Walk the lecherous Prague of Paul Leppin

Prague is a city richly preserved in architecture, art and literature. A tour of the more popular attractions is one way to connect with Prague's past, but poetry and fiction written in and about Prague offer a more sedentary way of tapping Prague's creative and historic spirit. Reading Blaugast, a novel by German-language writer Paul Leppin (1878-1945), recently published for the first time in English by Prague's Twisted Spoon Press, one gathers that Prague's past is sometimes more safely read about than experienced firsthand.  

Blaugast, which carries the subtitle, "A novel of decline," captures the decadent underbelly of Prague in the early 20th century, a time of opulence and debauchery, when anything a lecherous heart desired was available - for a price. The novel depicts the downfall of a mild-mannered clerk named Blaugast - a German coinage that means something like drunken guest - into a life of sex, drugs, drink and debauchery. Traveling with Blaugast down his sinking road, we see both familiar and unknown corners of Prague, imbued with a stoic vibrance in the midst of the protagonist's unraveling.

The differences between Prague in 2009 and 1909 are clear: Brothels have moved from unassuming back-alley flop houses to multilingual, neon-lit complexes around Wenceslas Square, and the syphilis epidemic seems to have subsided. But many of the places described in Blaugast still exist exactly as Leppin would have known them.

One unlikely stop on Blagaust's debaucherous tour is the Emmaus Monastery just off Palackého náměsti. Leppin wouldn't recognize the modern cathedral, with its sleek, pincer-like towers, which were reconstructed in the 1960s after the original church was destroyed by an Allied firebomb in 1945. But the foot-blunted cobblestones and damp stone walls of the original Gothic cloisters are the same that Leppin's Blaugast contemplates as he takes handouts from a soup kitchen run by the monastery's monks.

Blaugast
Paul Leppin
Twisted Spoon Press
188 pages
15 euros
ISBN 978-80-86264-23-3

Blaugast gave this thought as he ladled soup in the forecourt of Emmaus Monastery among the poor, lazy and sick. He counted the cobblestones that had scratched his shredded shoes as if they were the many tokens of a demystified world, the minutes, hours and days of a life transformed. … In the gaps of loosely set stones, where the wind had worn away meager bits of earth, a dusty-green blade of grass sprouted.

Most of Blaugast's adventures involve women, and usually those of the "loose" variety. The oldest profession boomed in Leppin's day under a perfumed fan of pre-Freudian gentility, and Blaugast (and Leppin) was what you might call a fellow traveler. Salon Goldschmied, a brothel near Old Town Square that Leppin and his fellow writers frequented, no longer exists, but the building remains in pristine condition, a departure from Leppin's time, when brothel sanitation wasn't always on the agenda. Syphilis ran rampant in Leppin's day, and no rakish chap who paid for pleasure was immune, a fact of which both Leppin and his Blaugast were painfully aware.

Blaugast's illness broke out horribly in the days that followed. It not only violently transformed his physique, but, like unsightly cracks in a mirror, it deformed his reflective psyche as well. … Fitful pains wracked and warped the pit of his stomach, back, calf muscles and torso, as if they were in the grip of an invisible vise.

Despite the voracity of his appetites, Blaugast maintains a sensitivity toward women that informs the novel and saves it from being a simple tale of good times gone wrong. Shards of tender humanity sparkle in the cesspool of Blaugast's declining moral and physical health. Fortunately, Leppin was a writer versatile enough to handle both tenderness and treachery.

One of Blaugast's more poignant adventures takes place in Stromovka Park. Away from the lights of the Industrial Palace, which was completed in Art Nouveau style for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891, Blaugast stumbles through the shadows of trees that are most likely still standing today. Leppin's lyrical description of an idyllic past is sadly timeless.

Midnight was already approaching when Blaugast parted from his comrades and set off for home through the pitch-dark Stromovka Park. These summer nights of twenty years ago were different than today's. War and atrocities had not yet filled all realms of the soul; one lived leisurely, lazed about, got drunk, and after sundown when the bright stars made their appearance, a blissful sensuality was emitted from the earth's pores and weighed down the air with its haze. Blaugast carried his hat in his hand. A light wind brushed the hair at his temples, and the park smelled of distant pond water and damp bark.

Handicapped and helpless due to a case of advanced syphilis, Paul Leppin died relatively anonymously during the Nazi occupation of Prague. Supposedly, the manuscript of Blaugast, published posthumously, was found in a trash can and donated to the archives of the Museum of Czech Literature at Prague's Strahov Monastery. Leppin has only recently begun to receive more universal recognition due to extensive critical work by scholars including Dierk Hoffmann, who wrote in an afterword to Twisted Spoon's edition of Blaugast, "There is little doubt that Leppin's work is essential to an understanding of the literary and cultural situation in Prague during the first decades of the 20th century."

In a city where you can hardly walk a block before passing a statue or plaque dedicated to a writer or artist, Leppin offers a stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, especially Franz Kafka, who has been all but canonized by city officials in the past decade. Perhaps Leppin's Prague, a world of tainted prostitutes, rotgut wine and syphilis, is less marketable to tourists than Kafka's depictions of Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. But maybe Leppin would have preferred it this way. As he wrote in Blaugast, "Life isn't all glitter, even for the fortunate."

Hearing Leppin read from Blaugast in 1933, Max Brod, Kafka's friend and literary executer, said: "[The novel] certainly belongs among the most unique, the most genuine and authentic that German literature has produced in recent years. Despite today's unfavorable circumstances, it will one day, sooner or later, fight for and win European recognition." The growing availability of Leppin's work and his continued relevance in Prague and beyond prove Brod's prescient words correct.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com