Few historians, including specialists in the field of Bohemian history, are familiar with Karel Vladislav Zap and his works. Born in Prague in 1812, he studied at Prague University before beginning a mediocre career in the Habsburg civil service. Although raised in a German-speaking home, he began learning Czech while in gymnazium, eventually changing his last name from ‘Zapp’ to ‘Zap.’ He entered the small world of the Czech national elites while still in university and published the first of his many articles for Czech-language publications shortly therafter. He also had a keen scholarly interest in the city that he called home.Footnote 1 In 1835, he published A Description of the Royal City of Prague for Foreigners and Locals, the first topography of the city written in Czech.Footnote 2 In 1847, he published A Guide to Prague: A Necessary and Useful Book for Everyone Who Wants to Become Familiar with the Memorabilities of the Bohemian Capital City, which might be considered the first Czech-language guidebook to the city. His publisher then released an extract of the book and a second edition before the tumultuous spring days of 1848. A German translation appeared that same year as well.Footnote 3
While largely forgotten now, Zap was well known for his writings on Prague before the 1848 revolution, as book reviews and the multiple editions of his works make clear. Yet, this article is not an attempt to give a now forgotten author his due.Footnote 4 Instead, it explores how Zap, a member of an increasingly emboldened Czech national movement, sought to claim Prague for the Czechs and Czech national history before 1848. Zap's works point to a crucial moment when a younger generation of Czech nationalists, inspired by the 1830 revolutions, sought to change the world around them. No longer content with the academic and aesthetic achievements of their predecessors, they sought to build nationalist institutions, widen the nation community and promote loyalty among its members.Footnote 5 For his part, Zap's 1835 Description provided the city's Czech-speakers the first scholarly topography of the city published in their native language. His 1847 Guide went a step further. The history of the Czech nation, he proclaimed, was inscribed in Prague's buildings, bridges and squares. Every patriotic Czech had a duty to appreciate and protect the city's memory containers. Finally, he called on those same patriotic Czechs to walk the streets of their city, where they would, one building at a time, claim Prague for the nation. His nationalism, in short, combined a respect for scholarship with a call to action.
Zap's topographies also speak to a crucial moment of transition in Prague's history. Before 1848, Prague was, in many ways, a ‘German’ city where German was the language of the bureaucracy, most educational institutions and the majority of the city's elites. German-language topographies of the city catering to travellers from Germany predominated. By the 1830s, however, a rising class of Czech-speaking tradesmen, civil servants and intelligentsia began to challenge the German-language domination of the city. As Jiří Štaif persuasively argues, these rising Czech elites drew upon language usage and a common sense of history in their embrace of nationalism. They mimicked the social practices of their German-speaking peers, such as attending balls or strolling through gardens, while carving a separate niche for themselves within Prague society.Footnote 6 These same elites also formed a reading public for Zap and other members of the intelligentsia. Zap, however, was not content with beautiful, moving words about Prague that Czech elites had been accustomed to reading. He demanded that they possess a deep, scholarly understanding of the city. He urged his Czech-speaking readers to leave the garden and walk the city, their city. He claimed Prague as the Czechs’ national capital and, perhaps unwittingly, gave momentum to forces that would define Czech nationalism and the Czech–German rivalry as the century progressed.Footnote 7
Czech nationalism and the urban milieu
The Czech national movement first emerged in the late eighteenth century when early national ‘awakeners’, often supported by Bohemian nobles hoping to push back against Habsburg centralization, began to codify the Czech language in dictionaries and grammars. Led by philologist Josef Jungmann (1773–1847), theirs was primarily an intellectual endeavour to revive a neglected literary language and establish Czech as a language and culture of European import. Their endeavour came to embrace a number of overlapping identifications. The word ‘český’, both then and now, can translate as either ‘Czech’ or ‘Bohemian’. Loyalty to Bohemia as a territorial unit often mingled with loyalty to an imagined community of Czech-speakers that extended into Moravia and Silesia. Furthermore, nationalist-minded intelligentsia who engaged in patriotic activity often belonged to a community of like-minded intellectuals that stretched from Prague to Bratislava – a community with various and overlapping notions of Czech, Slovak and Czechoslovak identities.Footnote 8 Slovaks such as L'udovít Štúr, for example, often published in Kwĕty, which, until 1848, called itself a ‘national journal of amusements for Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, and Silesians’.Footnote 9 This same community often shared notions of pan-Slavism that embraced various forms of Austro-Slavism.Footnote 10
These multiple identifications would survive into the 1848 revolution, but the goals and composition of the Czech national movement would undergo radical changes in the 1830s. The Polish revolution, in particular, sparked ideas about pan-Slavism and inspired the patriotic intelligentsia to imagine a national renaissance that went beyond cultural production. Influenced by Guiseppe Mazzini as well as the German writers Moritz Hartmann and Alfred Meißner, they imagined a Europe of independent nations. They understood that nations had to be created through hard work and effort. And so this generation, led by ‘father of the nation’ František Palacký (1798–1876), set about to create Czech-loyal publishers, raise national awareness, broaden the national community and eliminate the dialects that hindered communication among their conationals. They formed organizations like Matice česká (Czech/Bohemian Foundation), which provided financial support for Časopis českého Museum (Journal of the Czech/Bohemian Museum), a prominent scientific and literary journal that Palacký transformed into a vehicle for Czech cultural production. F.L. Čelokovský, another member of the 1830 generation, took over the previously staid Pražské noviny (Prague News) in 1834 and later established the cultural journal České včela (Czech Bee).Footnote 11 Language and culture, no doubt, remained central to the national project. Schooled in the writings of German thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, they imbibed romantic nationalist ideas about the existence of primordial nations defined by common language and common history.Footnote 12 And yet the times, many argued after 1830, required more than a cultivation of language, culture and aesthetics.
