by Peter Demetz
The Czechs decided that it was important, first of all, whatever the future might bring, to send a delegation to the War Economy Grain Institute, responsible for the distribution of food to civilians and the army, and request that its officials take an oath of allegiance to the National Committee; this was not at all a revolutionary act, for the Vienna government was expecting that its administrative institutions would work with the National Committee; the gentlemen of the committee did not care to go into lengthy legal discussions about what kind of state they had in mind, a federal territory within Austria or an independent body politic. The takeover of the grain institute was ceremoniously brief and polite, and after handshakes all around, the delegates left the Lucerna building, where the institute was housed, and entered Wenceslas Square—suddenly to face a jubilant mass of singing and marching citizens and of red-and-white flags, swiftly appearing from nowhere.
At 11 a.m. the National Committee’s executive task force met at Prague’s Municipal House, but not even the experts knew exactly how to interpret Andrássy’s note. Alois Rašín (later Czechoslovakia’s efficient minister of finance, before being killed by an anarchist) suggested that a council delegation ask the governor’s office whether instructions or news about the capitulation had arrived from Vienna and announce that responsibility for civil affairs now rested with the committee. At noon, the delegates had made their way to the office of the imperial governor and were told by his (Czech) deputy that Count Max Coudenhove had left on the morning train for Vienna to receive instructions from the new government; the delegates, unable to learn more about what was going on in Vienna, simply recited their declaration that the National Committee was taking over, and departed; the deputy immediately informed the Vienna government on the phone about the visit and implied that he had not been willing to offer resistance. The delegation, in an almost experimental mood, next went to the offices of the Bohemian diet, where they politely asked Count Adalbert Schönborn, chief of its administrative commission, to swear an oath of allegiance to the National Committee, which he readily did, assuming that he was loyally complying with the emperor’s federalization manifesto.
In the city, the semiotic transformation went on; people sang a new national hymn (“Kde domov mj,” “Where Is My Home,” originally a song in a popular play of 1834 by Josef Kajetán Tyl), tore the Austrian signs from the uniforms of officers, adorned policemen with new red-and-white cockades, and watched as the imperial and royal eagles on official buildings came crashing down. Popular speakers addressed the milling crowds at the traditional places: at the St. Wenceslas monument Isidor Zahradník, a patriot priest, was speaking; members of the National Committee orated at the corner of Wenceslas Square and Jindišská Street; and from a balcony at the National Theater the popular song writer Karel Hašler, long persecuted, was heard, but what he had to sing and say was definitely not gentle. Alois Rašín, who knew his fellow citizens only too well, had few illusions that the jubilations of the crowd would not turn into ugly and destructive anti-German and anti-Jewish demonstrations, and according to earlier plans, the National Committee requested Dr. František Scheiner to mobilize his Sokol (Falcons), a national gymnasts’ organization established in the nineteenth century in imitation of the anti-French German Turnverein, to make certain that triumph did not change into chaos. The military members of the Mafie, Masaryk’s secret organization that had been working for a free Czechoslovakia, all of them Czech officers and soldiers in the Austrian army, made clumsy preparations to neutralize the army command; unfortunately, the chief conspirator lived in a suburb and did not hear until 2 p.m. what was happening in the city, and by that time Magyar units of the army, fully armed and with machine guns, were taking strategic positions all over Prague—at the upper end of Wenceslas Square, close to the Café Rococo, at the Old Town Square, and elsewhere. By three o’clock, a clash between loyal army units and the people seemed almost inevitable.
