Under Four Flags

20. 4. 2022

Guido Lagus was a major figure in the pre-war cultural life of Prague. The German occupation brought his career to an abrupt end, but his life and the life of his family went on. In exile they showed an astonishing resilience and creative energy, which has come down through the generations. The family settled in England, but they never left their Prague roots entirely.

Here is an English translation of the article Under Four Flags, published in Hospodařské noviny, April 2022.

Ann Sadler-Forster lives in an old red-brick cottage in a village a few miles from the sea in the southern English county of Hampshire. The house could not be more English, but Ann and her grown-up children Jake and Jana have just become citizens of the Czech Republic. All three of them were born and grew up in England, but they consider their new Czech citizenship to be a return home. To celebrate, Ann roasted a goose with dumplings and cabbage, and they played the Czech national anthem, washed down with a glass of Moravian wine.

“It’s all about recognising where we come from,” says Ann, “and putting right a wrong. My mother Sonja and my grandparents Guido and Líza Lagus would have been glad.” Ann also talks about coming home to Europe. “Post-Brexit Britain doesn’t reflect what we feel ourselves to be. We are European.” We are sitting at her old kitchen table, looking out into the garden and Ann delves into a box. It contains artificial flowers, slightly faded. They come from the world of her grandmother Líza, from pre-war Prague. When her daughter Jana went to university fifteen years ago, Ann insisted on giving her one of the flowers. Throughout her studies, Jana kept it in a little vase on her writing desk. “It’s strange, how much personal meaning such little objects can have,” she says. “For me it really is a bridge to the past.” Jana recently had her first child, a son Miro. He has become a Czech citizen too.

Artificial flowers have more than symbolic meaning for the whole family. Ann’s grandmother was born in Prague in 1898, the second of five children of the successful Jewish businessman August Löwy, who later changed his name to Lindt. Four of the children were daughters, all of whom had an enterprising spirit, helping to run the business making artificial flowers and feathers, and ladies’ hats. In the second half of the 1920s August Lindt commissioned the steel-and-glass Lindt House on Wenceslas Square, one of the first purely modernist buildings in Prague.

“The saddest thing is that we don’t have any family left in Prague. Before the war there were so many relatives.” Ann is leafing through an album of family photos. This was a successful and confident Jewish family in Czechoslovakia’s First Republic.  “Either they were killed or scattered over the world. Yet I have always considered Prague our home. It’s something that most English people just don’t understand, but it’s something within us – through music, literature, food, all the things that I grew up with in the family.”

Ann opens a cardboard box containing artificial feathers – light red, green, brown, orange. This time they are not from Prague. In exile in 1950s London, her grandparents had to find a way to make a living. Líza understood hats and it seemed logical to set up a millinery business. Before long it was thriving.  Líza brought a continental elan to the grey everyday world of a still war-scarred city.

Ann and her older brother Nick have fond memories of visiting their grandparents at their workshop in the heart of Soho. There were prostitutes on every corner. “My grandmother knew nearly all of them by name,” says Nick. “They were very kind to me and would call out: ‘Is that your grandson? How wonderful!’”

Ann’s brother is Nick Broomfield, an internationally renowned documentary film maker. When he is not filming in the United States or elsewhere, he lives a few dozen miles from his sister in an old mill in Sussex that used to belong to their parents. Just like Ann, Nick talks about Prague as a lost home: “I always wished I could go to Prague and that I could have grown up in Prague. I just got the sense of a small city, where people were living in a much more intimate social way. I saw pictures of Prague, which was this wonderfully intact medieval city, with a warmth which London certainly doesn’t have.” The walls of Nick’s office are lined with black-and-white photographs of the English and Czech sides of the family. One of them shows Nick as a seven-year-old with his grandfather Guido. Both are smiling. “He was a very humorous chap and had a dry sense of humour.”