Prague and the social context within which Czech nationalists worked also changed significantly after 1830. Since the time of Jungmann, Prague had attracted a critical mass of like-minded nationalists who supported each other through various patronage networks. By the 1830s, the city's position as hub for travel and communications allowed Prague to act as a territorial base for an energized national movement.Footnote 13 Palacký and those of his generation also benefited from a newly emergent public eager to support their work. The social transformations brought about by a growing state administration, increased trade and early industrialization created the conditions for a relatively concentrated base of Czech-speaking civil servants, teachers, tradesmen and other lower-middle-class members of the city's bürgerlicher Stand to carve out a place among the city's elite institutions and practices while building a sense of national community.Footnote 14 Like the members of the nobility, bankers, factory owners, literati and Prague's other urban elites, these lower-middle-class Czech-speakers lived public and private lives that mimicked the Biedermeier sociability of their German-speaking peers. Yet, they also sought to challenge the predominance of the German language within the city. Like most of the major cities in east-central Europe, early nineteenth-century Prague's lingua franca was German even if many people, including the lower classes, spoke German and Czech. German was the traditional language of Prague burghers, but also the common language of the Habsburg bureaucracy, the army and educational institutions.Footnote 15And so rising Czech elites formed clubs and organizations where the Czech language predominated. They attended Czech-language theatre performances. They read Czech-language newspapers in cafés. They joined reading circles, singing groups and hunting clubs.Footnote 16 The Měšt'anská beseda (Burghers’ Club), which mimicked the casinos first frequented by the nobility, featured a reading room with 400 journals in Czech, other Slavic languages, German and French. It organized public readings, concerts and balls in which Czech was the dominant language of use. They created music academies, such as the Žofiniská akademie (Sophie's Academy), which offered piano lessons to boys and girls and had its own ensemble of singers replete with orchestral accompaniment. They forced the democratization of clubs such as the Jednota ku povzbuzení průmyslu v Čechách (Union for Advancement of Industry in Bohemia), which had previously been dominated by members of the nobility, large factory owners and the wealthiest shop keepers.Footnote 17
Prague's post-1830 Czech elites, which included the intelligentsia, thus shared a common commitment to build a more active and wide-ranging national movement in the city. They also possessed a sense that the fate of the nation lay within their hands.
The sentiment of nationality, which was reawakened in the nations of mid-Europe after the wars of our time, woke up us Czechs, too, albeit as the last ones, and civic life began – at first among modest enough numbers of learned practitioners of sciences and arts and the clergy. Thence it was transferred into the heart and core of the nation – the middle class,
a statement read to the first semiannual meeting of the Burghers’ Club of April 1846 declared.Footnote 18 Prague's post-1830 elites were not, however, revolutionaries. Habsburg spies and censorship repressed more radical ideas. Czech elites still lived in a society in which patriarchalism ran deep, meaning that they remained dependent upon the upper echelons of society for their cultural and economic advancement. In general, they imagined a Czech national community developing within the Habsburg monarchy rather than an independent nation-state. Nor were they populists. Sophie's Academy and the Union for Advancement of Industry in Bohemia counted only 190 and 594 members, respectively, in the months before the 1848 revolution.Footnote 19 Between 1842 and 1848 the average number of subscribers to the Journal of the Czech/Bohemian Museum was only 1,843, of which 556 lived in Prague.Footnote 20 (The 1843 census counted 111,706 inhabitants of Prague; tens of thousands more inhabited newly built suburbs outside the city walls.)Footnote 21 Outsiders commented that Czech elites inhabited a secret society with its own words, rituals and Czechified names.Footnote 22 They were urban elites who inhabited a world quite distant from their fellow Czech-speakers who lived beyond the city's walls. They were Czech-speaking elites who simultaneously mimicked and distanced themselves from their German-speaking counterparts.