One participant in the events later noted that on that afternoon the National Committee was still unsure of the Austrian army (though army units were melting away rapidly while the National Committee played for time). The army command in the Minor Town was headed by General Eduard Zanantoni, of an Italian family of soldiers, Paul Kestánek, a Prague German in spite of his name, both somewhat beyond their prime but experienced bureaucrats, and Colonel Viktor Stusche, a younger man who was politically more acute and had not yet ceased to make fine distinctions between the necessities for Austrian federalization and what the National Committee really had in mind. Orders from Vienna were that bloodshed must be avoided, and when the Social Democrat Soukup, of the National Committee, called General Zanantoni and guaranteed that the committee would keep order in the streets, Zanantoni ordered the Magyars to return to their barracks. Further discussions between the high command and the committee were scheduled for the evening, and it says something about the residual civility of the moment that at 8 p.m. the generals and their entourage came downtown to the offices of the National Committee, where a complicated arrangement was reached: the National Committee and the Sokols would guard factories and ammunition depots, officers were no longer to be insulted in public, and the National Committee would be responsible only for civil affairs while the army command would not yet relinquish its formal military authority. At about the same time, the military experts on the National Committee, including Dr. Scheiner of the Sokol and Jaroslav Rošický of the Mafie conspirators, began organizing a military command post of their own on Žofín Island, and all Czech army personnel on leave in Prague were notified to assemble there to form a first unit of volunteers. They came, ragtag, and were joined by about eighty highly qualified Czech sailors and officers from the imperial navy (then rather decorative among Prague landlubbers), ordinarily stationed at Pola and Cattaro, on the Adriatic Sea, and by an entire Romanian unit that had left its Magyar regiment.
Even if the generals negotiating with the National Committee had known of the committee’s political proclamation (they probably did not), they would have noted that the committee painstakingly avoided speaking of military matters. At 6 p.m. (that is, two hours before its discussions with the army command) the National Committee had issued its first Law Concerning the Establishment of an Independent Czechoslovak State, which, resolutely going beyond all previous statements, cut all links between Vienna and the new Czechoslovakia, and declared that the National Committee now had legal responsibility for all administrative affairs. It was left open exactly what this new state would be and all military questions were carefully kept in abeyance—quite apart from the sobering circumstances that the new state, de facto, could not extend farther than fifty or sixty kilometers to the north of Prague, because Germans there were asserting their own self-determination, and Slovak patriots, still under Magyar domination, were represented in Prague by lonely Vávro Šrobár, M.D., whose welcome presence had not much more than symbolic importance.
On October 29, additional imperial offices, including that of the police, were taken over without many complications, but the National Committee still had to deal with the imperial governor, who had returned from Vienna, and with the army command, increasingly showing signs of stiffening resistance, especially after the war ministry in Vienna admonished it for being too soft in its arrangements with the National Committee. By noon the usual delegation paid a call on Count Coudenhove, explained to him the ongoing process of takeovers and, ignoring its own independence resolution of the preceding evening, surprisingly agreed to a principle of co-administration in civil affairs—until Coudenhove, speaking of Bohemia’s German citizens, uttered the word Deutschböhmen (German Bohemians), which irritated Dr. Rašín, who said he did not want to hear the term again. Then the delegation left, and Coudenhove, no less irritated, called Vienna to report about the meeting, handed in his resignation, and left the field to the National Committee.
The last nest of loyalty to the emperor was, of course, the army command, where the generals began to have second though
ts and yet did not exactly know that many in the Prague garrison were simply going home. On October 29, the German Eger infantry regiment decided to depart, and most of the Magyars assembled at the railroad station. The National Committee conveniently organized trains to get the Magyars out, but the Sokol guards saw to it that each Magyar could leave with only one uniform and one set of underwear; if a Magyar soldier was found to have two, he had to yield one to the new republic. The Czechs and Romanians gathered at Žofín Island waited for orders; by evening, the Austrian command prepared for a last stand and pushed the Sokol guards out of its building, and challenged the National Committee to order its units to block the surrounding streets. Once again, a delegation arrived at the Minor Town to discuss matters of mutual interest, and when the generals noted that the last Maygar troops were fraternizing with the Czechs, they simply gave up and went home; a few officers were put under house arrest for the time being. By the evening of October 30, power was in the hands of the National Committee in Prague and in the Czech regions of Bohemia, and everybody waited for the return of a delegation which had gone to Geneva to discuss the organization of the new state and its future government with Dr. Eduard Beneš of the Czech National Council in Paris and his diplomats.
