In 2005, Czech television broadcast a spin-off of the BBC's Greatest Britons show and invited its viewers to choose the “Greatest Czech.” A surprise occurred. The greatest number of votes went to the Czech inventor and fin de siecle genius Jára da Cimrman. The tens of thousands of Czechs who sent in votes for him blithely ignored the reason why he had to be disqualified in the end: the unimportant fact that their idol never existed.
Jára da Cimrman is a fictitious Czech polymath, originally presented in a radio show in 1966, then from 1967 in the theater Divadlo Járy Cimrmana (The Jára Cimrman Theater) by Czech humorists, mainly by the author duo Zdeněk Svěrák (1936–) and Ladislav Smoljak (1931–2010). The shows had a stable form: a bogus introductory “seminar” featuring presentations by “scholars” concerning various aspects of the “Master's” oeuvre, followed by a comic play fictitiously attributed to him. The theater became very popular and Cimrman an almost parodic cult. He and his theater also inspired three film movies.
The popularity of the invented inventor has several dimensions. One of them is the distance from the national pathos, an accent on humor and (self)irony, which constitutes a major part of the Czech national identity.Footnote 1 The second is an ambivalent nostalgia towards the Habsburg empire. The ironic cult of Jára Cimrman somehow illustrates this ambivalence; Cimrman is depicted as a Czech nationalist and anti-Habsburg rebel, but at the same time he is a part of the nostalgically recollected fin-de-siécle past. After 1914, he is unable to live in the new world created by the Great War.Footnote 2
The peak of Cimrman's popularity came in the 1980s. During that period, one of the most commercially successful history books was Osud trůnu habsburského (The Fate of the Habsburg Throne, 1982), a history of the Habsburg family written by historian Jan Galandauer and communist journalist Miroslav Honzík (and, as a secret co-author, the historian František Svátek, whose work was banned for a time after 1968). A year later, the exiled Czech writer Milan Kundera published his essay on “Central Europe” which he claimed was defined by the Habsburg past.Footnote 3
There were some grounds for nostalgia, especially if we reconsider the twentieth century. The image of Franz Joseph I evoked stability and a relatively liberal era in comparison to subsequent decades. He ruled for sixty-eight years; during the next sixty-eight years, there were six different regimes on Czech territory. In eight more years, there would be not only yet another regime change, but the Czechoslovak state would dissolved altogether. This image was balanced by the sense of second-class citizenship under Habsburg rule, especially when seen from the nationalist point of view, and of the incompetent trusteeship of a decaying empire. The ominous prophecies of the nineteenth century that without the Austrian empire there would be no security for a small nation between Germany and Russia proved to be even more true during the twentieth century. Even then, however, Czech nostalgia for the Habsburg empire remained limited, ambivalent, and more cultural than political. According to polls taken on the centenary of the end of the Habsburg empire, 70% of Czech society considers the break-up of Austria-Hungary to have been a good thing.Footnote 4
Even the considerable efforts at relativization undertaken by some Czech historians and columnists after the Velvet Revolution did not bring about a generalized rosy view of the Habsburg past. Sometimes, the image of an impotent empire with a distant and nationally-alienated administrative center is even evoked as the background for a criticism of the European Union.Footnote 5
When, during the 2013 presidential election the populist Miloš Zeman competed against the right-wing liberal Karel Schwarzenberg, some elements of the Habsburg legacy in the popular imagination became part of the public debate, since Schwarzenberg was a member of an old, Habsburg-era aristocratic family. This was part of his public image, and he was even half-humorously titled “the duke.” His campaign did not succeed. Some of his followers, like film director Jiří Menzel, said this was the fault of the main part of Czech society, whom he called the “descendants of servants.” His comment was a variation on an old, much-covered topic: according to some critics, the Czech nation, which rejected its aristocracy (with the Habsburgs at its head), has very weak elites. Together with the story about being part of a backward empire, the Czechs tell stories about themselves as somehow being an “imperfect nation,” which oscillates between “provincial messianism”Footnote 6 and complete failure when it comes to generating civic loyalty to the state.Footnote 7
This essay seeks to characterize the roots of dominant Czech approaches to the Habsburg empire in critical dialogue with two authors, František Palacký and Tomáš Masaryk, who offered the most significant frameworks that have long informed—and indeed continue to inform—Czech discourse about the Habsburgs.
