Letters to the Editor May 1999
Nostalgia for bad times
On how the Czech Republic views its past
In Prague as it approaches its second millennium, nothing appears to change faster than the past. The present, of course, has been in a state of agitated flux for a decade. Hardly a week goes by that does not produce a change, often to the baffled indignation of Czechs. These changes range from the very look of long-familiar streets to the language itself, increasingly a prey to slangy neologisms. The restitution of confiscated real estate as well as the incursions of foreign investors have made checkerboards of neighborhoods that were neglected for over half a century. In the neighborhood where we have been living, the nineteenth-century middle-class district called Smíchov, street after street displays the motley mosaic of freshly repainted facades alongside the sooty and crumbling housefronts of those still too indigent to renovate; the effect is incongruous, like seeing debutantes in bright ball gowns amid throngs of disheveled...
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