The Vienna government still wanted to demonstrate that it meant federalization seriously, and to create goodwill among the Allies, the emperor had directed that passports be handed out to a group of Czech representatives to travel to Switzerland to meet Dr. Beneš for a discussion of the future (Beneš himself was rather surprised). On October 25, a delegation of seven had left Prague, among them representatives of the National Committee, Czech members of the Vienna parliament and two directors of important Czech banks; another passport was given to a Catholic delegate, who was, however, shunned by the group and did not participate in the conversations. Beneš welcomed the delegation, headed by Dr. Kramá, at the five-star Hotel Beau Rivage (a brilliant choice), and although nobody really knew what was going on in Prague, there was unanimity of views. Beneš told the Prague politicians what the Allies believed and expected, and the delegation was at times overwhelmed by the thought that their interests had been so efficiently defended on the international scene (they also enjoyed the clean tablecloths, the excellent food, and the perfect service). Beneš, who shared certain didactic inclinations with his mentor, Masaryk, spoke with the authority of a man who had been active in Europe’s capitals and was able to relay the wishes of the Czech legions now fighting on the Allied side in France, Siberia, and Italy; discussions centered on the republican shape of the future state (Kramá sacrificing his views of a royal Bohemia). The legions had elected Masaryk president, and agreement was now reached on a cabinet in which both the National Committee and the National Council would be represented. Kramá was to be chief of government, Beneš minister of foreign affairs, the Slovak Milan Rastislav Štefánik minister of war, Rašín minister of finance, Švehla minister of agriculture, and there were places for three Slovaks and one German “to defend the interests” of their countrymen. (In fact, the first German minister entered a Czechoslovak government only in 1926). On October 30, when the delegates finally heard what had happened in Prague, they tried to get home as quickly as possible—Rašín later wrote that he felt as if “intoxicated by hashish”—and they arrived by train on November 5, welcomed by thousands of citizens. Not many days afterward, the National Committee issued a proclamation asking for citizens to stop singing and celebrating and to start working again. Yet eight weeks later, there was another grand cause for celebration and parades: T. G. Masaryk himself returned home after four years of absence.
Masaryk Returns to Prague
After seeing President Wilson once again, Masaryk started on November 20 on a long trip home from New York via London, Paris, and Italy, accompanied by his younger daughter Olga. He had heard that he was badly needed in Prague to fulfill the most varied expectations; during his ocean voyage on the SS Carmania, he was in a pensive mood; “I did not want to speak to anybody,” he wrote later, “and for many days I walked back and forth on deck, my eyes roving over the the seas, and in my heart the hammering of future tasks.” He came to Bohemia from Italy, where he had been welcomed by the king and watched a parade of Italian soldiers and Czech legionnaires who had fought on the Piave; when his special train wended its way through Austria, he had time to talk to his entourage, the white-haired Italian General Piccione (later to command Czech units against the Hungarians), the British military attaché, Colonel Cunningham, M. Clement-Simon, France’s first ambassador accredited to the new republic, and Masaryk’s own military adjutant (clad, as we are told by malevolent tongues, in the tsarist uniform of a crack Cherkassian unit). Another special train had been dispatched from Prague to meet Masaryk at the border, carrying his son Jan and an appropriate delegation; at Horní Dvoišt, the border station, when the trains moved up alongside each other, Jan had to tell his father that his mother, Charlotte Masaryk, sinking into melancholy again, had been committed to a Prague institution for the mentally ill. Next day, a cannon shot announced the arrival of the train at Prague station, and a long day of ceremonies immediately commenced. Present were Alice, Masaryk’s older daughter (who had been imprisoned in Vienna and let go only upon American intervention), Dr. Kramá and the entire government, officers, poets, and diplomats. Speeches on the platform and in a waiting hall were mercifully short, even that of Alois Jirásek, the most famous writer among the patriots. Masaryk looked ill and feverish, was moved to tears, and stubbornly refused to take a seat in a horse-drawn imperial coach when asked; he rode in an open automobile. Surrounded by flowers, flags, and units of the Russian, French, and Italian legions, his car slowly moved down Wenceslas Square (with the cinematographic cameras rolling). He paused at the Old Town Square to look at Ladislav Šaloun’s new Hus monument, which he had not yet seen, and proceeded to the National Assembly in the Minor Town, to take his oath of allegiance in a brief ceremony, and then went up to Hradany Castle, a rather disheveled and gloomy place at that time.