From Federalist Dream to “European China”: The Habsburg Empire as an Empire
We can accept the positions of Pieter M. Judson that, first, “by the last third of the nineteenth century the empire of the Habsburgs increasingly asserted a unique ability to create a productive unity out of the cultural diversity of its people.” Second, that nationalists who challenged empire did not really represent nations per se, but rather “nationalists’ occasional mobilizations of large numbers of people for specific issues made it easy for them to claim that they indeed speak for existing nations.”Footnote 8 Finally, that it was “War” that “destroyed the Empire of the Habsburgs” and gave the nationalists the chance to transform their pretensions into reality.Footnote 9 Nevertheless, especially when we are discussing memory, this loss of legitimacy, the empire's fall, and its discreditation as a result of its role in starting the war are also historical facts. Furthermore, as historian Geoffrey Wawro points out, at the time of its collapse, the empire was perceived by many both within and beyond its borders as an archaic and dysfunctional “sick man of Europe.”Footnote 10
It was Friedrich Engels who described the Czechs as a “reactionary people.”Footnote 11 Maybe he was right, but the Czechs had an answer to the charge: could they be anything other than reactionary when forced to live as part of an empire wherein “progress” was so often synonymous with German nationalism? Could they cease to be “reactionary” without either the substantial modification or dissolution of the empire?
The main protagonist of Czech nationalism was historian František Palacký (1798–1876), the “father of the nation” for Czechs (and “nothing but a learned German run mad” according to Engels).Footnote 12 Both directly as a political leader and writer and indirectly as a historian, he developed an idea about the ambivalent relationship of the Czechs with the monarchy. On the one hand, he declared a strong, rational loyalty to the empire; on the other, he set conditions on that loyalty. The main question he posed was simple in its formulation: can an empire become a federation?
As a Protestant, Palacký was writing both a history and a political program for a Catholic nation within a Catholic empire. As a liberal—and at the same time a spokesman for a nation weaker in political, social, and cultural terms—he had to ally with the conservatives and formulate conservative solutions. As a democratic nationalist, he had to side with empire because of the fears of destructive elements that came precisely from the nationalisms of other nations in his view.
The main legitimization of the Empire for Palacký was the defense against Others (Turks, Russians, Germans). In earlier centuries this meant the Ottoman Empire; in 1848, when he refused an invitation to the Frankfurt Parliament, it was the Russian empire, the horrible possibility of “universal monarchy,” “an infinite and inexpressible evil, a misfortune without measure or bound.”Footnote 13 Of course, a further Other for him was German nationalism.
It was the pan-nationalisms of Russians and Germans that had created a situation in which any smaller nation might cease to exist. This was the moment at which negative legitimization could yield a positive “Idea of the Austrian state,” the name of Palacký's main political work, published in 1865 as a warning against the threat of dualism.Footnote 14 The idea which could better legitimize the Austrian state was federalism, thereby guaranteeing the existence of all nations within the state as well as considerable autonomy to govern themselves. According to Palacký, even the Hungarians, who wanted much more, would receive the best possible outcome in a federalist state because temporary overlordship could not absolve them from their existential fear for which Palacký expressed understanding (he quoted Herder's prophecy of the Hungarians’ disappearance). Only a federation could achieve this.