The rise of Karel Vladislav Zap
Zap had carved out a peculiar niche among these Czech elites. He worked as an accountant for the tobacco and tax revenue office within the Habsburg bureaucracy shortly after leaving university. While we know little about his social life, published records show that Zap became the 410th dues-paying member of the Czech/Bohemian Foundation in 1841.Footnote 23 Five years later he became a contributing member of the Bohemian Museum.Footnote 24 He published the first of his many articles for Czech-language publications in 1832 and in 1835 the well-known critic Josef Krasoslav Chmelenský reviewed Zap's first topography in the Journal of the Czech/Bohemian Museum.Footnote 25 In 1836, he published two massive volumes on world geography for the Czech/Bohemian Foundation.Footnote 26 That same year, much to the surprise of his compatriots in Prague, Zap accepted an administrative position in far-flung Galicia, where he would spend the next eight years. While in Galicia, he met leading Polish and Russian writers, and in 1842 he hosted the well-known Czech satirist Karel Havlíček Borovský for several days as the latter waited, rather impatiently, for a passport from the Russian authorities.Footnote 27 Zap maintained correspondence with leading Czech patriots in Prague, including Václav Vladivoj Tomek, a historian who in 1845 published a well-respected Czech-language history of the city.Footnote 28 Zap reviewed books, translated works from Polish to Czech and offered Czech readers in Prague a unique perspective on Polish literature.Footnote 29 From 1839 to 1842, Zap journeyed across Galicia, chronicling his experiences in Lviv and the poorer, eastern reaches of the region, eventually ending in Zabolotiv, where he had met his future wife, Honorata z Wisniowskich, in 1838. His reports on Polish and Ruthenian life filtered back to Prague and were eventually published in a three-volume work. Zap found an eager audience among Czech elites in Prague, only a tiny fraction of whom had travelled to Galicia. His often critical judgments of the Polish nobility sparked controversy surrounding the main tenets of pan-Slavism – a controversy that assured him a noted place among Prague's literary elites.Footnote 30 In 1845, Zap returned to Prague with Honorata and founded Pautník (The Traveller/Pilgrim), an almanac whose stated purpose was to familiarize the reader ‘with all sorts of lands, nations, cities, with their memorabilities, how one discovers in these lands and cities, and with [descriptions] of national and community life, and their lessons for [those here at] home and beyond our borders’.Footnote 31 At the same time, he continued work on a new topography of Prague that would solidify his position as a writer of note among the Czech-language community.
A very German genre
Zap may have carved out a peculiar niche for himself within the Czech literary community, but his topographies emerged from a genre dominated by German-speakers. A cluster of modern, German-language topographies of Prague first appeared in the late eighteenth century, the most influential being Jaroslav Schaller's Beschreibung der königlichen Haupt und Residenzstadt Prag, which established for local authors many of the organizational and stylistic conventions of the genre.Footnote 32 Schaller's introductory chapters offered the reader an outline of the city's history, topographical features, local organizations and statistical information about the city and its inhabitants drawn from the imperial census.Footnote 33 The bulk of the book, however, concerned itself with Prague's ‘most noteworthy’ structures, which he organized according to their location within one of the city's four gentile districts and then according to type (churches, squares, houses of note and so on). Schaller's four-volume tome was, first and foremost, a work of scholarship that drew upon primary sources to trace out the origins and history of each structure. Its intended audience was the local nobility, who, in the late eighteenth century, had begun to embrace Bohemian history as part of an effort to push back Habsburg efforts at centralization.Footnote 34
The genre underwent numerous modifications after 1812. Prague became an increasing popular destination for travellers from Germany, most of whom arrived from Dresden or the spas of Karlsbad.Footnote 35 Independent members of the middle classes preferred to explore the city without the aid of hired guides, instead moving independently with a book and map in hand. As with travel literature more generally, self-reflection now combined with the duty to observe and catalogue.Footnote 36 Thus, there emerged in Prague a market for the type of hand-held topography that had been available to Grand Tourists in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 37 Once again, it was Schaller who provided a model for others to follow. In 1820, a local publisher released a shortened version of Schaller's topography intended, as the subtitle indicated, ‘for travellers, as well as anyone who would like to become acquainted with [Prague's] peculiarities’.Footnote 38 The preface began with general praise for the city before describing what might strike the foreigner upon first entering the city: the constant motion of carriages and people; the mixing of different classes; the labyrinthine streets of the Old Town; the multitude of churches and spires. He then walked the reader to Petřin Hill, which provided an opportunity to describe a panoramic view of the city and its immediate surroundings.Footnote 39 An additional chapter offered information on postal carriages as well as first-class inns and tips for finding hot and cold drinks.Footnote 40 Other chapters listed educational establishments, libraries, learned societies and other organizations that might have appealed to the traveller. Yet another suggested walks beyond the city's walls. The topographical descriptions of Prague's structures and spaces had been reduced to 151 pages. The book concluded with excerpts from travellers’ descriptions of