ADVENTURES IN MARIENBAD

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Once upon a time, in an enchanted forest in Europe, there was a beautiful resort frequented by kings and princes. J.M. Ledgard enters the lost world of Marienbad ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

The train from Prague takes three hours. For the last few kilometres it snakes through a tangled forest. Clear streams run under the tracks, and deer stand still in the glades, staring up. The conductor briskly announces Marianske Lazne. I sling the satchel over my shoulder and jump down. The doors are slammed and the train continues to the German border.

The railway station has been reconstructed with European Union money. Its polished floors, digital screens and glass doors look more German than Czech. But it is a communist-era trolley bus that idles outside the station, and the seats were made in a factory in the Soviet Union. I pay my few Czech crowns for the ride into town. Not for the last time on this visit, I have a feeling of time and space being bent out of shape.

At first the town is unpromisingly concrete. The trolley passes a funeral home, a Vietnamese grocer, a porn shop and several of the narrow smoky bars lined with slot machines favoured by Czech alcoholics. Then we seem to trundle over a line; it trips history. Parkland opens out on the right, grand buildings rise up on the left. I get off and stroll up the main street towards my hotel. The buildings become more opulent, the parkland finer, but the shops are mostly tasteless, selling cartons of cheap cigarettes, Czech liquor, fur hats and Russian dolls, and the parks are pocked with communist-era features. Even so, there remains a beauty to the place: it was once Marienbad.

Among the grand resorts of the world which have faded from the collective memory, Marienbad was the richest and finest, a glorious Bohemian magnet for kings and emperors and pashas, industrialists, surgeons, poets and revolutionaries. To have arrived in Marienbad in 1890 would have been to push your way through a cosmopolitan throng at the station and take a carriage to a hotel in the clean air up by the forest, where there would have been hot water gushing out of the taps in your room, assorted perfumes and liniments, and supper by the fireplace. The dark wallpaper, the blacks, crimsons and purples, the velveteens, the brocades and sashes over the bed would not have seemed funereal, but as modish as the fluttering electric light by which you might have read the latest journals of science and fashion. Whereas my walk to the five-star Hotel Esplanade, once a favourite of the inventor of the light bulb, Thomas Edison, and of Nazi officers, was composed of blanks.

The detailing on the façades of the buildings has been painted over. Marienbad is held within, in the crumbling plasterwork of the derelict Hotel Weimar, once one of Europe’s most sought-after hotels, which now stands rusted on the hill, like a passenger liner run aground. The town poses a question. Could a place physically exist, yet not be there? In one sense, Marianske Lazne is extant all around me, a Czech spa town of 14,000 inhabitants, with a new lift on its ski hill (according to the adverts). In another sense, it is not there at all: Marienbad can never be recovered.

King Edward VII sat on the British throne for only nine years, after a long wait for his mother Queen Victoria to die, but he managed to spend more than six months of that time in Marienbad. In the town’s collective memory he has gone down as a generous monarch, tolerant, sweet-tempered; a big man, with a matching appetite for food and women. He chain-smoked cigarettes and cigars and only rarely undertook the fat man’s walk of the day to the springs at dawn, to embark on the daily Marienbad rigmarole: cups of sulphurous water forced down, more walks, frequent urination (the waters were diuretic), another drinking course, a sweat room, a mineral-water bath, a manipulation of joints, more urination. The fat man who lost the most weight won the prize: the all-time champion was an Egyptian, El Gamel Bey, who lost 53kg during his stay.

In the Edwardian years there was competition to get into the redbrick Anglican church on Ruska Street. Women scratched and savagely kicked each other for a place on a pew at the afternoon service the king attended. Tailors, hatters, hosiers, shirtmakers, collar-makers, cuffmakers and jewellers from all the European capitals followed the “first gentleman of Europe” around the town. “Every morning on the promenade in Marienbad”, wrote a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, “they can be seen notebook in hand, jotting down particulars or making sketches of this or that feature of King Edward’s outfit. If he goes for a walk they shadow him, and if he takes a drive they are again on the lookout to spy out any other alterations in his costume, which may be worthy of imitation.” It was from Marienbad that King Edward started the fashion for wearing tweeds. He introduced Homburg hats, and dinner jackets and black tie rather than tails and white tie—the better to deal with warm nights in Bohemia. His habit of leaving the last button on his jacket unbuttoned, in deference to his girth, was quickly copied by other spa-goers and continues today.