And then Nick adds, “I can send you his memoirs. They might interest you…”

These fragments of memories form a remarkable set of documents. They bring together the scattered pieces of Guido Lagus’s life. He died just a few months before the Velvet Revolution in 1989 with his memoirs incomplete, but he had worked up some episodes in vivid detail and with considerable literary flair. His accounts of his early life in Prague evoke the atmosphere of a lost world. We find out that his father was a travelling salesman and that his grandparents were pious Jews, who had a little grocer’s shop in what had once been the Prague Ghetto. Here is a short extract:

“How I loved the shop! I can see it so clearly that I could paint it if I had the skill.  It was a long, dark vaulted room, and the only light in it came from a glass panel in the front door and a paraffin lamp above the counter. The floor was covered with a deep layer of sawdust. The air was full of a marvellous spicy scent.”

In another scene he describes how he became infatuated with the sick mother of Sasha, his best friend from grammar school:

“There, propped up on a pile of pillows, was a girl rather than the mother of a fifteen-year-old boy – a girl as boyish in her beauty, with her pale face and huge black eyes, as Sasha was girlish in his. Taking me by the hand, she put me at ease at once and asked me about myself. Instead of being tongue-tied, I talked with her more freely than I had ever talked with anyone, even with Sasha.”

By the beginning of the next term, Sasha’s mother had died of tuberculosis.

Just as vividly, Guido recalls his traumatic experiences of the First World War, when he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian army in Italy. His portrayal of a world where sadists thrived at the expense of the weak is raw and uncompromising, and he is haunted by a sense of guilt for the lost lives of the men who served under him.

After demobilisation he became politically active. “I was profoundly influenced by October 1917 putsch by Bolsheviks in Saint Petersburg and subsequent civil war. I was an active fellow traveller and believer, but never an actual member of the Communist Party.” In Prague he studied analytical chemistry.

“Then I was given a job in the factory owned by August Lindt, the father of my girlfriend Líza.”  Guido’s knowledge of the chemical qualities of different colours proved useful in a factory making artificial flowers.

Líza and Guido married, and in 1922 their first child, Ann and Nick’s mother Sonja, was born. In 1927 August Lindt decided to have his firm’s headquarters on Wenceslas Square rebuilt as a modern department store. He needed someone to oversee the construction and, aware of his son-in-law’s technical and organisational skills, he asked Guido to do the job.

“I was successful as a ‘bauleiter’ and enjoyed it,” Guido writes, “so I spent one year at the Technical College learning building construction, use of concrete, etc. Other commissions followed and this was to be my career, including a good deal of actual architectural work, until 1939.”  

Guido set up office with the successful and highly talented architect Rudolf Wels, who had studied in Vienna under Adolf Loos.

“Uncle Charles can tell you more about that period,” Nick tells me, handing me a phone number. Charles is Guido and Líza’s younger son and is living in Mauritius. At ninety-three, he still has vivid memories of the pre-war world of his parents:

“I can remember quite often visiting his office – or rather studio.  It was a very, very large room with big tables and great big rulers… and architectural drawings on all of them… and a lot of people working on them… and father going from table to table and picking out details and correcting them. He virtually lived there.”

The studio was in the huge U Stýblů building, close to the Lindt department store on Wenceslas Square and designed by the same architect, Ludvík Kýsela. Guido and Rudolf Wels designed an elegant functionalist wing at the back, including what was later to become the legendary Semafor Theatre.

They received plenty of commissions, and in the second half of the 1930s they designed several stylish modern apartment blocks around Prague, all of which are still standing.

At some point in the 1950s, Nick and Ann remember Guido taking them to the cinema in London. The National Film Theatre was showing Martin Frič’s 1934 Czechoslovak comedy “Hej rup!” (Heave-Ho) with Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich. To the astonishment of the children Guido suddenly cried out: “Those are my legs!” Afterwards he explained that he had worked on the film as artistic designer – as is confirmed by the opening titles, which tell us that it was shot “on sets designed by Lagus and Wels.” “A couple of times I slept on set, and on one occasion they forgot to wake me up!”

