I’d like to tell you some grand story about why I moved to Prague in 1991, but the truth is I was a runaway, slipping off the map just when I was supposed to be distinguishing myself from hundreds of other smart young journalists in Washington, D.C.
Prague was a giddy adolescent then, a place where the playwright president Václav Havel was rumored to ride a tricycle through the Castle. Just two years earlier, he had stood on a balcony of the Melantrich building, in Wenceslas Square, leading the people as they toppled Communism simply by shaking their house keys—and the building’s squat, beige face was a daily reminder that the utterly impossible had become possible. But four decades of Soviet rule had left the city of a hundred spires—Golden Prague—a black-and-white photo of coal-silted domes and near-empty stores with signs that said “Vegetables” and “Meat.” Prague and its soul were bare then, stripped to their essence, and I wanted to be, too. I landed a fellowship to disguise my wandering, and stayed four years.
I returned last fall for the same reason you have lunch with your first love, out of curiosity and nostalgia. Neither of us was stripped anymore: I had demanding deadlines, a mortgage, a husband; Prague had just joined the European Union—and had erupted into Technicolor.
A kaleidoscope of BMWs swirled outside my hotel, and a torrent of tour guides—headset microphones on full—swept me to Old Town Square, where red and green café umbrellas bloomed like mushrooms under the 15th-century astrological clock. The warm almond vanilla scent of fresh oplatky (wafers) carried me up Celetná Street to Na Prˇíkopeˇ—now among the world’s top 20 shopping boulevards—where a hulking steel and glass retail complex twisted like Oz up from the ancient cobblestones. I picked out the Czechs—dressed now in fleece and olive suede like the other Europeans—only by the short, hard consonants they fed into their cellphones. Cellphones! Prague had leapfrogged into the 21st century, skipping several steps entirely, and my head tingled with the city’s infectious buzz.
The human river carried me to Wenceslas Square, and I saw the Melantrich building. Above its iconic balcony blazed a neon-green emblem of Prague’s brave new world that read “Marks & Spencer.”
Whoa! It was like waking up and finding all your furniture rearranged. I suddenly remembered the other reminder that justice always prevails—photos of Havel, paired with others of Tomásˇ Masaryk, creator of the independent, prewar Czechoslovakia, a place of cafés and concerts, architecture and industry, one of Europe’s richest nations. Czechs had hung these images in their shops and restaurants the way Irish-Americans hang photos of JFK. I ducked into doorways to look for them. Where had they gone?
A few days later, I put the question to my old friend Jaroslav Veis. Jarda had been a reporter at a formerly dissident newspaper, and we used to smoke cigarettes at a café near the newsroom, both of us in tatty jeans, lunch meandering into herbal Becherovka liqueur. Now he wore a jacket and tie, I wore tailored woolen pants, and we ate in the dining room of the Senate building, where he is an adviser to the body’s president. He’d been too busy to notice the photos were gone. But he had an idea what had replaced them.
“The twelve golden stars of prosperity,” he said wryly.
Golden Prague. The golden stars. Joined in a circle, they are the symbol of the European Union, and they shone from royal blue “Welcome” banners everywhere I went in the city. But when I left Jarda that day, I noticed something I hadn’t before. Like the Havel photos, the banners often had a twin, a flag for the huge South Korean electronics and appliance company LG. These said “Life’s Good.”
It certainly looked that way. Prague today is a 24-hour party, an all-night rave for aspiring go-getters. A tight-coiled energy ricochets through the once languid streets, from the canyons of Nové Meˇsto to the wide cobblestones of Na Prˇíkopeˇ, where men cut deals in accented English. At the Cuban watering hole La Bodeguita del Medio, boisterous young Czechs quaffed Mojitos, and at Universal, I eavesdropped on Chuppies, what some call Czech yuppies, strategizing for a meeting over beef tour-nedos and Stella Artois. The Hotel Josef, Prague’s answer to the W, bills its absinthe-green-lit bar as the best place to “catch Prague’s new spirit.”
“I love it here,” said a young transplant from the countryside named Petra. “Just the bravest, the strongest, survive.”
I didn’t love it. This was not my Prague. So I went looking for the old one in Smíchov, an industrial neighborhood where I’d lived near a train station under the hop-sweetened steam of a brewery. And when I got off the tram, the old Prague was there. Staunch, square, soot-covered, the station hadn’t changed at all. Its sign said simply that it was the Smíchov station. And then it hit me.
Nothing was wrong here. Prague and I had simply grown up. When the world was black-and-white—when there was only “Fruit” and “Shoes” and “Havel good, Communists bad,” when the stores had only soft, brown-spotted onions, when Prague was building itself from scratch—there was nothing to want, the world was unspoiled, and everything was possible. Not so for grown-ups. When you are grown up, choices have already been made, paths already set. I love my life, but some mornings I miss when it fit in a suitcase. Czechs, originally convinced that capitalism would make everyone rich, have discovered 10 percent unemployment and a resurgent Communist party that polls nearly 20 percent. (“For this I shook my keys?” my friend Sˇárka’s mother says as she watches the news.) And the Holy Grail—that shiny EU membership—has come with higher prices and, some fear, a dilution of national identity.
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