1 - Bohemia (1819-1849)

Summary

METTERNICH'S EUROPE

In an antiquarian bookstore in the city of Prague I found a collection of English American prints, and in it a set of journals from the years 1780 to 1790. I purchased the whole, and read with the heart more perhaps than with reason. That literature made me a naturalized American in the interior of Bohemia.

(From the sermon preached by Isaac Mayer Wise on the occasion of his jubilee in the rabbinate on 21 October 1893, as reported in the American Israelite, 40 (26 Oct. 1893),4.)

ISAAC MAYER WISE was born in Steingrub, Bohemia, on 20 March 1819 (3 Nisan 5579). The village of Steingrub (now known as Kamenny-Dvur) lies in the north-west corner of Bohemia, then part of the Austrian Empire, close to the German frontier and not far from the point where Bavaria and Saxony meet. It 1s-in the Bezirkhauptmannschaft ('administrative county’) of Eger, the nearest town, or, to give it its present name, Cheb (historically famous as headquarters of the Imperial Army during the Thirty Years War, and the scene of the assassination of its commander, Albrecht Wallenstein, in 1634). Eger was morally the heart of the Sudetenland, the Germanspeaking area which fringes on the western border of Bohemia. When in the nineteenth century Czech nationalism raised its head, the Deutschtum of the Sudetenland became inflamed in response. From the time that the independent Czechoslovak Republic was established, Eger was the centre of the separatist movement which in 1938 was temporarily successful. When they regained their independence in 1945, the Czechs, fearing the presence of an element which might again become the agents of a foreign enemy, expelled the Sudetens into Germany. Today the quarrels of Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs and Wettins, which made the tramp of marching soldiers familiar in Eger, are no more. Until the pull-back of 1989 it abutted the uneasy border between the two republics of Germany and was the westernmost point to which, through her satellites, the power of Russia reached.

The countryside which Wise knew as a boy today gives the impression of solitude, even of desertion. The road ascends as it leaves Eger., leading eventually to a broad plateau of meadow land whose flatness is emphasized by the distant prospect of the Erzgebirge mountains. After traversing this plateau, one repeats the ascent until a few nondescript buildings by the road mark the village of Steingrub.