bohemia from the 19th century and were often amazed by the old churches or the Jewish ghetto before the sanitation. The literary scholar cites from the books of George Eliot, Francis Marion Crawford or The Golem by Gustav Meyrink, “a very impressive, if cheesy melodrama”, writes Demetz sternly about the well-known novel from 1915.

Among the spreaders of clichés is also “the most famous poisonous flower of magical Prague”, an anti-Semitic novel about a secret meeting of the twelve tribes of Israel in Prague’s Jewish cemetery, part of which later found its way into the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion, quoted by Adolf Hitler.

Demetz is consistent. “The famous Golden Alley was not inhabited by alchemists, but honest lackeys who were servants of the royal chamber, and the great moralist Rabbi Löw began to be associated with the legend of the golem only two hundred years after his death,” he refutes one myth after another.

In this part of the book, however, he argues more with the post-revolutionary tourist image of Prague than with Angela Maria Ripellina’s whimsical book. Who wrote his primarily literary and in any case charming portrait of the city after August 1968, in the darkest of times. And it was as much a dirge as a eulogy, because Ripellino missed Prague and could no longer return. Even Peter Demetz certainly understood this given his own fate.

Shop in the Jewish ghetto, Josefov, Prague, circa 1900. Photographed by Jindřich Eckert. | Photo: ČTK / ullstein bild

Torment for Kafka

Demetz’s mother was a Jewish seamstress from a family that fled from Poděbrady to Prague after the pogrom. Father Hans Demetz had roots in the Ladin national minority with its own language, he worked as a director of German theaters in Prague and Brno. Among other things, the father visited the young insurance agent Franz Kafka in Celetná street. “When Kafka died, he loyally went to his funeral, and whenever it came up, he didn’t forget to mention that Kafka’s last lover, Dora Diamant, passed out at the open grave,” Demetz wrote. After Kafka’s death, his father arranged a trial at the Mozarteum.

That is also why Peter Demetz used to be called the last link with the world of Prague Jewish German literature. As a class of 1922, he no longer experienced Kafka personally, but as soon as he started studying religious studies, German studies and Bohemian studies at Charles University, he became interested in his work.

In 1947, he completed a professional work on the reception of Kafka’s books in England and later dedicated several more texts to him, including the book essay Airplanes over Brescia, also published in Czech. It tells of Kafka’s holiday trip to an air show in Italy in 1909. For this book, Demetz spent several months in Brescia, walking the countryside where the air day was held, reading old newspapers on microfilm, and drinking cappuccinos at the hotel where the first aviators stayed.

The general public may also be familiar with Demetz’s book about another key personality of German literature born in Prague, the poet whose Czech period was analyzed in the publication entitled René: The Prague Years of Rainer Maria Rilka. It was the first one he wrote in exile. “On free evenings and weekends in a cozy teahouse on Maxmilian’s Street in Munich, I barely got out of the refugee camp,” he recalled.

Freshly graduated with a doctor of philosophy, Demetz emigrated in 1949, he and his wife were taken across the Šumava by a member of the already banned scouts. He first got to the editorial office of Svobodna Europa in Munich, where he met Ferdinand Peroutek and wrote a book about Rilke, and then to the USA: he lived there since 1953. Eight years later, he was appointed professor of German literature and comparative studies at the prestigious Yale University, where he headed the department for a long time . He lectured there for over thirty years.

In addition, Peter Demetz was a visiting professor at Princeton and Columbia University. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, received the Grand Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He wrote hundreds of professional texts and translated, for example, Babička by Božena Němcová into German. He also participated in the 33,000-volume Tschechische Bibliothek edition series, where between 1999 and 2007, translations from Czech literature were published in uniform binding and graphic editing.

In 2014, Peter Demetz received an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University. | Photo: CTK

Slavic Prague

He returned often after the Velvet Revolution. He taught for a while in Ostrava, received an honorary doctorate in Brno and a silver medal in Prague, but he only referred to himself as a “former Prague resident”. The panorama of the capital, enriched with a television tower and communist housing estates, impressed him only to a limited extent.

Demetze has been interested in multi-ethnic Prague all his life, built over centuries by Czechs, Germans, Jews and Italians. He knew the contact areas between them and their cultural heritage most intimately. Just as he called one of his book of essays Dějiště: Bohemia, he also understood the Czech metropolis without narrowing national or linguistic boundaries.

He did not consider it a tragedy that in the new millennium it became cosmopolitan again, only Slavic. “Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks live here. This is also an opportunity. Things just happened and nothing can be done about them,” he shrugged in an interview with Týden magazine. But he himself already had a city associated with memories. And for example, when he was walking along Vodičková Street past the Boulevard bageterie branch, he told how he was forced to work in a German bookstore at this place during the protectorate and how many times he washed the shop window here from top to bottom.

“I know Prague and I don’t know it at the same time. Nothing that is in me reminds me of anything of me and everything that reminds me of the familiar I have brought with me – even the feeling in my fingertips when I tap the wood of the old white sideboard in the kitchen, whose drawers I opened when I was seven or eight years old and looked for nuts and raisins in them,” describes in the conclusion of Prague Black and Gold how in the post-revolutionary city “I mix with the living, but the dead rub between us”. Especially the mother. He never forgot the last time he saw her at the Jewish meeting place near the Fair Palace. We will not forget Peter Demetz.