Conversely, the fulfilment of Hungarian demands would make the injustice of empire a “double injustice,” and in fact “the opposite of the idea of the modern Austrian state.”Footnote 15 Through a process that we might call ethnic gerrymandering, it would make the Slavic nations (almost the majority of the population) of the Empire into a subordinate caste. It would mean the end of Slavic loyalty to the Empire, and the beginning of the end of Austria.Footnote 16
Both in 1848 and 1865, Palacký formulated his federalist views in close conclave with the aristocracy and in opposition to the liberal centralists.Footnote 17 Quite logically, a federation meant a very conservative structure, suited to the conservation of local differences as well as to sustaining the legitimacy of the unifying center: the Habsburg family. Palacký did not consider himself a reactionary, however. His struggle for the nation was for him part of the struggle for progress. He considered the liberal centralists of governing nations to be hypocritical defenders of their national privileges, the price of which might be described as the “national helotism” of others.Footnote 18
Palacký closed his historical work with the year 1526, the year the Habsburgs came to the Czech throne. The center of Czech historical consciousness thus became the Middle Ages, while the next three Habsburg centuries, in particular the seventeenth and eighteenth, acquired from the national standpoint a somewhat problematic status, with an alien aristocracy arriving after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 to replace the exiled Protestant aristocracy. The most important moment in Czech history for Palacký was the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. Into the center of the Catholic nation's national identity came the beginning of the Protestant line of Czech history. These preferences carried very clear political implications: as the violent re-Catholization of the Czech nation in the seventeenth century was the work of Habsburg rule, once this process was considered illegitimate or even traumatic, then also the rule of that dynasty could be problematized by reference to this “original sin.”
Both Germans and Czechs could feed their nationalism with the feeling that they represented something more advanced than the “rotten empire.” Czechs’ national self-consciousness grew from the fact that the Czech lands became the most important taxpayers in the empire, such that Czech nationalists sometimes wondered why they should finance an archaic imperial center.Footnote 19 The nationalist use of this argument was not hindered by the fact that most of the developed industry in the Czech lands was owned by Czech Germans rather than Czechs. At the same time, the Czech nationalist political elites often blocked progressive and liberal reforms and supported the “iron circle of the Right” in exchange for national concessions.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937)—sociologist and head of the small intellectual party called the “Realists”—developed some of Palacký's impulses in his philosophy of Czech history. Based on the thesis that there was considerable continuity between Protestantism and the Enlightenment, Masaryk argued that the Czech nation had its “idea” in the general idea of humanity that passed in a line from Jan Hus through the Czech Reformation and Comenius to the Enlightenment and modern-day Czech nationalism. This philosophical notion also had a political implication: this modern and universally humanist ideal nation was implicitly or explicitly contrasted not only with the real nation and its bitterly felt backwardness (“Czech Abdera and Rowdytown”), but also with the empire as the carrier of this backwardness, a “European China,” as Masaryk's collaborator Jan Herben described it.Footnote 20
After 1914, Masaryk became the head of the resistance in exile, and declared his will to struggle for Czech independence on the five-hundred-year anniversary of Jan Hus's death (July 6, 1915). At that time, Masaryk was in the minority. Beginning even with his war memoirs (called World Revolution in the Czech original from 1925, and The Making of a State in English from 1927), Masaryk described the moments that had been formative for his decisions in almost symbolical ways. On the one hand, he found that at the beginning of the war many Czech politicians, as well as a large swath of Czech public opinion, were waiting to be saved by a Russian victory (which he believed was neither probable nor desirable). On the other hand, he met the former (and later) Prime Minister of Cisleithania, Ernest Von Koerber, whom he trusted, and asked him what was likely to happen to Cisleithania in the event of the victory of the Central Powers. The sad (and at the moment when Masaryk was writing his memoirs, safely dead) Austrian statesman had to confirm to Masaryk his fears that in this case the Austro-Hungarian Empire would probably become more dependent on Germany, which would make the position of Austrian Slavic nations even more unequal than it already was.Footnote 21
Masaryk thus had a similar dilemma as Palacký: Pan-Germanism or Pan-Slavism, or how to escape them. Now, however, the Habsburg empire no longer meant simply an unjust system with a hope of better prospects, but had effectively merged with Pan-Germanism. Against this backdrop the alternative he found appeared very attractive: identification with the cause of the Allied powers, and concomitant identification of their imperial power with the cause of justice for (some) smaller nations.