the city. Decades later, local topographers, inspired by Karl Baedecker's and John Murrays respective guidebooks, appended suggested walks that guided readers to the city's ‘most important’ sites.Footnote 41 Nearly all of these early nineteenth-century guidebooks included a map and several lithographs depicting some of the city's notable structures. Yet, topographies remained distinct from guidebooks proper in that the former contained much more detailed information about Prague's structures and spaces. Erudition and scholarship, while giving partial way to the needs of the traveller, remained paramount. ‘A “Guide to Prague” is what I should have written’, Zap commented in the opening lines to his 1847 publication, ‘yet instead there arose a more extensive description of our Prague – and no wonder; so much material, so much important, wonderful, and interesting material offers itself that it simply was not possible to remain within the limits of a dry guidebook.’Footnote 42
Like his German-speaking counterparts, Zap owed a great debt to Schaller.Footnote 43 Not only does Zap often repeat basic information about sites found in Schaller's book, he copied Schaller's organization and, at times, mimicked whole ideas and phrases first published by Schaller and his successors. Yet, there was one crucial difference: Zap's books were written in Czech and were intended for a Czech-speaking audience. ‘I have long been aware that Germans still have a better knowledge of the precious things and monuments that Prague cradles . . . than the Czechs/Bohemians (Čechové) themselves do’, Zap sadly noted in the introduction to his 1835 Description. German-language publications about Prague, its history and its structures – ‘some good and some bad’ – predominated, he wrote.Footnote 44 The situation did not improve in the coming years. In his 1836 description of Bohemia and the north-eastern most regions of the Habsburg empire, Adolf Schmidl listed four German-language topographies of Prague, three lithograph collections and two maps available for purchase in the city.Footnote 45 In 1838, Franz Klutschak, a well-respected Prague editor, published a German-language topography that enjoyed 13 editions through 1878.Footnote 46 By the 1840s, Murray and Baedeker included long descriptions of Prague in their guidebooks through what many considered to be German central Europe.Footnote 47 In 1847, Zap's publisher, Bedřich Křečmár, advertised five lithographs with Czech-language titles, yet Zap remained the sole author of a Czech-language topography to Prague.Footnote 48
National past, nationalist cityscapes
Zap, however, was appealing to a different, and smaller, reading public than his German-speaking counterparts. It is difficult to say with much certainty just how many Slavic-speaking Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks and other Europeans visited Prague in the decades before 1848, but they were no doubt far outnumbered by travellers arriving from Germany. Zap, of course, included a great deal of information for the traveller, but his main audience appeared to be local Czech-speaking elites with an interest in their city. In the 1830s and 1840s, Czech playwrights, poets and other fictional writers had begun to make Prague an object of sentimental praise. Prague, like the Czech nation itself, was described in various female forms – maiden, mother, widow of a king. Authors endowed spaces with historic meanings meant to recall a peculiarly Czech past. The city became a collection of signs, rather than a living, organic entity with urban characteristics. Together, these signs, Vladimír Macura writes, formed a ‘layer’ of meanings in which the reader is meant to perceive ‘the present only to the extent to which it is a reflection of the past’.Footnote 49 These descriptions were meant to recall a ‘past glory’ tinted with nostalgia typical of the Romantic era, but they had a present purpose. Czech-language literati now attempted to make Prague a Czech space, a sanctum and mecca for current and future national loyalists.Footnote 50
Zap embraced these writers’ goal of claiming Prague for the Czechs and endowing its structures with national memories, yet, as he suggested in his 1835 topography of Prague, this was a sentimental praise with little scholarly knowledge standing behind it. ‘Hardly any Czech/Bohemian’, he wrote, ‘could divert his glance from the glorious views the city provides or behold the monuments that the thousand-year old city has to offer.’ Moravians and Slovaks, too, ‘carry a little bit of Prague in their hearts’, he continued. Yet these same Czechs, Moravians and Slovaks, he argued, lacked the proper knowledge of the city, its structures, and their histories needed truly to appreciate the city.Footnote 51 Thus, following Schaller's lead, his 1835 work included chapters on the history of the city, its climate, geographic features, political and civic institutions and information about the city's population culled from the latest Habsburg census. The bulk of the book, however, drew from primary sources and previous topographies of Prague to describe the origins and history of the city's structures and spaces. In 1847, Zap rewrote these chapters and the history of Prague and its urban development. Perhaps most significantly, Zap's appeal to learn about the city had, by 1847, become a call to action. Prague is ‘our Rome’, he wrote in the preface to his 1847 Guide, ‘where our history has been concentrated and monuments [to that history] have been built’. Prague's urban structures, he continued, served as ‘immediate witnesses, the surest proof’ of the Czech past. ‘Every good Czech who feels the nation in his heart should reverently cherish these monuments, and every [Czech] should enthusiastically accept the obligation that enjoins us to protect them and to care for their preservation.’Footnote 52 Like his contemporaries, Zap was interested in much more than artistic and literary achievement. He demanded that Czech-speakers claim their city and remember its history through its structures.
