English Translation

4.3 To this day, this city is the stone-shaped and therefore incorruptible image of its German past. And especially the two epochs, since Prague was the metropole of the German Empire, the l4th and 17th centuries, have shaped the face of this city. Romanian architecture and the Gothic style of the German Middle Ages, early and late Renaissances of modern times, Baroque and Rococo, the hands reach here to a dance of unique beauty, which together with the landscape's lavishly and enchantingly designed frame of nature can be heard a symphony of the visual arts, as it probably only emerged once in German lands in such vastness and majesty, in such grace and simplicity and in such splendour and greatness of artistic will and skill. It is only a matter of course that artists of all German eras have always stayed in the walls of this city for more or less a long time. German emperors and German princes, high nobility and rich bourgeoisie, well-stocked farms and rich abbots created through generations with their art orders the possibility of living- 9 3i