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September 7th, 2008
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Royalty runs in Lobkowicz family

Castles, vineyards, brewery reclaimed through restitution

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 16th, 2008 issue

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William Lobkowicz was a Boston real estate developer before moving "home" to Prague in 1990.
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"The Princely Collections" at Lobkowicz Palace include a royal collection of unique paintings, music, including original Beethoven symphonies and military weapons, among its other sumptuous appointments.
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The Lobkowicz File

Born in: Milton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Age: 46
Returned to Prague: In 1990, after previously living in the United States and working in Boston as a real estate developer
Through restitution: Family got back Nelahozeves Castle, 25 kilometers north of Prague, in 1993, and Lobkowicz Palace in 2002. The family also owns Strekov Castle and Jezeri Palace
With his wife: Opened the exhibit "The Princely Collections," in Lobkowicz Palace, in April 2007

Pulling up to the Czechoslovak border in his family’s Volkswagen bus in the mid-1970s, William Lobkowicz waited as authorities took it apart for inspection.
After all, it wasn’t every day that the would-be heir apparent to a royal Czech family showed up at the border.
Had history taken a different course, Lobkowicz would have been a prince in this country. But, as it was, he was a regular American visiting for the first time.
“It was a strange place to be if you had grown up in the States,” says Lobkowicz, now 46. “It was a moving experience for all of us.”
After that trip, Lobkowicz wouldn’t return to his ancestral homeland, the country his father fled under threat of the Nazis, until 1990. It would be years later that he would reclaim some of his family’s palaces, including Lobkowicz Palace at Prague Castle.
To be sure, William had lived quite a different life than had the men in his family before him.
His father, Martin Lobkowicz, grew up in Roudnice Castle, a 250-room palace north of Prague.
“Even after 50 years of exile, I have vivid memories of riding my bike down the long galleries of Roudnice Castle, feeling the weight of my disapproving ancestors looking down on me, room after room,” Martin Lobkowicz says, in a perfect American accent, in an audio guide to the family’s collections in Lobkowicz Palace.
This idyllic life ended in 1939, when Martin was 10 years old, with an escape across the Czechoslovak border just hours before the Nazi occupation.
He went to England with his father, Maximilián, and his British mother. But, right after the Battle of Britain began, he was sent to the United States to live, along with other children fleeing wartime England.
After the war, the Lobkowicz family got its property back, only to have it taken away again in 1948 by the communist regime. The family only narrowly left with their freedom.
As William Lobkowicz tells it, the communists granted Maximilián a two-day pass to visit his allegedly sick wife in England, a ruse she had concocted to rescue him from behind a rapidly hardening Iron Curtain.
“And leaving 13 castles and his country behind, he literally left with his hat and his coat,” William says in the audio guide.
Maximilián, whose father was a prince before the republic was formed in 1918, never returned to Czechoslovakia.
A noble family
William, Maximilián’s grandson, was raised in Milton, Massachusetts, about half an hour outside of Boston, by Martin Lobkowicz and Margaret Brooks Juett, an American.
He went to Milton Academy and then on to Harvard University, where he rowed crew, sang operas and studied European history. His family’s history inspired his course of studies and interest in music.
William’s great-great-great-great grandfather, Josef František Maxmilián, the seventh Prince Lobkowicz, was a famous patron of the arts. He sponsored Ludwig van Beethoven, who returned his generosity with the Third, Sixth and perhaps most famously Fifth symphonies. Beethoven also wrote the Opus 18 string quartet for the prince. Beethoven’s symphonies, written in his own hand and dedicated to the prince, are on display at the palace and are among the family’s most treasured possessions.
The composer debuted his Third Symphony, Eroica, a piece said to have changed piano music forever, in the Lobkowicz’s Vienna palace.
The family also sponsored Mozart and Haydn, who both have handwritten scores on display at the palace. The family’s musical connections run deeper still: Antonín Dvořák was born in the Lobkowicz’s Nelahozeves Castle, and Richard Wagner conceived his Tannhäuser opera in their Střekov Castle, in north Bohemia.
As their patronage suggests, the Lobkowicz family was one of the richest in Europe and one of four princely families allowed to marry into the Habsburg dynasty (the Schwarzenbergs, Fůrstenbergs and Wallensteins being the others), which ran Austro-Hungary. With noble roots dating to the 14th century, the family’s line includes several chancellors of the Czech kingdom and ties to royalty across Europe.
Its international character persists. William remembers relatives from Austria, Germany, Canada, the United States, Belgium and France visiting his family in Massachusetts.
“There was a little bit of a refugee mentality,” he says.
An unexpected return
William, who was working in Boston as a real estate developer in 1989, remembers watching television as crowds tore apart the Berlin Wall. Around the same time, he saw images of East German refugees seeking asylum at the West German Embassy in Prague, a building on Vlašská street that used to be a Lobkowicz residence.
He arrived in 1990 and knew he wanted to stay. Coming back to his father’s homeland was something he never expected to be able to do. “It was a big surprise,” he says.
Neither did his father think he would ever return.
“For me to have returned to my native country, so unexpectedly, gave me both joy and a sense of fulfillment,” Martin Lobkowicz says in the audio guide.
Restitution laws passed throughout the 1990s made it possible for the family to reclaim some of its former holdings. They got Nelahozeves Castle, 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) north of Prague, back in 1993. In 2002, they obtained Lobkowicz Palace.
Today, they have four castles including Střekov Castle and Jezeží Palace. Both Lobkowicz Palace and Nelahozeves Castle have exhibits and are available for functions.
“Probably the most remarkable thing, certainly in the past 100 years, is that we’ve lost everything twice, and gotten it back twice — or a great part of it anyway,” William says at the start of the recorded audio tour.
It will probably take generations for the family to reclaim all its former property, he says.
In the meantime, the family seems set to stay here. William, growing up in a household in which only English was spoken, learned Czech after moving to Prague. He conducts his business meetings in Czech, and his three children attend local schools.
The Princely Collections
William and his wife, Alexandra Lobkowicz, opened the exhibit “The Princely Collections,” in Lobkowicz Palace, in April 2007 after much work. The family lives in a rented apartment in Prague.
“We’re a practical people,” Lobkowicz says. “We don’t live in castles anymore.”
But one of the biggest reasons they don’t live in the palaces is so they can use as much space as possible to display the family’s enormous collection of paintings, guns, dinner services and other art.
The collection contains some of the most valuable art in Central Europe, including Antonio Canaletto’s The River Thames with St. Paul’s Cathedral on Lord Mayor’s Day.
Another painting depicts a family matriarch, Polyxena of Pernštejn, wife of the first Lobkowicz prince, preventing mobs from harming Catholic priests who had taken shelter in the palace — an event that precipitated the Thirty Years’ War.
In addition to the art collection, Lobkowicz Palace also hosts daily concerts and evening events. It has a gift shop and restaurants and cafés in which wine from the family vineyard in Roudnice and beer from the family brewery (which dates to 1466) is served.
“All of these things help us support the buildings,” Lobkowicz says.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


Other articles in Tempo (16/01/2008):

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