Masaryk's option—alliance with the western empires (France, Britain, US)—combined two qualities: they were the most developed world powers that combined democratic ideas with power, and they were relatively distant and without territorial interests in the region. Masaryk fought hard to cast the Great War as a struggle of principles (“democracy” against “theocracy”) and to declare the national emancipation of the Czechs (and thus the break-up of Austria) as the necessary complement of the victory of the better principle.Footnote 22
For the western world, the war meant a deep civilizational crisis. But the Czechs (like the Russians) could blame not modern civilization, but the backwardness of their own imperial state. It is quite striking how much Masaryk, long an analyst of the modern crisis, focused much less on civilizational crisis and more on developing a fairly Manichean view of the struggling sides. He did not even consider the war a great tragedy, but rather a chance for emancipation, and even feared it might end too soon, drowning his expectations, and worked tirelessly to prevent such an outcome.Footnote 23
In spite of Masaryk's vision, the predominant Czech experience of the Great War was one of tragedy. The dimension of civilizational crisis was, however, also missing: people were sent to war not by modern civilization, but by their backward empire, and for “His Majesty the Emperor.” Even the greatest Czech response to the war, Jaroslav Hašek's Schweik, can be read in an ambivalent way. It is at once a radical critique about the travesty of the whole world of culture and civilization imploding in such a bloody absurdity as the Great War, but above all it is a parody of a very particular local form of that world, embodied by the old world of Habsburg Austria-Hungary.
Small Means Innocent? The Czech Nation as a Nation
When the reviewers and essayists of the 1920s and 30s debated Hašek's Schweik, they emphasized the other aspect of the plebeian hero, which they considered characteristic of the Habsburg heritage. As result of their long political life in opposition, with an alienated relationship to the “alien” state, Czechs had lost their sense of civic loyalty to the state and their feeling for constructive political work and statecraft.Footnote 24 The problem did not end with the fall of the Habsburgs, because the new state and new national identity was constructed to a considerable extent around a negation of the old one. The need to odrakouštět (de-Austrianize), to overcome the mentality connected with second-rate citizenship and old-school hierarchical Austro-Hungarian society, was one of Masaryk's key slogans. The promotion of democratic values was strongly connected to the negation of the past. The new republic abolished aristocratic titles, and with the slogan “undo White Mountain,” organized a major land reform.
Masaryk combined strong negation of the recent past with a modernizing democratic ethos and a strong accent on the mythologized Hussite and Protestant legacy. During his triumphal comeback from exile, he visited the iconic town of the Hussites, Tábor, and declared “Tábor is our program.” The young journalist Ferdinand Peroutka (Masaryk's critical follower) then pointed out that the Czech nation was mainly Catholic. “The circumstance, accented by celebratory speakers, that we are children of [the 15th Century Hussite leader] Žižka is something completely meaningless in contrast with the serious and sensational circumstance that we are children of orderly citizens from the times of Franz Joseph.”Footnote 25 But the image of the monarchy in the heads of those children had started to be dominated by the black legend of the Habsburgs, an image of “three hundred years of suffering” as part of a nation governed by an alien dynasty, an alien aristocracy, and (in some versions) an alien church.Footnote 26
A few decades later, this emphasis on a break with the past would be followed and developed by the Czechoslovak communists during their successful self-integration into the national tradition and the construction of their own hegemony during the 1940s. They could present themselves as a radical version of the “best traditions” of the Czech nation, in the words of Masaryk's student and later leading Czech Stalinist Kulturträger Zdeněk Nejedlý.Footnote 27 To this end, the nation was explicitly and consistently identified with its lower classes. Not only did populaire mean völkisch, as István Bibó observed about central European nationalisms,Footnote 28 but also the social content of völkisch was informed by a Stalinist version of a vague “class analysis,” with national and class characteristics often merging in symbolic caricatures of the alienated German-speaking aristocracy, the similarly aloof “cosmopolitan” (read: Jewish) capitalist or intellectual, and the real Czech worker or peasant as the core of the nation.Footnote 29 It is worth noting that mainstream liberal anti-Communists after 1989 promoted “de-Communization” as an adequate way of “coming to terms with the past”; of course, this “de-Communization” imitated “de-Nazification,” but in fact also structurally repeated “de-Austrianization,” as well.
