Czechs have been celebrating freedom in at least one classic way: Everybody in Prague, or everybody who can, is getting pregnant. The women of age who are not pregnant have just given birth; those who by some mystery have not just given birth and who are not pregnant are scouring the landscape for father candidates. There are stroller jams at traffic lights and in grocery store queues. And the bellies, burgeoning with brand-new Czechs, are in the cafés, in restaurants, lolling in parks, on the trams, in the shops, and in the streets. If you are an available male and have no interest in starting a family, it's best not to go to Prague right now. If you require a family immediately, book a flight.

"It's a phenomenon of the last perhaps year and a half," says the scholarly, polished Prince Karel Jan Schwarzenberg, tapping his sumptuous briar empty of ash and refilling it with Virginia blend. "I can only assume that it's a measure of confidence. We had one of the lowest birth rates in Europe just a few years ago; the young people were holding off. Suddenly, children are being born."

We're sitting in a quiet Nové Město café called Universal. Although he owns a great deal of Prague real estate, including the building in which Havel has his office, the prince uses this as his ad hoc refuge when he has appointments "downtown."

Schwarzenberg, scion of an illustrious German/Czech/Austrian house, is arguably the most entertaining and certainly the most intellectually robust and politically active incarnation of the returned aristocrat. His family name—which translates as "Black Mountain"—first appeared in the books in the thirteenth century. The current prince was forced to flee Bohemia—the westernmost Czech lands, which are south of Poland, east of Germany, north of Austria—with his parents in 1948, as the Soviets took over Czechoslovakia. They retreated to Vienna, where he was raised in a grand Schwarzenberg palace. But they left behind five castles and 28,000 acres on estates in Bohemia, among them the Palais Schwarzenberg in central Prague.

During his forty-one years of exile, the prince was a major supporter of Czech political resistance. He returned to Prague in 1976 as an observer of dissident trials for the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, of which he was elected president in 1984. Havel, during his first term as president, appointed Schwarzenberg to serve as chancellor of Czechoslovakia—essentially the majordomo and chief adviser to the president—a post he held from 1990 to 1992. Since 2004, Schwarzenberg has represented Prague's sixth district as a senator in Parliament. He divides his time between his house in Prague, near the Castle; the family seat in Bohemia, from which he manages his logging operations; the Palais Schwarzenberg, in Vienna; and a residence in Switzerland.

"You could take the history of the twentieth century and argue that the World Wars were really the European civil wars," Schwarzenberg says. "Think of the American South—when you go there, you can still feel your Civil War. It's the same in these places, from Warsaw to Belgrade and Budapest: For some years still, you will be able to feel this Cold War. Every place also has a period that it sees as its golden era, and for Prague that was the First Republic, between the two great wars. I think we're approaching another time like this now. I was gone for forty years, from the age of ten, but even at ten I told myself that if I ever had the chance to come back, I would. To be back, to work and contribute to the creation of something—it's the greatest adventure of my life. And I think my feeling about it is not uncommon. People are invested in building something here."