There are at least 60 cold-water springs in Marianske Lazne, each with different chemical properties. Rudolf’s spring is alkaline, Ferdinand’s is heavy in purgative salts, while Ambrose and Karolina have exceptionally high iron content. According to balneologists, the waters are suitable for treating liver complaints, diabetes, gynaecological disorders, and obesity, among other conditions. Marienbad was not just a grand resort, it was a health resort. People came to be cured, or cleaned out. Health care has been the one constant in the town’s history; different people, altered trajectories, but the same urinary tracts, bowels, lungs, kidneys, the same layers of fat. “We do well in a recession,” the tall and somewhat looming manager of the Nove Lazne spa hotel, Karel Kalivoda, told me. “People take better care of themselves in hard times.”

Kalivoda runs a queer domain of marble colonnades, quiet with bodily functions. I followed him down seemingly endless corridors. Guests sat on little benches outside treatment rooms, each holding a treatment card. In one cabin I was introduced to a man “enjoying” a dry carbon bath. He was wrapped from the stomach down in an inflated bin-liner, filled with 99.7% clear carbon dioxide. “Our natural Viagra,” whispered Kalivoda. I was shown a cryosauna. It resembled Woody Allen’s Orgasmatron, but served only to speed up the metabolic process by blasting guests with -160ºC cold for a few seconds.

For the most part, the treatments were similar to those offered in the Edwardian age: mineral baths in zinc tubs, gas inhalations through one nostril, and the chance to wallow in peat gathered from the bogs nearby. I glimpsed a large woman in a bath of steaming peat. She was in repose, too much in repose, I thought. She looked about to sink under—like an unfortunate character in a Tarzan film, lost in the quicksand. Kalivoda was particularly proud of the peat treatments, which he claimed cleaned the blood and cured joint pains. The repeating patterns of the corridors, the curious mix of hospital and hotel smells, the motionless guests, inevitably recalled the film “Last Year in Marienbad”. Once more, as the film’s director Alain Resnais has it, they walk the corridors of a sepulchral hotel from another century, through its halls and galleries, its silence.

The beauty of Marienbad, so acclaimed by its returning guests, is in the trees about it. I hiked up from the Esplanade and within minutes found myself lost in spruce, beech, fir and pine. The path skirted the peat bog, and I had a choice of springs from which to fill my water bottle. Apart from the deer and the boar, there were traces of badgers, stoats and wild cats. There were ticks in the long grass. The clearings blazed in the sunshine. The shadows were cool and claustrophobic, at least for those who love the sea and the desert.

The Iron Curtain had sliced through the forest during the cold war, but now it was possible to hike into Germany without anyone noticing or caring, and have lunch in a tavern in one of the German border towns, the kind with cobblestones, quiet enough for the fox to bid the hare good night, as the Germans say, before circling back to Marianske Lazne. There was deep snow in the forest in the winter. You needed snow-shoes just to get to the nearby hunting lodges. Occasionally in winter, I was told, it was possible to see the distant silhouette of castles that were hidden in the summer by the greenery. The fairy-tale forest of the Brothers Grimm, in short, surrounded Marianske Lazne. A poor woodcutter, I supposed, lived hard by with his wife and two children: not Hansel and Gretel any more, because Marianske Lazne is now a Czech-speaking town, but Jenicek and Marenka. All of this is important, because the forest helps give Marienbad its sense of being suspended outside time and place.

If anyone gave Marienbad its memory, it was the great German poet and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who spent his third and final season there in 1823. The resort had appeared from the wild forest only in 1808, when a doctor at the nearby monastery in Tepla established a boarding house called the Golden Balls to treat ailments with the spring water that percolated up through the volcanic rock. Goethe was 73 and in pursuit of an 18-year-old girl, Ulrike von Levetzow, who was staying in the same boarding house. He spent the days collecting geological samples. In the evenings, he showed the rocks he had found to Ulrike. She was so uninterested that he learned to place chocolates among his finds to amuse her.

The newness of Marienbad in his time, before the advent of trains, and before the speculation and landscaping began in earnest, with the ravines filled in and the parks laid out, is one reason why Goethe still felt so present in the town. Indeed, another question I asked myself was whether the sensibility of the town would have been more cheerful if Ulrike had agreed to marry and just bedded the old man. As it was, Goethe was rejected. He penned one of his strongest and most personal poems, the “Marienbad Elegy”, on the long journey home over the mountains to Thuringia.

Ulrike lived to 95. In her old age she was the only person in the world with a living memory of Goethe and that earlier Marienbad. In an act of high sentimentalism an obelisk was put up next to the bench where Ulrike and Goethe had sat together. On it was inscribed Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Song at Evening”, a poem which still nicely describes the feel of Marianske Lazne on a summer evening, how a silence hangs over the outcrops, and the slightest breeze moves the trees in which the birds are quiet. Just wait, Goethe says, and you will be quiet too.

