Lobkowicz Palace: the Embassy Garden of 1989
Why is it significant?
Stand in quiet, sloping Vlašská street, in front of a dignified Baroque palace with a German flag above the door. It looks like the most peaceful address in Prague.
Key Facts
| Place | Lobkowicz Palace: the Embassy Garden of 1989 |
|---|---|
| Address | Vlašská 19, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08710, 14.39780 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Secret Lesser Town: Kampa, the Devil's Stream & the Embassy Garden of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in quiet, sloping Vlašská street, in front of a dignified Baroque palace with a German flag above the door. It looks like the most peaceful address in Prague. In the late summer of 1989, this pavement was full of abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, little East German cars left behind by owners who had no intention of ever coming back for them.
The Lobkowicz Palace was built in the early 1700s, and since the 1970s it has housed the embassy of West Germany, today simply Germany. In 1989 East Germans could still travel to communist Czechoslovakia without a visa, and word spread that this embassy would not turn them away. So they came, first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, climbing over the back fence of the garden from the slope of Petřín, handing their children over the bars. By the end of September several thousand people were camping in the mud of a Baroque garden, in tents, under the trees, in the rain.
On the evening of the thirtieth of September 1989, the West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stepped out on to the palace balcony. He had been born near Halle, in what became East Germany, and he had come to tell these people that they could leave. He never finished his sentence. The moment he said the word for departure, the garden exploded into a roar so loud that the rest was lost... it is one of the most famous unfinished sentences in German history.
Trains took them to the West, routed through East German territory because the regime in East Berlin insisted on expelling them itself. Six weeks later the Berlin Wall fell, and a week after that, Prague began its own Velvet Revolution. In the garden today stands a bronze cast of David Černý's Quo Vadis, a Trabant walking away on four human legs, and you can glimpse it from the path on Petřín behind the embassy.
It is hard to find a better place to begin a walk about hidden Malá Strana, because almost nothing about this story shows from the street. Now walk down Vlašská, the old street of Italian builders, past the steep lane of Tržiště, towards Karmelitská. Just before the tram tracks, a gateway hides one of the loveliest gardens in Prague.