"PRAGUE never lets you go." Kafka's observation isn't hard to believe, for the city is both glamorous and intimate. On the plane from Heathrow, for example, there was a middle aged Czech, an anxious man got up as an American commercial type on holiday: sneakers and jeans, windcheater, home movie camera, Jansport hand luggage.
Affecting an in your face New York accent and manner, he spread out, somewhere over Germany, street map of Prague and studied it with loud condescension. He was letting us know that he'd along since forgotten his mental geography of the provincial dump, probably his birthplace, towards, which we were headed - and giving us, involuntarily, a glimpse of the inferiority complex with which Czechs, like ourselves once, have had to contend.
What a history! During the 20th century alone they have had Austrian rule (admittedly not the worst), German occupation, the Cold War and now, when they might have been expected to hold their heads up at last, they have what Kundera calls an "unbearable lightness of being" and Havel a "post prison psychosis", and the multinational hegemony of McDonald's, Kureci Speciality Kentucky, Kafka Tshirts, and all the delights of intensive tourism. (I am a guest; you are a visitor; he or she is a tourist).
No wonder there is renewed interest in the past in, for example, the great kings of Bohemia, clever Charles IV who founded the 15th century? Karolinum, the oldest university in these parts; and "mad" Rudolph II, a contemporary of England's Elizabeth I, best known for his devotion to astrology and art and memorably portrayed in John Banville's Kepler.
Thanks to Milos Forman's kitsch classic Amadeus (the soundtrack was good though), Prague, where the film was made, is famous in "Western" eyes for its Baroque architecture and music, and rightly so; but the really striking feature is the synergistic combination of the two, the civilised manner in which they complement each other, the music polished matter in graceful flux, the architecture a cool harmonies in stone. Granted, this was in the run up to the Spring Music Festival (May 12th-June 2nd), with orchestral noises issuing, it seemed, from every door and window; with Gregorian chant in St George's Basilica, Telemann in St Nicholas's Church, Dvorak in the National Theatre, Smetana - in the Rudolfinum, and Mozart everywhere.
Curiously, annoyingly even, the Amadeus experience is hard to shake off: having seen the film, you have been here before - twice. Don Giovanni premiered at the Estates Theatre on October 29th, 1787, an event restaged by Forman; over 60 Czech actors and crew were involved in the film, and the lanes of the Old Town still seem to echo to Suzanne Murphy's voice singing the role of Katerina Cavalieri. As so often happens in these cases, the city (and not just the great Barandov Studios) took on some of the character of Patrizia von Brandenstein's production design and was never the same again.
Hence, in part, the tourist appeal, especially for the American "kids" who came here in their thousands a few years ago, in the wake of democratisation, and are still in evidence. The Disney turreted Tyn Church, behind the Old Town Square, must have been an added incentive; for here we are in the world of Umberto Eco's "hyper reality", where the real thing, being real, is a poor substitute for its dopey imitation.
Architecture and music; art too. Hradcany, the ancient palace complex overlooking the city's onion domes and Gothic spires, and the wide Bohemian plain, contains important works by Titian, Veronese, Rubens; Durer, Cranach, Hals; the moderns Klimt and Schile, Chagall, Kokoschka; and St Agnes's Convent houses a large collection of 19th century national art. But all big cities have these galleries where you look at more pictures in an hour than you can possibly absorb.
The real Czech art, because the most loved and ubiquitously applied, is the Art Nouveau or Jugendstil of Alphonse Mucha, a factory of a man, the Warhol of his da, whose flowing forms and languorous fin de siele mannerism are reworked everywhere in Prague, on doors, windows and accessories of all kinds.
The Grand Hotel Eruopa, Prague's equivalent of the Shelbourne, is a positive monument to Art Nouveau, as are the apartment buildings of Josefov, the Jewish quarter, which also houses a different and very special kind of Czech art; for here, in the Jewish Museum, is the Terezin collection (Terezin, the former concentration camp, is a short train ride from Prague). There is some highly accomplished work on show, like Otto Ungar's An Empty Dormitory and Terezin in the Rain; and, of course, the celebrated children's art, the work of eight and nine year olds like Robert Bondy and Tania Steinova, Josef Novak band Doris Weiserova - all of them transported with their elders, to even darker destinations farther east. What do they depict? Guns and wire? No gardens and flowers, even an elephant, even a rainbow: pencil, crayon and water colours, bright yellow and blues, by the quaint children whose photographs are preserved here, and by "artists unknown".
Regimes mutate, but outside interference is a constant; Wenceslas Square, once a site of heroic resistance (remember the Russian tanks?), is today, in a trickle down of "free market" economics, a sleazy strip dotted with fast food outlets. Jazz clubs, and fringe theatre venues were sources of youthful subversion in the pre 1989 period; now rock, the sound of late century consumerism, threatens the older kinds of music.
A Kundera character, the artist Sabina, deplores the commercial "uglification" of the world. A planetary process, she says: "Beauty survives only where its persecutors have overlooked it." So it doesn't matter if the plumbing seems rickety, or if the lights fail while you lie in your bed reading Hugo Hamilton's The Last Shot. It doesn't matter if you have to stumble home across waste ground lit by a single nervous gas bracket on the police headquarters (a cinematic experience, after all) or if shop bought goods are reminiscent of Ireland in the 1940s. These are the outward signs of a culture decently behind the times.
THERE has been an Irish embassy here since last year, at Triziste 13, off Mala Stranska Namesti in the "Little Quarter" on the north bank of the river, between the Charles Bridge and Hradcany. (The Czech Republic hopes to join the EU.) The ambassador, Marie Cross, estimates there are about 400 Irish nationals in Prague at any given moment, among them business people, students, musicians, and those just passing through. Czechs see a parallel between their own recent history and events in Northern Ireland. There are at least three Irish pubs (the James Joyce, Molly Malone's and Scarlett O'Hara's), Irish music is popular, and there are visiting writers from time to time, most recently the poet Paul Durcan and the young novelist Aisling Maguire.
But the most distinguished Irish visitor was here 400 years ago as a guest of Rudolph II. This was Edward Kelly ("Ned" to us fans), an alchemist who, together with his English colleague John Dee, worked hard in the Hradcany powder tower trying to turn coal into gold, without success. After a spell of imprisonment he seems to have escaped; but nothing more is known, except that Ben Johnson mentions him in The Alchemist. The alchemists didn't live in Golden Lane, by the way; the goldsmiths did. Those little houses, washed pink and blue, in one of which Kafka once spent a summer, are still there and still visitable - if you arrive before the hordes of tourists, visitors or guests.
. Derek Mahon is a poet and freelance writer. His most recent publications include The Hudson Letter and Racine's Phaedra.