Zap's works, and especially his 1847 topography, thus offered a scholarly, and at times cumbersome, nationalist perspective on ‘our beautiful, long celebrated, and one-hundred spired city’.Footnote 53 His long history described a city alternating between its purely Slavic essence and a cosmopolitanism created by an influx of outsiders, and especially Germans and Jews, to the city. ‘Prague belongs among the oldest, most noteworthy, and most important cities of modern Europe’, his history section begins, ‘and the origins of this venerable head of this most celebrated and at times powerful Slavic Kingdom of Bohemia stretches back to the oldest era in the history of our nation.’Footnote 54 Slavs established their first settlements around the Vyšehrad fortifications just outside Zap's present-day city before establishing settlements that would eventually become three relatively independent polities within the city. High up on the eastern side of the Vltava stood Hradčany, or the castle district, home to the Bohemian kings. Just below Hradčany stood the Lesser Town, which became dominated by the Bohemian nobility. Across the river, craftsmen, traders and others of lesser status inhabited the Old Town, the centre of Prague's economic activities. With the passing of time, however, the city was subjected to numerous waves of German influence. ‘The first enemies that Prague saw before its gates’, Zap writes, ‘were the Germans’, even though he lists as one of these enemies the first king of Poland, Boleslav Chrobry, who attacked the city in 1003.Footnote 55 Over the next few centuries, contact with the cities of the Holy Roman Empire increased. Soon thereafter ‘the first German settlement in the heart of the Bohemian/Czech lands’ appeared on the eastern edges of the Old Town.Footnote 56 Successive waves of immigration brought more German burghers and Jewish traders, as well as ‘wayward knights, most often German’, to the prospering city.Footnote 57 Even the glorious era of Charles IV (1347–78), when Prague was the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and many of the city's most celebrated landmarks, such as Charles Bridge, appeared on the landscape, diminished the national essence of the city. Prague, ‘wedged within Germandom’ and ‘cut off from its Slavic brothers’, took on a ‘cosmopolitan character’ that, if the trend had continued, would have completely subsumed the city's Slavic elements.Footnote 58
In the short term, the trend did not continue, however. In 1409, Czech efforts to establish control over the university founded by Charles IV led to a mass exodus of students and professors from Germany. Social tensions mapped onto national differences, which exploded into the open during the Hussite Wars (1419–34). Even more Germans fled the city so that Prague became what it had originally been – ‘the capital of the Slavic peoples of Bohemia’.Footnote 59 Cosmopolitanism, however, returned during the era of Rudolf II and, especially, after the Thirty Years War, when the Habsburgs replaced disloyal Bohemian nobles with foreigners.Footnote 60 Even the Bohemian nobles who managed to remain had, by the third generation, become entirely disconnected from the native peoples. Shortly after Joseph II's Germanization of the administration and educational institutions, Prague's ‘street corners and nooks swarmed with German civil servants, professionals, and speculators’ who, until recently, had only spoken Czech.Footnote 61 Only now, with the creation of clubs, the Bohemian Museum and Czech cultural achievements have Prague's Slavic elements begun to emerge again, he concluded.Footnote 62
The chapters that follow detailed how this peculiar national history was embedded in Prague's physical landscape. The most prominent example was Zap's 27-page description of St Vitus cathedral, a striking Gothic cathedral atop a hill overlooking the city that was founded in 1344 after Prague received an archbishopric. Although still incomplete in Zap's time, St Vitus stood as one as one of the grandest ‘historical, national, and religious monuments in the Bohemian kingdom’.Footnote 63 It was on this spot that St Václav, patron saint of Bohemia and newly minted national hero, established a church in 925. The gothic cathedral became his final resting place. It was here, in St Vitus, that the Bohemian nobility elected Ferdinand the Holy Roman Emperor their king in 1526, the initial moment when Bohemia came under Habsburg rule. St Vitus served as a final resting place for a long line of Bohemian kings, not all of whom would have been claimed as Czechs. Yet, the space exuded Czech history, a past Czech glory, Zap wrote. The cathedral, he continued, cannot help but evoke memories of St Václav and the old Czech battle cry: ‘Saint Václav, duke of the Bohemian/Czech lands, pray for us!’Footnote 64 Outside the cathedral doors, Zap warned that only those with a ‘heightened sense of religiosity and national feeling’ should enter.Footnote 65 Inside, we learn that in St Václav's chapel the archbishop of Prague sings the oldest known Czech-language choral, ‘Hospodine pomiluj ny’, during Sunday afternoon vespers.Footnote 66
This type of nationalism, it should be noted, stood in stark contrast to the perspective adopted by Zap's German-language counterparts. Schaller's eighteenth-century work, dedicated as it was to the Bohemian nobility, identified Prague first and foremost as the capital of Bohemia, and, as such, sought to promote a peculiar form of territorial patriotism. Loyalty to Bohemia, and to the city of Prague, remained a central aspect of German-language topographies throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. After the Napoleonic Wars many authors, including Schaller, began to imagine Prague within the lands of Germany, perhaps not surprisingly given Bohemia's history within the Holy Roman Empire. For travellers from Germany, comparisons with other German cities proved irresistible. Prague, one traveller in Julius Max Schottky's topography remarks, ‘is the most beautiful capital city that I have seen in Germany . . . If Vienna displays the limits of splendid affluence and magnificence, Berlin has the feel of a new royalty, Nuremberg, Cologne, etc. the old luster, then Prague is regal through a combination of antiquity and nature and here none can compare.’Footnote 67 Yet none of these authors claimed Prague as a German city. Theirs was a geographical distinction, not a national one. Schaller approvingly quoted one traveller's remarks that the peculiar mixture of Slavic and German natures found in Prague had created a city known for free-thinking and persistence.Footnote 68 Klutschak praised the recent flowering of Czech literature which, he proclaimed, had produced works equal to the best of European literature.Footnote 69