For his grandchildren “Hej rup!” became a symbol of Guido’s lost Prague world. Nick chose to use a couple of extracts from the film in his recent documentary “My Father and Me”. The film is primarily about his relationship to his father, the well-known British photographer Maurice Broomfield, but it also looks at the Czech side of the family. We see shots of his mother Sonja on eight-millimetre film from family holidays in the 1950s, a strikingly beautiful and elegant young woman. Nick says that she had a huge influence on his life and career. “I think that the political side of my film making comes from my mother’s family and my grandfather, who always started with a political position and then looked to other emotions that came with it.  My mother was a great fan of Ken Loach’s films and they both loved Charlie Chaplin for his humour and his political position.” We find the same political impulse in most of Nick’s documentaries. They are direct, sometimes raw, and often expose hidden violence in the exercise of power.

Nick Broomfield is not the only subsequent member of the family to have caught the film bug. His uncle Charles Lagus remembers seeing his father working on “Hej rup!” and other films for the Barrandov Studios before the war. Later Charles himself became a cameraman with the BBC, where he got to know a young naturalist, who wanted to make films. “So we decided to go off round the world,” Charles recalls. “It was just the two of us. I was the one who knew all about the equipment. I did all the filming. Anything he noticed that could be botanically interesting, I filmed in detail. I filmed him looking at it and examining it.  When we got back to England the films were shown and were considered to be absolutely brilliant.” The young naturalist was none other than David Attenborough. “We were rebels,” Attenborough recalls, “and up to that moment no-one took us seriously.”

But to come back to Prague in the 1930s – after Hitler came to power in Germany, Guido’s political engagement led him to build up links with the German exile community. For a while he was publisher and editor-in-chief of the left-wing literary magazine Neue Deutsche Blätter, to which nearly all the most prominent anti-Nazi German writers contributed, including Thomas Mann and Anna Seghers.

After the occupation of Prague in March 1939, he realised that the Gestapo would soon be coming after him.

“I remember my father saying we have to get out of this. The Nazis are killing and imprisoning all the Jews. We have to get out. He was a wonderful manager, arranger. What I remember well is that one day he said – We’re leaving. Here are a couple of rucksacks. If you have anything important, put it in there. We’re leaving today!” Charles was ten at the time. They managed to escape to Poland and then by ship from Gdynia to Dover. Sixteen-year-old Sonja was already in London, where she had been working as an au-pair. Four months later war broke out.

Ann has a photograph of her grandfather in British military uniform, and for a while he also served in the US armed forces. He was appointed a “repatriation officer” and his task in the last months of the war was to help people who had been liberated from concentration camps to get home to Czechoslovakia. He was one of the first to go inside Bergen-Belsen after its liberation. Later he would rarely speak of what he saw, but Nick did manage to record him talking about the horror of the experience:

“There were thousands of dead bodies lying about and they were not so gruesome as those who survived, who were just crawling about like beasts on the grass there. And when we told them they could crawl out of the concentration camp, they were afraid. They couldn’t grasp it. They thought it is not true, only a German trick. I have given up hope in mankind. The idea of the general goodness of people has never been true and never will be. It is just idealism and will remain so.”

In the Holocaust Guido lost both his parents and his three sisters.

After demobilisation Guido became head of the London office of the Czechoslovak News Agency. In his memoir he retells an episode from late autumn 1947. He had a private meeting with the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, who was in London on his way back from an official visit to the United States. The trip had been a disaster, as the Americans had turned their backs on Czechoslovakia, realising that the country was being rapidly drawn into the orbit of the Soviet Union. Guido remembers that Masaryk was at the end of his nerves:

“He got up and started walking again: … ‘Do you know what insomnia is?  Does anybody know? People think insomnia means just to sleep badly. No, no, no! My insomnia is not to sleep at all…  In the morning, when other people wake up after a restful night, I am still utterly exhausted. I have seen doctors in Prague, consulted specialists in New York and this is the result.’

