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Prague

capital city of the Czech Republic

Pragueis the capital andlargest cityof theCzech Republic,and the historical capital ofBohemia.On theVltavariver, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has atemperateoceanic climate,with relatively warm summers and chilly winters. Prague is a political, cultural, and economic hub ofcentral Europe,with a rich history andRomanesque,Gothic,RenaissanceandBaroquearchitectures. It was the capital of theKingdom of Bohemiaand residence of severalHoly Roman Emperors,most notablyCharles IV(r. 1346–1378). TheThirty Years' Warstarted in the city afterProtestantnobles threw severalCatholicHapsburgofficials out a window in 1618. It later served as the capital and largest city ofCzechoslovakiabetween its foundation at the end ofWorld War Iin 1918 and itspartition into the Czech Republic and Slovakiaafter the end of theCold Warin 1992. During that time the city was alsooccupiedby bothNazi Germanyand theSoviet Union.

View from the tower of Old Town Hall in Prague

Quotes

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  • The people from Prague and other Czechs should be whipped who speak halfCzechand halfGerman(...) And who could enumerate how the Czech language has already been corrupted, so that the true Czech hears they speak, but he does not understand them. And from that arisesenvy,anger,conflict,strife and Czech humiliation.
  • While many of the world's richest people live inLondon,four of its boroughs rank among the twenty poorest inEngland,and 27 percent of the city's population live inpoverty.London's polarized economic landscape is typical of "superstar" cities. Other leading cities ofEurope—Oslo,Amsterdam,Athens,Budapest,Madrid,Prague,Riga,Stockholm,Tallinn,Vienna,Vilnius—also suffer widening gaps between the top and the bottom of the social hierarchy.
    • Joel Kotkin,The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class(2020), p. 133
  • In Pragueclassical architecturebecomesromantic,andromantic architectureabsorbs the classical characters to endow the earth with a particular kind of surreal humanity. Both become cosmic, not in the sense of abstract order, but as spiritual aspiration. Evidently Prague is one of the great meeting-places where a multitude of meanings are gathered.
  • To my mind, imperialism is something very simple and clear and it exists as a fact when one country, a large country, seizes a certain strip of territory and subjects to its laws a certain number of men and women against their will.Sovietpolicy after the beginning of thesecond world warwas precisely this. There is no difficulty in pointing this out, but the difficulty lies in the fact that when one quotes from memory one will forget one or other argument. Because theRussians,thanks to the second world war, have quite simply annexed the three Baltic States, taken a piece ofFinland,a piece ofRumania,a piece ofPoland,a piece ofGermanyand, thanks to a well thought-out policy composed of internal subversion and external pressure, have established Governments justifiably styled as Satellites, in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest,TiranaandEast Berlin- I except Belgrade wherethe regimeis unique thanks to the energy and courage ofMarshal Tito.If all this does not constitute manifestations ofimperialism,if all this is not the result of a policy consciously willed and consciously pursued, an imperialist aim, then indeed we shall have to start to go back to a new discussion and a new definition of words.
  • The determining factor ininternational politicsafter the second world war-was thecoup d'etatat Prague, the disappearance of ademocraticprogressivepolicy and its replacement by atotalitariangovernment with a Communist minority. It will have a singularly important place devoted to it when the time comes to write the post-war history of international politics. The coup d'etat at Prague, the disappearance ofCzechoslovakiaas a free democratic State, was the last straw on the camel's back, or, if you prefer, the flash of lightning which opened the most stubborn eyes. Everyone understood inWestern Europe,and fortunately also in theNew World,that if we wanted to prevent the continuing unbounded development ofSovietimperialism, if we wanted to prevent its repetition in other capitals or in other more or less similar ways, yet following the same pattern, the same political procedure, that if we wanted to avoid the repetition of the events of Prague, then the Western countries had got to unite, to draw together and give Soviet Russia clearly to under- stand that Prague represented the last manifestation of this imperialism which we could permit without far more important and serious results.
  • Mr. Chairman,you have invited me to speak on the subject ofBritainandEurope.Perhaps I should congratulate you on your courage. If you believe some of the things said and written about my views on Europe, it must seem rather like invitingGenghis Khanto speak on the virtues of peaceful coexistence!...TheEuropean Communityisonemanifestation of that European identity, but it is not the only one. We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, peoples who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look onWarsaw,Prague andBudapestas great European cities...To try to suppress nationhood and concentrate power at the centre of a European conglomerate would be highly damaging and would jeopardise the objectives we seek to achieve. Europe will be stronger precisely because it hasFranceas France,Spainas Spain, Britain as Britain, each with its own customs, traditions and identity. It would be folly to try to fit them into some sort of identikit European personality...it is ironic that just when those countries such as theSoviet Union,which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of thestate in Britain,only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance fromBrussels.
  • TheFrenchwriter,Albert Camus,once lamented that "man eventually becomes accustomed to everything". I have always believed that this is an unjustly pessimistic view ofour human condition;and in recent weeks I have seen enough to convince me that Camus, on this point at least, was wrong: 30,000East Germansabandoning home, friends, jobs, everything, to escape to a new life of opportunity but also uncertainty in the West; thousands ofSovietminersstrikingnot for more pay, but for better supplies; the joy of Poles as they greettheir first non-Communist Prime Ministerin 40 years; over a million inhabitants of theBaltic statesforming a human chain to protest against the forced annexation of their nations; demonstrators in Prague braving the security forces to mark the 21st anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion; or in Leipzig calling forfreedom of speech.Clearly the peoples of the East have not become accustomed to their lot.Totalitarianrule has not made people less attracted byfreedom,democracyand self-determination. The opposite is true. Nor has it made them incapable of exercising these values through political organization and self-expression: look at the debates in the new Congress of the People's Deputies, the activities of the popular fronts, Solidarity inPolandor the opposition parties inHungary.The demand forpluralismand reform can now be heard in every Eastern nation.
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Encyclopedic article onPragueon Wikipedia

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