Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above
its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture.
The city's most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature
and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don
Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the
forefront of the city's intellectual life, while later writers such as
Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled
Prague's fortunes under communism.
Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka
museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the
avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the "new wave"
film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city's
famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek
Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art
at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague
has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great
German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that "whoever
controls Prague, controls mid-Europe" and a succession of imperialist
powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious
reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident
Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990
made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe.
In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold
new buildings such as Frank Gehry's "Dancing House" rub shoulders with
monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge
and St. Vitus' Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to
world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers
and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to
Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a
growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly
confident and diverse city of the new Europe.