Putting both hands in his jacket pockets, he pulled out little boxes and glass tubes.

‘So I return home, pockets full of useless pills and drops but no loan. Not a single dollar.’

He went on talking and walking, repeating all he had said before… Then came the unforgettable moment when he stopped in front of me and said: ‘You know that I am descended from a family of lunatics and suicides.’”

Just three months later the communists took control of Czechoslovakia in a coup, and two weeks after that, on 10th March 1948, Masaryk’s body found on the courtyard of the Czechoslovak Foreign Ministry. For Guido was a terrible blow. The cause of Masaryk’s death has never been clarified – whether he killed himself or was killed. Either way, he had come under unbearable pressure. Guido’s text ends with a sentence added in pencil.

“Finally, I should like to make the obvious point that it is not impossible for a person possibly of suicidal tendencies to be done to death by a hand other than his own.”

Realising that dark times were coming in Czechoslovakia, Guido left the Czechoslovak News Agency in 1948.

Nick Broomfield says that his grandfather always felt rather like a fish out of water in England. Líza saved them financially with her idea for the millinery business in Soho, but Guido was far from happy. When Líza died young in 1962, he immediately passed the business on to his employees. “Grandfather was grateful to the English for giving him a new home,” Nick says. “He admired British civilisation and a certain moderation in British society, which he could identify with, but at the same time I think he suffered somewhat. In Prague before the war he was in the middle of things. He lost it all and tried not to think about it.”

Nor did Nick’s mother Sonja entirely come to terms with losing her home. Her marriage to Maurice Broomfield was happy, but her husband’s family, from a provincial industrial town in the north of England, always considered her suspiciously exotic. She had been sixteen when she left Prague and she never quite lost her foreign accent. In the mid-1970s she travelled with Ann, who was then in her early twenties, to Prague, to show her some of the places she knew from her childhood. “It was very nostalgic, and I had the feeling I was at home in Prague.” Ann remembers that she fell in love with the city. At the time she was studying restoration at the Courtauld Institute in London, and she applied for a British Council scholarship to Prague, where she given a placement at the National Gallery. By coincidence she ended up staying in Terronská Street in the Prague district of Bubeneč, where her mother, uncle and grandparents had lived before the war. This was at the height of the period of normalisation, the gradual return to hard-line rule after the 1968 Soviet led invasion. “It was amazing just to be there, but also to begin to understand the issues that people were living in under communism,” Ann recalls.

It was also during this time that Ann began to find out about the complicated fate of many members of her Czech family during and after the war. Against all odds, her great-grandfather August Lindt survived the war in the Terezín ghetto along with his daughter Pavla – Líza’s sister and Ann’s great-aunt. Pavla took over running the family firm after the war, but times were changing fast, and after the communist takeover in 1948 she was in ever greater danger. She was both Jewish and bourgeois, two reasons for the Stalinist authorities to mistrust her. Trumped up charges were brought against her, claiming that she had been selling industrial secrets to the Americans. She was sentenced to seven years in prison and was only rehabilitated in the 1960s.

In the Lagus family, it is not just film that has passed through the generations. As an architect, Ann’s son Jake Forster has reconnected with pre-war world of his great-grandfather. He is working in the New York office of Rem Koolhaas, one of the great architects and philosophers of architecture of our time. Like his mother and sister, Jake is now a Czech citizen. “Architecture is there to improve people’s lives,” he says. “It is not always as altruistic as that, but we should push to try to challenge what it is to make buildings.” We can be sure that his great-grandfather Guido would have shared his sense of engagement.

At the same time, I think that Guido would have felt pride – perhaps with a hint of irony, given the unpredictable twists of history – at his family’s return to the Czech fold. “I am not Czech,” he once said. “I was a Czechoslovak and now I am British. And I was born as an Austrian. I wore four different uniforms in my life. In the end you don’t belong anywhere.”

Artificial flowers from 1930s Prague, made by Lindt

Still from the film Hej rup!