The Roots of Czech Democracy

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 456, 19 March 1948, Page 19

The Roots of Czech Democracy

HE outcome of the events in which Czechoslovakia is at present involved cannot be foreseen, but the deep-rooted liberalism: of the Czech people is a not unworthy foundation on which free men may build their hopes. The history of that liberalism is traced in the

accompanying articie, specially written for "The Listener’

by Professor

F. L. W.

WOOD

Professor of History at Victoria University College

OHEMIA, said Bismarck in a famous phrase, is a fortress set by God Himself in the heart of the continent; and, he added, control of that fortress gave a military race domination over central Europe. Two of the most destructive wars that have devastated Europe-those of 1618-48 and 1939-45 --were in fact begun by the seizure of Bohemia. But it is not only for strategic reasons that it has been a persistent storm centre. For centuries it has been inhabited by two distinct branches of the European family of races, Germans and Czechs, who only upon rare occasions have found the means to live amicably together. Moreover, their conflict has been seen by some thinkers as a sample of one of the basic themes of European history. That theme, which came to be a favourite one among German propagandists, was the struggle of Germans against Slavs, in which the Germans claimed to defend the values of Western culture and therefore to deserve the support of Western Europe in general. This was the war of Germanism versus Slavism prophesied, if not willed, by the younger Moltke, with Russia increasingly seen as the embodiment of Slavonic and non-European values. It was a war in which, as Bismarck had pointed out, Bohemia must play a vital role: "Bohemia in the hands of Russia would be Germany’s enslavement; Bohemia in our hands would be war without mercy or truce with

the &mpire of the Isars." But Bismarck the realist devoted splendid talents to preventing a final breach between Germany and Russia, and it was left to lesser men to build a foreign policy on the assumption of their basic hostility, On this assumption it was easy to argue that all Slavs were not only inferior but to be treated as enemies; and that Bohemia was a wedge of alien culture, an advanced outpost from which Russians could _ strike quickly at the heart of Germany. This whole argument is utterly falsified by plain facts. It is true that the Czechs are Slavs, and up to 1914 a section of them looked for salvation to Tsarist Russia as the only force strong enough to overthrow their Germanic oppressors. But the great interest of the Czech. story is precisely that ‘they possessed a tough and apparently in-

destructible national tradition of their own: a tradition which differed more sharply from that of their Slavopic kinsmen than from that of their German enemies. Their culture was western and individualistic. It was hammered out of a long and turbulent history and preserved in defiance of the strongest political pressure and organised propaganda known to our fathers. The story may well begin with the Battle of the White Mountain in. 1620 when Frederick the "Winter King" was ignominiously driven from Prague. Not much sympathy need be wasted on Frederick. Yet the fact is that his victory enabled Ferdinand the Hapsburg to revolutionise Czech life. In the 14th Century Prague had been the Imperial capital and one of the leading centres of European culture. There had followed the Hussite period, when Czech patriotism was armed with a religious fervour which was for years irresistible, and which even in defeat could extract significant privileges from Pope and King. Now, after 1620, the native Czech nobility was removed, as by a surgical operation, through migration, proscription, confiscation, and inflation. In their place was established -a cosmopolitan, but mainly German nobility. Partly by accident and partly by design Ferdinand followed the modern technique of striking specifically at the nerve centres of (continued on page 21)

BACKGROUND TO THE CZECHS

(continued from page 19) cultural life. The wealth of one of Europe’s richest provinces, and with it the power of patronage, was transferred to reliable hands. The re-established Catholic Church and the whole educational system, branded as wicked and seditious the previous phase of national achievement. Czech intellectual leaders

maintained for a time a precarious cul!ture in exile, but in Bohemia itself Czech literature died, and the Czech language sank to the status of a peasant dialect. Folk Art Among the peasantry there remained a reservoir of native culture, which interacted with importations from abroad. In the field of architecture, for instance, the court, the church and the new nobility built extensively, employing architects from Austria, Italy and Spain. This wave of building put more and more work into the hands of Czech craftsmen, with the result that the peasants them-’ selves were stimulated to create in their own native tradition, Folk art flourished, particularly ceramic, strongly influenced by the arts and crafts of the Italian Renaissance. Apart from the plastic arts and decoration, the baroque roof lines of village houses showed the strength of Italian influence on peasant life. Moreover, Czech Baroque turned out to be something different from contemporary trends abroad. After 1620, as before it, Bohemia drew deeply from the cultural tradition of the west, without becoming merely derivative. And similarly in the field of music. The Czechs are a deeply musical people, as the 18th Century English traveller Burney tells with such emphasis. Music, with the native language, was of the texture of national life. Hussite hymns had summed up the essence of Czech nationalism. Then, with the Jesuit conversion, there came the music of the Catholic church. Italian music was performed regularly in all Czech and Moravian churches, and in the homes of the aristocracy. Thus to the indomitable native musicality of the Czechs there was added a powerful and

