Café Arco
The Café Arco is a coffee house in the New Town in the center of the Czech capital, Dlážděná 6 / Hybernská 16, Prague 1, next to the station nádraží Praha Masarykovo . At the turn of the century it was a center of Prague coffeehouse literature .
history
The reading café had its prime when the Prague Circle met here. The visitors included Franz Kafka , Felix Weltsch , Oskar Baum , Willy Haas , Egon Erwin Kisch , Franz Werfel , Ernst Polak , Paul Kornfeld or František Langer , referred to as Arconauts by Karl Kraus . Johannes Urzidil immortalized the Arco in his story Night of Terror . Later the writers Max Brod , Anton Kuh , Else Lasker-Schüler , Kurt Tucholsky and Ernst Weiß joined them. Not only writers came. While the Czechs and young Czechs gathered in the Café Union , the German and Jewish intelligentsia gathered in the Arco, but interested in everything Czech and very often bilingual.
The painter Egon Adler , the draftsman Alfred Kubin and the psychoanalyst Otto Gross , whose re-enactments attracted attention by his father, frequented the place. Franz Kafka's visits are documented from 1908, but he was not a regular guest. However, one of the evenings he met the journalist Milena Jesenská , who had been married to Ernst Polak since 1918 and wanted to translate Kafka into Czech. Jesenská: “In the coffee house people write, correct and talk. Family scenes take place in the coffee house, in the coffee house people cry and scold about life and life. In the coffee house you eat on credit, in the coffee house you live, lazy, and kill time. "
After the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust with the annihilation of the Jewish population of Prague, after the expulsion of the Germans and the years of communism , the Arco lost its old character. Peter Demetz writes on his return to Prague: “The new picaresque was rather petty bourgeois, and the stalls were standard Prague café furniture from the third five-year plan. Pensioners and lovers waiting for the trains to the provinces drank 'Red River', the local Bohemian tonic water. “ The Arco was completely closed for a long time, temporarily an inconspicuous officers ' canteen and is now an inconspicuous restaurant.
literature
- Hartmut Binder : Ernst Polak - a man of letters without work. To the coffee house circles in Prague and Vienna . In: Fritz Martini , Walter Müller-Seidel , Bernhard Zeller (Ed.): Yearbook of the German Schiller Society . 23rd year, Kröner, Stuttgart 1979, pp. 366-415.
Web links
- Prague cafes and coffee house culture
- Coffee hour with Franz Kafka
- Germans and Czechs / History - Culture - Politics; Becksche series, p. 579 f.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quotation from: http://tschechien-online.org/magazin/2007/07/19/prager-cafes-und-kaffeehauskultur/
- ↑ Quoted from: [1] ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ′ 14 ″ N , 14 ° 25 ′ 57 ″ E