Prague, Derek Sayer tells us in this sweeping book, deserves to be called the capital of the twentieth century because “this is a place in which modernist dreams have time and again unraveled,” thus exposing “grand narratives of progress for the fairy tales that they are” (10). This same suspicion of grand narratives has, one can assume, led Sayer to eschew traditional modes of interpretation and argument for a method that strings together a number of loosely connected “petites narratives” and “details that derail” (7). Inspired by Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, Sayer sets out to “rummage amid the rags and refuse of yesterday's modernity in the hopes of uncovering the dream worlds that continue to haunt what we fondly believe to be today's waking state” (7). Such revelations will not come easy, however: “Whether in the writing of history or the visual arts, such a twist of perspective does not produce an immediately legible surface. There is work for the reader to do” (7). Typically, such work is done by the author, but this is not a typical book. Instead, Prague is a compilation of loosely connected images, stories, and personality sketches that evoke, rather than explain, a sense of absurdity and disjuncture expressed by cultural elites in this small Central European capital.
Much of the book is about Prague's interwar modernist movements and, perhaps most intriguingly, their multiple connections with their French counterparts. The surrealists, of course, receive much attention. André Breton arrives in Prague in the first chapter and is eulogized in the final chapter. In chapter seven, the Czech surrealists decide not to sign the French surrealists’ anti-Soviet manifesto, and in chapter eight, a new wave of French surrealists visit their Czech counterparts during the Prague Spring. Numerous love affairs, friendships, inspirations, anecdotes, and disagreements surface throughout the rest of text. Sayer's erudition is nothing short of remarkable. This same erudition, however, leaves many questions unanswered and a sense of opportunity lost. There is no sustained effort, for example, to show why and how “Prague's surrealism has generally been both less mystical and less romantic than its French counterpart” (10). Sayer justifiably criticizes the Museum of Modern Art's 1930 exhibition catalogue The International Style for only including four Czechoslovak buildings, yet we get little sense of why Prague's modernist architectural achievements deserved more pages. Nor is there a detailed discussion of Czech modernist architecture's larger, European significance.
The International Style catalogue and its 1965 reprint also take it in the chin for celebrating a progressive, unified sense of modernity. “Modernity is and always has been more twisted than that,” Sayer tells us, “a chiaroscuro etched in infinite shades of gray, shot through with bolts of darkness as well as light” (155). A description of the Trade Fair Palace's exhibitions found in the Michelin Green Guide to Prague receives a similar criticism, after which the reader is advised to explore the surrounding neighborhood of Holešovice: “For there are other sights to be seen … that might lead us to question this over easy equation of modernity with progress” (420). Numerous allusions and the book's roughly chronological organization suggest that the horrors of Nazi occupation and Communist rule prove this point, but again we are left grasping for more. Shall we locate the place where Czechoslovak parachutists assassinated Reinhard Heydrich? Then what? Here, as elsewhere, clever statements substitute for analysis. What do we gain from learning that secret police attended the funerals of Jaroslav Seifert and Karel Havliček, or that the Havel family built a Secessionist house next to the lot that eventually became the home to Dancing House, one of Prague's most celebrated post-Communist architectural wonders?
Thoughtful, deliberate analysis, as Benjamin knew well, can produce lasting insights that challenge our understanding the past and present. Crafting a coherent argument does not mean having to accept grand narratives. Prague does manage, however, to evoke a sense of a city that Sayer describes as “an object lesson in humour noir” (10). In this respect, Sayer seems to have taken his greatest inspiration not from Benjamin but from Angelo Ripellino, the Italian exile forced to leave Prague following the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968. There are, of course, differences. Ripellino's masterful Magic Prague clung to the hope that something mystical and eternal would survive the blandness of normalization. Sayer's Prague speaks to a twenty-first-century “appreciation of irony and absurdity, an enduring suspicion of sense-making grand theories and totalizing ideologies, and a Rabelaisian relish for the capacity of the erotic to rudely puncture all social and intellectual pretensions toward rationality” (10–11). Sayer's inspiration comes from interwar surrealists, not late-nineteenth-century decadents. Both authors, however, marvel at their beloved city and its characters—a testament to Prague's ability to spark the imagination, especially among us outsiders. In both books, traditional scholarly methods give way to stark imagery and playful language that create a palpable sense of place. The question, then, is whether the sacrifice is worth the gain.