Masaryk also had Palacký's problem: a small nation between Germany (with 3 million frustrated Germans inside the new state, violently prevented from self-determination; Czechs proved to be very skillful at ethnic gerrymandering) and the threat of “universal Russian monarchy” (in an updated Bolshevik version). His solution, to a certain extent analogous to the Polish idea of “Międzymorze,” was called “New Europe”: the security collaboration of the new and mainly small European states.Footnote 30 The idea failed to materialize, partly because of Masaryk himself. Czechoslovakia did not develop good relations either with neighboring Hungary or Poland. By January 1919, a “six-day war” between Czechoslovakia and Poland had broken out following a Czech military attack on Polish forces in a part of Silesia with a predominantly Polish population. Instead of building a common defense space, members of the new Europe became rivals in relatively marginal border conflicts. After twenty years of existence, the Czechoslovak Republic was killed by Hitler with the assistance of France and Britain, and militarily attacked by both Poland and Hungary.
The idea of central Europe languished until the 1970s and 80s. In the 1980s, it was particularly attractive to think about the Czech lands as part of a broader entity that has its metropolis behind the iron curtain. In his essay, Milan Kundera somehow tried to de-de-Austrianize Czech culture and resurrect the lost possibilities of the Habsburg empire. Palacký’s and Masaryk's progressivism were exchanged for a strong nostalgia, and their nationalism for an accent on longing for the lost paradise of the difference and plurality of different nations and cultures. This nostalgia was above all cultural, emphasizing the legacy of irony and the self-critical mode of central European modernism against its western progressive counterpart. The liberal progressivism of Palacký and the democratic optimism of Masaryk would seem antiquated to Kundera, but he can also be considered their successor in some respects. In the political diagnosis of the Habsburg empire, he shares their views and blames the Habsburg dynasty for not fulfilling its historical role of creating a safe haven of national freedom and “diversity in equality” in their empire. This failure, in Kundera's view, explains how the dynasty squandered the decisive historical opportunity not only of their empire, but also of central Europe.Footnote 31 Thus, even the central European nostalgic Kundera was part of the mainstream Czech version of blaming the Habsburgs and the unsustainability of the Austrian-Hungarian empire for the trajectory of the region's history. This interpretation remains prevalent even though after 1989 a strong wave of conservative imperial nostalgia became part of intellectual landscape of the new democratic society.
Instead of a Conclusion: Impossible Comebacks?
Palacký formulated and co-created four paradoxes for Czech existence in the Habsburg monarchy. His Czechs wanted national specificity, or even some form of independence (“stateness,” whatever that meant), but at the same time imperial guarantees. They were progressive in their ideas and dominant political identity, but as a tool for their efforts they chose the transformation of the empire into a federation, without considering its conservative implications. These two paradoxes were based on a third one: their ethnic “authenticity” made them Slavic, but their culture was under strong German influence (Germans were their main mediator with the west, as Palacký underlined). Both Russian and German pan-nationalisms could and did claim them, and both of those claims implied the demise of Czech national identity. The Austro-Hungarian monarchy could be considered a barrier against those claims, but at the same time, the development of this Czech identity (based on suppressed Protestant history), and co-existence within the Austrian-Hungarian empire (with the prevalence of German influence in Cisleithania, as well as the conflictual relations of Vienna with Russians and Southern Slavs) caused deepening alienation from this empire.
Masaryk tried to solve these dilemmas in the changed historical situation by making a radical rupture: the exclusion of Austrian heritage and the reconstruction of civic virtues. He was only partially successful in this work of reconstruction. He was very successful, however, in his efforts to “de-Austrianize.”
An important element of “Jára da Cimrman” humor is its infantility. Both the fictitious inventor and his time are depicted as a childhood of modern times, as a juvenile prelude to the real history of the twentieth century, marked by rupture of the Great War. The image of childhood can be idyllic: there is some oppression in the Habsburg monarchy and Czechs suffer there, but only a little bit. The infantile humor connected with Cimrman also mirrors the infancy of the nation that, during the Habsburg long nineteenth century, had to be “born again.” Because the nation was not sovereign, it could not and did not have to solve its key political questions. According to some critics, there was a tendency to sustain this condition of infantility. Czech politics, alienated from its empire/state, developed for a long time as a politics of gesture; a politics of culture and ideas separated from practical impact, consequences, and responsibility.Footnote 32 The Habsburg empire and repeated comebacks of the Habsburg myth in this narrative worked to stave off adulthood.