Similarly, it is important not to overstate the centrality of nationalism – and Czech claims to the city – in Zap's Guide. The Bohemian Museum, then located in house number 858 on na Příkopě, receives a four-page description, more than any other site in the New Town.Footnote 70 Yet, the entry is little more than an inventory of the Museum's holdings. Some entries emphasize religiosity and respect for the Catholic church. Other entries evoke a sense of loyalty to Bohemia and its history. Still more entries suggest a civic loyalty. Arriving at Horse Market Square in the New Town, now Václav Square, Zap's readers are meant to picture ‘one of the most beautiful and largest open spaces in any large city on the continent of Europe’. Zap provides the square's measurements and describes the layout of the square. The baroque statue of St Václav that stood atop the square is mentioned only in passing.Footnote 71 Futhermore, Zap apparently allowed for a German-language translation of his Guide that softened his anti-German statements and reworked references to Czech nationalism. The translation excluded Zap's original preface in which he declared Prague to be the Czechs’ Rome and demanded that Czechs remember and protect the structural reminders of the nation's history.Footnote 72
Zap, in other words, had other loyalties – regional, civic and religious. He was not above seeing his prose modified for a German audience. Yet, nationalist purpose runs through both books. Prague, in Zap's mind, was a Slavic city that embedded the nation's history in its structures. As a member of the generation of 1830, he took an active role not just in publishing original works in Czech, for a Czech audience, but also in urging his compatriots to think about their capital city as a national capital. He implored them to remember a past that was embedded in the city's structures. He demanded that they care for these structures which contained within them the memories of the nation's history. ‘If today's Prague did not exist’, he wrote, ‘we would not have the most important witness to the Czech/Bohemian past’ and be left with only books, full of doubt, and groping for a proper sense of the nation's history.Footnote 73 Yet, there was one more aspect of Zap's 1847 Guide that distinguished it from its German-language contemporaries: an emphasis on walking. Patriotic Czechs were not just supposed to know ‘their’ city. Zap sought to divert them from gardens and forest paths back to the city where, step by step, they would learn about and claim the city as their own.
Walking through Prague with Karel Vladislav Zap
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars walking, promenading and ambling remained a pursuit restricted to Prague's nobility. In 1820, Schaller bemoaned the fact that so few Praguers ventured to Petřin Hill to enjoy the view of the city. The city had few gardens open to the public. Footpaths leading from the city had been overgrown. Only those with access to carriages visited gardens and sites of note beyond the city walls.Footnote 74 In the coming decades, however, Prague's rising elites would take up the practice of strolling and ambling. As throughout Europe, the middle-class Spaziergänger sought to establish his or her status by walking like the nobility. They participated in the continental fad of constructing English gardens. They sought to escape an increasingly dirty and polluted city. They celebrated fresh air. Unlike peasants, urbanites living enclosed within city walls imagined the natural world, whether a garden or path through the woods, as an escape. They sought inspiration from Rousseau and saw the escape to nature as a journey of self-discovery and self-fulfilment.Footnote 75
‘Strolling has become quite popular in recent times’, Schmidl noted upon arriving to Prague in 1835.Footnote 76 And thus opportunities for Prague's elites to enjoy a stroll multiplied. In the early 1820s, Bohemia's highest government official, Count Karl Chotek, opened a section of the city's wall to promenaders. By 1842, Praguers could stroll along almost the entire perimeter of the city's walls, which had become a garden path of sorts lined with trees and other plants.Footnote 77 Just below St Vitus and the castle, on the north end of the city, Chotek transformed, in 1833, a storage area for lumber into the city's first public park, named ‘The People's Garden’. Soon thereafter, the imperial gardens in Hradčany opened to the public. Count Waldstein-Wartenberg allowed Praguers to enter his garden in the Lesser Quarter on Thursdays and Saturdays.Footnote 78 In the 1830s, the educated classes also began to descend upon Dyer's Island, named after the leather dyer who owned the island, which later was renamed ‘Žofin’ after Archduchess Sophie. Numerous paths meandered through the poplar-lined island, which was accessed by crossing a small wooden bridge from the New Town. Visitors could partake in warm or cold baths, listen to occasional outdoor concerts, or play billiards in the saloon. Vendors offered pony rides for children. Shooter's Island, just down the river, was more wooded yet had a reputable dance hall.Footnote 79 Just outside the city's walls, the Tree Garden's grandiose English gardens and hunting fortress had become, in the words of Murray's Handbook, the Prater of Prague.Footnote 80 Other urban elites ventured further afield to gardens and green spaces such as Troja, Hvězda and Divoká Šárka to go for a stroll.Footnote 81
