Street name in Prague

[tetsabb]

A street has been named in Prague after Sir Nicholas Winton, who arranged the transport of hundreds of children, mostly Jewish, from there in the run-up to WWII. A genuine hero.

One of the most moving moments on TV ever
youtu.be/6_nFuJAF5F0?si=McA-JvcS4GoI-jNf

PDR's dad was in that audience

[alexanderhoward]

So, who had the job of changing all the street names in Prague? They would have been in German once until a hundred years ago or so. For such a big city, it is a heck of a job to invent new names for every single road.

The same must apply to many German / Austrian cities which were annexed to Poland or Czechoslovakia (or the Ukraine in the case of Lemberg).

[suze]

The streets of Prague already had a German name and a Czech name, so only a handful needed to be given new Czech names overnight.

Bohemia turned Protestant from around 1400, after a series of events involving Bad King Wenceslas (Václav IV), Jan Hus, and some throwings of people out of windows, and Protestant Bohemia spoke Czech.  After the Thirty Years' War the Holy Romans put their collective foot down and tried to impose German and to re-impose Romishness.  The latter thing did happen - the Czechs of today are mostly Catholic - but the former never really did.

It could have done.  As of about 1800, around half of the people of Prague spoke German or Yiddish rather than Czech - but the Czech language was kept alive by puppets.  Puppet theatre has a long history in Bohemia, and it was funnier than the opera and Shakespeare of the upper orders - and it was all performed in Czech.

A few street names were changed for symbolic reasons.  Rossmarkt (Horse Market) became Václavské Náměstí (Wenceslas Square, even though it is a street rather than a square), but the lower profile thoroughfares just continued to use the Czech names that the lower orders had always used.

I won't go into Poland in detail here since it is not the subject of this thread, but a few streets in Gdańsk have been symbolically renamed twice.  It's not quite Adolf-Hitler-Straße became ul. W I Lenina became ul. Lecha Wałęsy, but getting that way!

[alexanderhoward]

I have Baedeker on my bookshelves, of North Germany, printed in 1890. many of the towns described are now in Poland, though of course that was a long way ahead, so they are all German towns with German names. That said, much of the east of Prussia was 'Prussian Poland' and Polish names are given. You can see, for example that the name 'Gdansk' was used at the time, and was not made up after the War.

Years ago (for reasons that made sense at the time) I quoted in a memo Churchill's "From Stettin in the Baltis to Trieste in the Adriatic", and the Polish secretary chirped up "Is that Szczecin in Poland?" She pronounced it almost indistinguishably from my pronunciation - "Stettin", which made me wonder where all those extra consonants come in. Maybe there are subtleties in tone that I missed.

[suze]

Sept 15, 2024 22:30:26 GMT alexanderhoward said:

You can see, for example that the name 'Gdansk' was used at the time, and was not made up after the War.

The city which we now know as Gdańsk is traditionally said to have been founded by St Wojciech (in German, St Adalbert) in the year 997.  Modern thinking is that the city is actually a bit older than that, but only by a decade or two.

The oldest known form of its name is Gydannyzc, and the Polish form of the name has evolved from there.  By now, the <ń> is all but silent.  German speakers found the <gd> cluster awkward since it would never occur in a German word, and German forms with no <g> are recorded as far back as 1220.

The city has switched between Polish dominance and German dominance half a dozen times, but neither community has ever been completely absent.  To be sure, the Nazis claimed that the city was 98% German-speaking in the 1930s and the communists claimed that it was 100% Polish-speaking in the 1950s, but neither statement is all that close to being true.  The Nazis seem to have counted anyone who understood "Heil Hitler" as a German speaker, while the German-speaking minority in Poland didn't officially exist between 1945 and 1956.

So yes, it has had two names since more or less ever.  The Pole who does not understand what you mean by Danzig doesn't exist, but the Pole who will take violent offence if you use that name absolutely does.

[alexanderhoward]

I diverted this thread when it began with the very worthy purpose of drawing our attention to the naming of a Prague street after Sir Nicholas Winton. He was a hero indeed.

I recalled 'Three Men on The Bummel' (a decades-later follow up to 'Three Men in a Boat'), in which the three friends travel round Germany before a cycling trip in the Black Forest, and amongst the German cities they visit is Prague. After a discussion of the extensive Jewish quarter - which, well we know what happened to that - JKJ talks of the language issue.

"At Dresden they advised us not to talk German in Prague. For years racial animosity between the German minority and the Czech majority has raged throughout Bohemia, and to be mistaken for a German in certain streets of Prague is inconvenient to a man whose staying powers in a race are not what once they were. However, we did talk German in certain streets in Prague; it was a case of talking German or nothing. The Czech dialect is said to be of great antiquity and of highly scientific cultivation. Its alphabet contains forty-two letters, suggestive to a stranger of Chinese. It is not a language to be picked up in a hurry. We decided that on the whole there would be less risk to our constitution in keeping to German, and as a matter of fact no harm came to us. The explanation I can only surmise. The Praguer is an exceedingly acute person; some subtle falsity of accent, some slight grammatical inaccuracy, may have crept into our German, revealing to him the fact that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we were no true-born Deutscher."