Prague, a city torn between tradition and modernity

"The magic of Prague, a city that survived communism, risks disappearing today, after too much contact with the West", notes the Italian writer Claudio Magris, upon his return from the Czech capital. "It was the symbolic capital of Mitteleuropa, suspended between classicism and the concerns of modernity. Between the end of the 19th century and the end of the First World War, even up to the Nazi invasion, Prague had been both on the periphery and at the centre of the world. It was a capital of minds, living in the shadows, and in a vital, explosive insecurity ... . The great Prague tradition resisted right up to the broken Prague spring of 1968 and up to its liberation in 1989. Today adjustment by forced march to the western model is threatening to cause the disappearance of Mitteleuropa, of which Prague was one of the vital organs, the heart even."

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