sustained stimulus from abroad: and it was from these two sources that the Czech "pre-classical" composers drew. True, as the result of political disaster, there was for a time little future in Bohemia for the creative musician. But Czechs in the great capitals of Europe ~-often with names rendered into Italian or German-helped to build the great. movement that culminated in Mozart. and Beethoven. Indeed, Mozart was. hailed in Prague while still ignored in Vienna, and Don Giovanni was accordingly specially written to present to a | Bohemian audience. National Revival In short, though Germanisation after | 1620 was in some ways extraordinarily | successful, the roots of Czech national- | ism were not destroyed, and in the fav- | ouring atmosphere of the early 19th | Century a powerful growth took place. There was in itself nothing surprising | in this. The same impulse was felt by peoples throughout Europe who lacked | the full political expression of their | ideals: from Greece to Ireland and from Finland to Italy the same forces operated. What was remarkable, however, was the form taken by Bohemian nationalism. In a word, it was democratic and liberal, not merely as a talking point against oppression, but as a consistently held article of faith, embedded in religion as well as in politics, The main lines of national revival followed a familiar pattern, based on pride in all things Bohemian. Scholars relearnt the language from peagants and with help from the languages of other Slavonic peoples, built Czech once more into a literary instrument. Czech writers were able to share in European trends, and. expressed a romantic, at times Byronic, tendency which seems to have been quite foreign to their didactic and less imaginative forebears. As the movement gathered strength, to speak Czech became a badge of honour, not of helotry. Nobles became the pupils of their stable hands, armed themselves with Jungmann’s great dictionary, and stammered through unfamiliar phrases in public places. In art, too, there was. a strong impulse. Though, with the exception of sculpture, Czech plastic arts were never outstanding outside the field of folk art, the Romantic Age produced its artists in the persons of Joseph Manes, and later Kosarek. Manes, with | the composer Smetana, turned romantic art in Bohemia away from German influence and academic convention to find | genuine sources of inspiration in his own countryside. Czech composers turned to the peasant in whose songs and dances were the natural spontaneity, the rich melody and rhythm of a deeply musical and optimistic people. If they did not compose music of the soul, it was nevertheless of the heart. Smetana, Dvorak (more cosmopolitan but still genuinely Czech in feeling and spontaneity), and others less well known outside Bohemia, gave the Czechs through their music the full expression of their nascent national feeling. Youth Movement To this revival in literature, art and music, there was added in 1862 the beginnings of a youth movement of enor- _ (continued on next page)

BACKGROUND TO THE CZECHS

(continued from previous page) mous importance for the future: the Sokol (Falcon) organisation founded by Tyrs and Fugner. Like much else in Czech life, it had a foreign inspiration but adapted to different purposes. Tyrs found in physical education a means not only to fitness of the body, but to inner discipline’ and patriotic devotion, "We must march freely, with head held high. Perish on the way or be the first to reach the goal. All or nothing. There are mottoes for you." Unlike the Nazi youth movement, the Sokol did have a

fundamental democratic basis, and prepared its members, men and women, for active citizenship; but it taught that citizenship meant self-sacrificing loyalty to comrades and above all to one’s fatherland. "It is not the past, even the most flourishing, that can guarantee the existence of a nation,’ wrote Tyrs, "but its activity and health in the present." Nevertheless it was in their past history above all that the Czechs found the inspiration and character of their movement. Here was the root of their

democracy, to which Tyrs strove to dedicate the services of disciplined youth, and here lay the root of their cultural affinity to western Europe. For two hundred years, so the Czechs now felt, their history had been interpreted for them by aliens. Scholarly and indeed patriotic works in Latin or German had written Bohemia’s past in terms pleasing to Jesuits and Viennese. Now Czech scholarship found in that history another meaning. Led by Palacky, whose great history began to appear in 1836 (in German) they found the flowering of Bohemian history in the heroic period of Huss and those who followed him. This was seen not only as a struggle against foreign rule, but as a struggle for freedom and individual rights. The true tradition of Bohemia, Palacky taught, was that which spoke again in the liberalism of the 18th Century enlightenment, in the idealism of the French Revolution, in the absolute moral values of Kant. "Whenever we were victorious," he wrote, "it was always more as the result of spiritual forces than of physical might, and whenever we succumbed there was always the insufficiency of our spiritual activity and of our moral courage responsible for it.’ Democracy and Social Change This was explosive and dangerous thinking, but its democratic intention was in tune with the temper of the people and with their political situation as well as with their history. Unlike the nobles of Poland and Hungary, the Bohemian upper class mainly stood aloof from the national revival, and thus threw leadership on to peasants and bourgeoisie, This is perhaps what saved it. Such men were interested not only in the traditional demand for "national rights" -the independent status of the Crown of St. Wencelas-but in the human tights of individuals. Hence the rise of the "New Czechs" from about 1870 onwards-men who insisted that social change must accompany the new order. Here lies the true significance of Masaryk, Palacky’s great pupil and successor. Himself of peasant stock, he knew how vital was economic change to anything that could be fairly called democracy; and he taught that Czechs must build the future by their own efforts, not relying on the help of Tsarist Russia. It was he who pulled together the threads of the Czech tradition, and provided the leadership to give them political reality. The fate of Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia is too tough a subject for this article; and indeed it cannot yet be written. Meantime it may be said that the Czechoslovakia of the 1920’s and 1930's with all its faults went a long way towards embodying western ideals of democracy and personal freedom; and that it valiantly defended them in the heart of reactionary Europe. In 1935 Benes, whose name had long been honourably associated with Masaryk, succeeded him in the presidency of the republic as well as in the spiritual leadership of Czech democracy; and Benes’s fall before Hitler in 1938 was the effective beginning of World War II. And it scarcely needs to be added that in the trials that followed the Czechs fought the foreign tyrant with a persistent heroism worthy of their highest traditions,