The blows of World War II and the heavy hand of Communist construction � so apparent in neighboring capitals � are barely discernable there. It is nothing like the wholesale reinvention of Bucharest, the scars of Warsaw or the division of Berlin.
�The people of Prague had an inferiority complex with respect to those other cities,� Milan Kundera wrote in his now-classic novel �The Unbearable Lightness of Being.� �Old Town Hall was the only monument of note destroyed in the war, and they decided to leave it in ruins so that no Pole or German could accuse them of having suffered less than their share.�
The hall is in ruins no longer, and the city�s Old Town begs a postcard from almost every angle. On a crisp fall day, the flagrant yellows and reds of the autumn trees on the lesser bank of the Vltava gild the city�s already rich skyline. The Charles Bridge remains in a permanent tourist traffic jam long past the summer high season.
The streams of visitors are not disappointed by the Gothic Tyn Church or the Art Nouveau Municipal House. But the result of so much beauty is a visual amnesia that lulls even the historically versed visitor into a kind of forgetting, encouraging a Disney castle version of the city and rendering Prague�s recent wounds almost invisible.
As Tereza, a principal character in the novel, climbs the grassy Petrin Hill, Mr. Kundera wrote, �On her way up, she paused several times to look back: below her she saw the towers and bridges, the saints were shaking their fists and lifting their stone eyes to the clouds. It was the most beautiful city in the world.�
But �The Unbearable Lightness of Being,� first published in a French translation from Czech in 1984, is no love letter to the city; it is a message from a time of oppression, and one worth carrying for perspective on a trip through Prague. Mr. Kundera submerges the reader in the undercurrents of political life, the rough passages of far-too-recent vintage and the personal repercussions of an invasive, claustrophobic time.
Tereza is climbing Petrin in a dream � a dream in which she will be executed, but only if she convinces the executioners that she seeks death of her own free will. The novel returns again and again to Tereza�s harrowing dreams, simultaneously erotic and morbid.
She and her husband, Tomas, are living through a most tumultuous period for what was then Czechoslovakia: the crackdown by the Soviet Union after Czechoslovakia�s attempt at liberalizing reform. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a brief flowering of openness behind the Iron Curtain; what followed was a trauma hidden inside the city. The novel provides a key to remembering.
Mr. Kundera writes of a time when a former ambassador could be consigned to the reception desk at a hotel, when private conversations were not only recorded by the police but broadcast on state radio and when the cinematographers of authority would set up bright lights and film cameras at a funeral to record the mourners� faces for study. In the novel, Tomas, a superior surgeon, is consigned by the authorities to wash windows because of a politically provocative essay he once wrote about Oedipus and the guilt of unknowing crimes.
Today, scenes of surveillance and harassment play on a permanent loop in the small video room at the Museum of Communism. The visitor is also confronted by unforgettable images of tanks on the streets outside, armed forces in Wenceslas Square and protesters� being sprayed by hoses and beaten with clubs.
Much is held at the arm�s-length distance of black and white. But the scene shifts to the demonstrations in 1989 that led to the collapse of the Soviet-backed regime. Suddenly the faded jeans and bad haircuts are distinctly recognizable as � for all but the youngest of us � coming from our own time. The blows of the clubs seem to land that much harder with the realization that it could be you.
Though moving and informative, the Museum of Communism has a strangely amateur feel. Busts of party heroes are collected in one corner haphazardly and without explanation, like knick-knacks in a grandmother�s attic. The texts on the walls are at times quaint, like the one that declares: �From the very beginning, Lenin pushed forward the tactics of extreme perfidiousness and ruthlessness,� which earns a laugh but also cuts through the typical staleness of academic understatement.
But perhaps most surprising is that the museum itself is hidden on a commercial strip of Na Prikope, tucked, as the museum�s own literature puts it, �above McDonald�s, next to Casino.� Decades of a dictatorship for an entire country, a dictatorship within the lifetime of most Czech people, is squeezed into a space smaller than another pleasant enough museum devoted to the Slavic Art Nouveau pioneer Alphonse Mucha.
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