Zap acknowledged that promenading was an important pastime for Prague's elites, including the Czech-speaking elites, and thus dedicated 15 pages in 1835 and 19 pages in 1847 to recommending places to take a stroll. Yet, Zap's interests remained focused on the city and its monuments. Walks along the city walls and in the People's Garden, he wrote in 1835, are no doubt pleasurable in themselves, but the crucial point here was that ‘the whole city . . . serves itself up’.Footnote 82 In his 1847 work, he took particular care to celebrate streets and the urban experience of pedestrianism. Prague, he boasted, counted 210 streets, 32 alleyways and 60 squares.Footnote 83 The city magistrate had recently added marble cobblestones to the streets and marble plates as sidewalks, replete with run-off canals. This was a marked improvement over the hard and angular cobblestones that proved especially tiring for the pedestrian. (The marble sidewalks’ only disadvantage, Zap noted, was that they became especially slippery after rain.) City hall had signed a contract with a private firm to construct even more marble sidewalks and streets in the city. Sadly, Zap noted, much of the city remained in darkness at night, yet that, too, was improving. Gas lamps had been introduced to pockets of the city in the 1830s, and city hall had recently signed a contract with another private firm, this time from Breslau, that would introduce gas lighting to the city. A factory in Karlín was busy making cast iron lamps which were being installed along the main streets of Old Town and the New Town. ‘In the near future’, Zap wrote enthusiastically, ‘this new enlightenment will become part of life [in the city]’ and soon thereafter the whole city will be illuminated.Footnote 84
Indeed, walking formed a crucial leitmotif running through Zap's 1847 Guide. An appendix provided additional one- two- and three-day walks past the city's most notable sites.Footnote 85 The reader following one of these walks, Zap wrote, was meant to carry Zap's Guide with him, turning to the index when a site appealed to his interest in history, art or the sciences.Footnote 86 Each of his voluminous chapters on Prague's structures was organized around walks through each of the city's districts as well. Thus, and in contrast to his German-language predecessors, Zap sorted his structures not according to type, or alphabetically, but how one might see them on foot. As a result, the reader, whether on the street or at home, imagined sites as points linked by series of lines running through the city, not as abstract, atomized structures stripped from the cityscape around them. Zap's reader, whether following a walk through a district or across town, was supposed to imagine stopping in front of a building of note, consider its history and significance, and then, following detailed directions found in the guide, amble to the next site. In addition, Zap wrote, each district offered a variety of sensual experiences for the pedestrian. Few cities, Zap wrote, could offer the contrast of ‘ambling [in the Old Town] through dark, crooked, and narrow streets full of shops, life, and hub-bub, a place where two carriages could not pass by each other and suddenly step before the wide, open spaces [of the New Town], where the eye contentedly takes in wide, straight, and beautiful houses that decorate the streets’. In Hradčany, the ‘widowed seat of the Bohemian crown’, every step on the streets echoed through the empty, forlorn district. The industrial suburb of Karlín, teeming with new building and settlements, felt disordered.Footnote 87
Zap's reader, in short, was meant to experience the city by putting one foot in front of the other. For the Czech elites, as for so many others, walking was meant to be full of cultural and political meaning.Footnote 88 In many ways, Zap was urging his readers to take part in a European – and particularly English – moment in the history of urban experiences. Like early nineteenth-century Londoners, he praised the act of walking the city streets, taking pleasure in Prague's newly paved streets and sensual experiences.Footnote 89 Yet, Zap did not envision their reader as a flâneur who saw the city as theatre, or, as Charles Baudelaire famously wrote, a ‘passionate spectator’ keen to observe the ‘fugitive, fleeting beauty of present-day life’.Footnote 90 The bulk of his book consists of what Hayden Lorimer has called a ‘walk as a product of places’, or ‘a cultural activity that is made distinctive and meaningful by the physical features and material textures of a place’.Footnote 91 With Zap's book in hand, Czech elites and others could further the national cause – and participate in the national community – by walking through a city endowed with powerful new meanings. Just as others had codified the language and established a common narrative for the nation, Zap was codifying Prague's memory landscape – a memory landscape that his readers were meant to confirm, over and over again, as they wandered through the city. Zap claimed Prague, both in its entirety and its individual parts for the Czech nation. But he also expected his readers to follows his paths through the city, his guide in hand.
Prague becomes zech
On 15 March 1848 – perhaps just weeks after the second edition of Zap's Guide appeared in print – the afternoon train from Vienna brought startling news to Prague. Klemens von Metternich, Austrian chancellor and despised symbol of Habsburg conservatism, had fled the imperial capital. Viennese authorities had ended censorship and called for the formation of a constitutional government. Upon hearing the news, jubilant crowds took to the streets in Prague, drinking champagne and participating in nighttime processions. Various political organizations emerged. Most Czech elites, including Palacký, kept a careful distance from their more radical counterparts among the students and working classes, however.Footnote 92 In the summer, Zap became a member of the preparatory committee of the Slavic Congress, which was intended to be a public display of Slavic unity against liberal German efforts to include Bohemia within a unified Germany and to lay the groundwork for future political participation within the Habsburg monarchy. The Congress convened on 2 June in a building located amidst the poplar trees on Žofin Island.Footnote 93 Ten days later, fighting broke out between Prague's radical student groups and Habsburg soldiers commanded by arch-conservative Field Marshall Windisch-Grätz. After six days of street fighting, Windisch-Grätz ordered his artillery battalion, now perched atop Petřin Hill, to bombard the city. The city capitulated soon thereafter. Hordes of people – 20,000 by one estimate – fled Prague. Back in the city, Windisch-Grätz established a police state, and at one point he accused members of the Slavic Congress of participating in an East European-wide conspiracy against the forces of order.Footnote 94 The following year, Prague and the Habsburg monarchy entered a new period of political repression and neo-absolutism.
