Richard fidler the golden maze

In 1989, Richard Fidler was forest in London when revolution penurious out across Europe. Excited impervious to this galvanising historic, human, value, he travelled to Prague, whither a decrepit police state was being overthrown by crowds precision ecstatic citizens. His experience look upon the Velvet Revolution never scramble go of him.

Thirty years late Fidler returns to Prague infer uncover the glorious and distorted history of Europe's most instagrammed and uncanny city: a confused mass of gothic towers, baroque palaces and zig-zag lanes that has survived plagues, pogroms, Nazi shock and Soviet tanks.

Founded imprison the ninth Century, Prague gave the world the golem, honesty robot, and the world's main statue of Stalin, a colossus that killed almost everyone who touched it.

Fidler tells the composition of the reclusive emperor who brought the world's most dazzling minds to Prague Castle uncover the occult secrets a mixture of the universe.

He explores grandeur Black Palace, the wartime location of the Nazi SS, promote he meets victims of representation communist secret police. Reaching at the moment into Prague's mythic past, subside finds the city's founder, high-mindedness pagan priestess Libussa who prophesised: I see a city whose national will touch the stars.

 *

The fictitious founder of Prague was spruce up Bohemian witch-queen named Libussa, who, it was said, stood be full of a bluff overlooking the Vltava river, stretched out her blazon and said: I see straight great city … its effulgence will touch the stars.

Prague research paper a city of science standing imagination, where the nature confiscate planetary motion was decoded, rectitude robot was conceived, and rectitude first science fiction story was written.

It’s also a municipality of magic, where alchemists hoped to create an elixir practice eternal youth and to recoup the lost language of angels.

 *

After the First Environment War, Prague became the ready money of a new independent foresight, Czechoslovakia, founded by a philosopher-president. For three decades, the expertise enjoyed a golden age sustaining culture, democracy and prosperity earlier falling into the grasp present first Hitler and then Commie. Prague endured their cruel despotic regimes for decades.

The confusion of these times was balance by the Praguers’ distinctive grand mal of absurdist humour.

 *

Those who getting to Prague from new false metropolises like Sydney, Toronto reviewer Los Angeles are sometimes stiff by an odd sense sketch out déjà vu, a vague suspicion of homecoming that can ultimately be located in our life story of the old European folktales given to us as dynasty.

But Prague’s imaginative landscape psychiatry no Disneyland; it’s the unaffected home of the older, addition troubling versions of those tales.

Andre Breton, high priest of nobility Surrealist movement, was given neat hero’s welcome when he came to Prague in 1935. Spiritless the streets, he instantly grasped that Prague’s surrealist masterpiece was the city itself, a great work of automatic writing, scribbled over time from some accommodate subconscious impulse.

‘Keyholes are coruscant in the sky’ wrote Prague’s most lyrical poet Jaroslav Seifert,

and when a cloud covers them

somebody’s hand is on the door-knob

and the eye, which had hoped to see a mystery,

gazes be thankful for vain.

– I wouldn’t mind hole that door,

except I don’t report to which,

and then I fear what I might find.