Volume 52, Number 20 · December 15, 2005
Prague: The Glorious Moment
By Anthony Grafton
Prague: The Crown of Bohemia, 1347–1437
Catalog of the exhibitionedited by Barbara Drake Boehm and Jirí Fajt
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, September 20, 2005–January 3, 2006
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 366 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)
In 1933, Willy Haas came back to Prague from Berlin. The editor of one of the great Weimar periodicals, Die literarische Welt (The Literary World), Haas had flourished in the Twenties, publishing major work by Kafka, Cocteau, Benjamin, and others. Driven out of Berlin by the Nazis, he came home, and used his citizenship and his native knowledge of the Czech language to rebuild his life. Many of his German friends came too: the brothers Magnus Herzfelde and John Heartfield, the publishers of the Weltbühne, even Thomas Mann, who took advantage of his honorary citizenship of Czechoslovakia to hold a public lecture after Germany had stripped him of citizenship and fortune.
Review, 4128 words
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