Marienbad’s golden age ended decisively with Edward VII’s death in 1910 and the descent into the first world war. The Treaty of Versailles produced an independent Czechoslovakia, and the new country distinguished itself with its industry, innovation and plurality. But it was hobbled by the Sudeten question—and Marienbad was at the heart of Sudetenland. By the time Britain and France betrayed Czechoslovakia in 1938, Neville Chamberlain was able to dismiss its disagreement with Hitler as “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”.

Perhaps the dark history which struck the town from then on is another reason why it feels so strangely suspended, out of the present day and the Czech Republic, not German but not Czech either, not contemporary but haunted. I found that it was easy enough to engage locals about the celebrities who were devoted to Marienbad before the Nazis took over: Gustav Mahler working on his symphonies, Rudyard Kipling playing golf, Alfred Nobel thinking peace, the revolutionary Maxim Gorky lying low in a cheap hotel, and Sigmund Freud reclining in the peat bath and considering the complexities of the human psyche.

Everyone was able to tell the story of Goethe and Ulrike, the rocks, the bench, the rejection, and so on. They were also good on the story of how Edward VII bought his mistress a hotel. But they were uncertain where exactly the large synagogue had stood on the main street, and had little or no inkling that Marienbad had been a neutral place for Jews, a place where rabbis from eastern Europe and assimilated Jewish intellectuals from central Europe could meet—perhaps because of the pacifying effects of the spa, the communal taking of the waters, the common illness and hypochondria, and the large number of Jewish doctors. Marienbad hosted a Zionist congress as late as 1937, but the synagogue was burned to the ground a year later—on Kristallnacht.

The Nazis who staffed the treatment rooms, the shops and the beer gardens following Kristallnacht hated the First Republic of Czechoslovakia and the Czech language. They found Slav aspirations and folklore repellent. They were explicit in their belief that the Jews had infected the sanitary conditions of the baths. The picture of Kaiser Franz Josef in Edward VII’s suite in the Weimar was taken down and a picture of the smooth-faced Sudeten Führer, Konrad Henlein, put up in its place. The Czechs in the town were expelled. The hotels were given over to the treatment of German war wounded.

This is all well documented, but Marianske Lazne’s official history, as shown in the town museum, makes no mention of how the roles were reversed at the end of the war. Sudeten Germans were stripped of their Czechoslovakian citizenship and banished, taking with them only what they could carry, and Czech peasants from the countryside moved into the empty apartments. The first thing the Czechs did was to remove the personal effects of the previous owners, leaving only the furniture, the anonymous paintings, the chandeliers and the pianos, and perhaps this also had the effect of instituting amnesia and foreshortening history, making 1890 appear closer than 1947.

Czechoslovakia was a free country until 1948, when the communists took over after a coup, throwing the anti-communist foreign minister out of a window in the Prague castle, and nationalising most of the property in the country, including the hotels in Marienbad. The town was renamed Marianske Lazne once more and suddenly it stood proud on the western front of the Warsaw Pact. Soviet comrades poured in, with their kidney complaints. The Czech writer Milan Kundera mentions this in his novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. The heroine, Tereza, wants to visit a spa town where she once worked, somewhere like Marianske Lazne, but finds it changed. “The streets and buildings could no longer return to their original names. As a result, a Czech spa had suddenly metamorphosed into a miniature imaginary Russia, and the past that Tereza had gone there to find had turned out to be confiscated.”

Kundera was writing with too great a sense of permanence. It is easy to see now that communism has left less of a mark on Marianske Lazne than the Belle Epoque. One overcast afternoon I walked from the Anglican church along Ruska Street and passed a rundown establishment called the Hotel Bulgaria. Its front door of glass and cheap aluminium metal was pure 1970s Leningrad. But such buildings are surprisingly few and far between in the town, almost exotic, and found nearly always in afterthoughts of annexes, public toilets and fountains. There are, by contrast, any number of swanky buildings with Edwardian associations, such as Osborne House and the next door Balmoral House, where Franz Kafka stayed.

The post-communist period has been depressing. Most of the tea rooms catered for the budget-conscious German pensioner. The apple strudel was dry, tea came on a string. The council flats in the rich villas were broken down and stood out like black teeth among the restored buildings. “This is a place for people tired of life,” a tourist guide told me. “There are no young people here. Nothing happens.”

(J.M. Ledgard is The Economist's Nairobi correspondent and author of "Giraffe". His last piece for Intelligent Life was the summer 2009 cover story, "We are all African now".)

Picture Credit: Axel-D, Jim Linwood (both via Flickr)