Zap apparently was spared Windisch-Grätz's witch-hunt and, for the next few years, kept a relatively low profile. Near the end of 1849, the Journal of the Czech/Bohemian Museum published an anonymous review of Zap's Guide. During the tumultuous days of 1848, he or she wrote, quickly produced newspapers, filled with the immediate concerns of the day, had predominated. Thoughtful works of scholarship, such as Zap's Guide, had thus failed to gain the readership that they deserved. Moreover, the reviewer continued, Zap's Guide, ‘so interesting, so handy’, should be in the hands of every young Czech who travelled to the city seeking national inspiration and a proper understanding of the city and its many monuments to the past.Footnote 95 Yet, Zap's Guide was never reissued. Instead, he published, in 1850, a shortened German-language translation of his Guide that remained stripped of any overt nationalism.Footnote 96 Zap, however, eventually returned to writing Czech-language topographies and histories. At the request of the Czech/Bohemian Foundation, he completed, in 1851, a Czech-language historical guide to significant places in Bohemia and Moravia for secondary schoolchildren.Footnote 97 Eight years later, and after Austria's first halting steps toward liberalism, he helped found a society dedicated to renovating St Vitus cathedral. In the following decades, he continued to write about Prague's monuments while completing well-regarded works of popular history and archaeology.Footnote 98 Zap can justifiably be called one of the fathers of Czech historical geography.Footnote 99 Later topographers of Prague clearly followed in Zap's footsteps.Footnote 100
There is no direct evidence, of course, that Zap's urgings to walk the city were ever heeded. Nor can one confidently claim that Zap's calls to preserve and protect Prague's memory containers had significant influence. Renovations to St Vitus cathedral would not gain momentum until the inter-war period, for example.Footnote 101 His calls for Czechs to claim Prague and its structures for the nation, however, resonated among a new generation of wealthier and more numerous middle-class Czech elites who, in the last quarter of the century, built their own monuments to the national past. On St Václav's Square they constructed a neoclassical palace replete with a massive pantheon of major figures from Czech/Bohemian history that housed an expanded National Museum. Soon thereafter a new statue of St Václav by the Czech nationalist sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek appeared on the square. Over the course of the nineteenth century, patriotic Czechs raised funds to dot Prague with numerous structures – the Municipal House, the National Theatre, the Czech Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Land Bank – that suggested a glorious national past and confident future. They used other means to claim the city as well. Their representatives in municipal government renamed street names after leading Czech historical figures and events, and in 1892, the city's aldermen removed the German-language names from the city's street signs. At times of heightened nationalist tensions, Czechs and Germans took to the streets, where they participated in symbolic battles over contested sections of the city.Footnote 102 Meanwhile, Czech-speaking tourists and travellers from the countryside surged to Prague, newly minted guidebooks for a mass audience in hand.Footnote 103 As throughout Europe, tourists and the tourist industry co-operated to further nationalist aims through travel.Footnote 104 There was, of course, considerable push-back from Prague's German national minority. At the turn of the century, preservationist organizations, appalled by city hall's Hausmannization plans for the Jewish Town and much of the Old Town, organized to protect the city's historical monuments.Footnote 105 Czechs battled among themselves about the choice and meaning of Prague's national markers.Footnote 106 But there was little doubt that Prague had become a ‘Czech’ city long before patriots announced the creation of Czechoslovakia on St Václav's Square in 1918.
Perhaps most important, however, is what Zap and his topographies can tell us about Prague before 1848. An increasing number of travellers from Germany visiting the city encouraged the development and production of German-language topographies of the city. Praguers, including members of the Czech elite, had also begun to stroll along paths laid out in public parks, islands and the city walls. They escaped the city and walked amidst natural surroundings, mimicking other urban elites who themselves had been mimicking a practice once restricted to the nobility. Czech elites had also begun to show an interest in ‘their’ city. Zap took these developments as a starting point for a call to action, a stance that speaks to the boldness of the 1830 generation and its commitment to realigning power relationships and changing society itself. In 1835, Zap called on his fellow Czechs, as well as Moravians, Slovaks and other Slavs, to learn about Prague – a city that, he claimed, was better known by German travellers than Bohemian natives. In 1847, he repeated the same call, now adding that it was every Czech's national duty to protect and appreciate physical markers of the past. He urged his readers to put one foot in front of the other and walk the city with a newfound knowledge about the city and its past. Prague, he wrote, had wavered between cosmopolitanism and its true Slavic essence ever since the first Germans settled in the city centuries ago. A flowering of Czech culture and the increased use of the Czech language boded well for a return to those Slavic roots. But to make the city Czech again, he suggested, his reader had to walk, book in hand and eyes focused on structures endowed with memories of the nation's past.