In the afternoon, Masaryk immediately went to see his wife at the Veleslavín institution, where she was being treated with indifferent success (she was to return to live with him a few times, only to be committed again); it is curious that Masaryk’s biographers are very reticent about Charlotte’s and his intimate tragedy. Later in the day, we are told, Masaryk in his warm winter coat with a fur collar was seen in the streets of Prague on a leisurely walk with his friend J. S. Machar, a poet and colleague of his Vienna days.
Masaryk had invited members of the National Assembly to visit him at Hradany next afternoon, but the time of revolutionary improvisations had passed, and he had to learn the hard way that the provisional constitution had defined his prerogatives rather narrowly; it was more than polite conversation when Kramá, as chief of government, told him “to stay above the clouds” as president, for everyone who was immersed more deeply in Czechoslovakian political life would have to defend himself against mudslinging and loss of authority. (Masaryk nonetheless managed to have his prerogatives widened, while Václav Havel seventy years later went the other way.) The National Assembly, newly picky about constitutional niceties, did not wish to be at the president’s beck and call, yet resolved to go to the castle not collectively and as an institution but, as it were, altogether privately—in spite of the fact that Masaryk had earlier submitted, by special courier, the text of his first political speech to the government, which promptly cut two paragraphs from it—one suggesting amnesty for wartime collaborators with Austrian power and another one warning against anti-Semitic emotions. As later events showed, Masaryk’s warnings were legitimate, and the government was wrong.
Masaryk’s speech of December 22 was political (when he wanted it to be), unusually frank, and, as far as Czechoslovakia’s Germans were concerned, distinctly contentious; members of the assembly recognized that the president did not intend at all to stay above the clouds. In his speech, he developed a concept of democracy
in which he skillfully combined his habitual respect for daily work with the preferences of Czech civil servants: democracy was essentially, he insisted, a workaday matter of justly administering human affairs (“justice as the mathematics of humanism”); he added, possibly with a glance at Kramá and the last Pan-Slavs, that the Russians unfortunately had never learned how to administer and the new democracy was logically bound to the traditions of the West. He freely admitted that he had been antimilitarist for a long time, yet the republic needed an efficient army, not to indulge in military adventures but for reasons of defense (Slovakia was still held by the Magyars). Speaking to Bohemia’s Germans, Masaryk firmly declared that the state would not be divided, reminding his listeners that the United States had risked civil war rather than tolerate the seccession of the southern states; Czechs and Slovaks had created a new state, defining by that act the legal position of the Germans who “had originally come to the country as immigrants and colonists” (here he sounded like Palacký in one of his more irritable moments). In that one relative clause, quoted for decades by his friends and adversaries, Masaryk chose to break a good deal of political china; even Ferdinand Peroutka, a political analyst who cannot be accused of anti-Masaryk sentiments, in his essential books about the founding of the republic (1934), skeptically asked how many centuries immigrants and colonists would have to live in a country before they ceased being immigrants and colonists. The sociologist Masaryk, usually more ready to defend the natural rather than the historical rights of people, kept his own counsel. Three days after his speech, he attended, together with members of the government, a festive performance at the Prague German Theater and, on that occasion, thanked the Prague Germans for the trust they put in him; he expressed his hope that his presence at the theater was but a “prologue” to the grand drama that Czechs and Germans were now called on to perform. It was an appropriate metaphor, before the curtain rose. Few people in the audience knew in what forms and scenes the drama would develop—creative, conciliatory, and brutal—in the years to come.