It can be said that Chad Bryant, although institutionally anchored in Chapel Hill (North Carolina University), has long held Prague as the subject of his heart. As early as 2007, he published Prague in Black, a book about the city's period of Nazi occupation (Cambridge, MA, 2007). Now, as a monograph, he has returned to Prague, which has accompanied him in the meantime in various sub-studies.
In terms of genre, Prague: Belonging in the Modern City is undoubtedly a scholarly work, including extensive notes referring to a solid range of secondary literature. At the same time, though, it is written in a simple and accessible manner. The author was clearly aiming at a wider range of readers. There are many ways to cover more than two centuries of Prague's modern development, and Bryant has chosen a very original approach. He chose five heroes from different periods and used their fates to portray the changing face of the city, which thus takes on five very different forms. The story begins in German Prague in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the predominantly German city began to transform into a Czech one under a wave of Czech nationalist activities. The reader's guide here is the Czech revivalist Karel Vladislav Zap.
The book's second setting is the Czech Prague of the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy, where the now dominant Czechs met and clashed on multi-ethnic ground with the German and German-Jewish communities. For Bryant, the almost ideal person for capturing the interactions between these different milieus is the well-known (and later communist) journalist Egon Erwin Kisch. Third, Revolutionary Prague between 1914 and 1948 is captured through Vojtěch Berger, a radically socialist carpenter and avid reader of the daily press who left behind a monumental legacy of clippings and commentaries on the events of his time. Communist 1948–89 Prague is depicted through the actress Hana Frejková, who was the daughter of the leading communist economist Ludvík Frejka, executed during the Stalinist purges of 1952. The transformation of post-communist Global Prague is shown by the “banana children” (descendants of Vietnamese workers growing up in the Czech environment), whose spokesperson in the book is blogger Duong Nguyen.
All the selected people have something in common that is not immediately obvious at first glance. They are “non-belongers.” “All of these Praguers, in their own ways, experienced a sense of marginalization in the city that they called home,” Bryant states in the introduction (5). Each of the characters breaks out of the dominant contemporary framework of the city, making them—each to varying degrees—strangers in the city in which they live. Zap, born in 1812, was an educated and conscious Czech nationalist breaking into the public space of a city that was originally German, along with other similarly oriented members of the Prague middle classes. Kisch, born in 1885, came from the family of a wealthy Jewish merchant and experienced firsthand the contradictions resulting from his German-Jewish identity in a city where the Czech element was rapidly supplanting the previously dominant German liberal elites. Berger, born in 1882, was a political non-belonger. In the bourgeois First Czechoslovak Republic, he became an organized and (in the local party cell) active communist, which set him apart from the body of the nation's orderly and regime-loyal Praguers. Hana Frejková, born in 1945, although, as she herself said, her parents did not give her “a single chance to be anything other than Czech,” struggled all her life with her German-Jewish-Czech roots in the environment of the communist dictatorship where she was also forced to live as the daughter of an executed traitor. Born in Vietnam to Vietnamese parents who had previously lived in Czechoslovakia, Duong Nguyen Jirásková arrived in the Czech Republic in 1995 when she was 8 years old. She guides the reader through the post-communist period when Prague, like other capitals of former communist countries, began to transform rapidly into a cosmopolitan metropolis due to globalization.
As is clear from the above, the key analytical concept for Bryant is “belonging/non-belonging.” He considers this to be a basic human need in the sense of a genuine cultural universal. Belonging means “a sense of comfort, acceptance, and certitude found in a particular place or group of people” (8). We can certainly debate how far this is a theoretically supportable concept for cultural anthropology and, within it, for the analysis of individual identity constructions, and Bryant may face criticism directed against this theoretical framework for doing so. However, in my view, this is a secondary issue and a valuable perspective. Bryant is primarily writing a history of the city of Prague, and the concept of “belonging” enables him to reveal the lived experience of outsiders that often remains hidden, or at least not immediately apparent, to those who are “belongers.” The concept of “belonging” allows him to turn urban history into a true biography of the modern city through the authentic experience of real individuals.
Bryant's book on Prague can therefore, in my opinion, be considered a successful case of the so-called biographical turn in history that became widespread among scholars at the turn of the millennium. Abstract sociological historiography had by then lost much of its luster and prestige, and, in the search for new ways to create representations of the past, a return to descriptions of the fates and life dramas of individuals seemed promising. However, elaborating the unique fate of an individual was not in itself the purpose of the historian's work. It was merely a means of rendering the social context in which the individual in question moved more vividly and perhaps more plausibly and intelligibly than the sociological charts and tables of quantitative and sociologically oriented historiography could. Although not all the chapters of the book are homogeneous—in my opinion, the German City and Czech City chapters best fulfill their stated goals—Bryant has written a very fine scholarly work whose conceptual framework I find inspiring for further similar research.
