by Peter Demetz
From the Coachman’s Cottage to Prague Castle: A Modern Fairy Tale
The story of Masaryk’s rise from the plebeian cottage of his birth to the castle of the Bohemian kings sounds like a modern fairy tale (he used the term himself), and though he came to enjoy a few surprising and happy turns of fortune, he never ceased to speak of the necessity of hard work, and he knew why. He was born in 1850 at Hodonín (Göding), the son of a Slovak groom and coachman, later a bailiff on an imperial estate in southeastern Moravia, and a Moravian mother who was educated in German and spoke the local Slovak only later in her marriage. It may be said of Masaryk that he did not have a mother tongue (though his mother taught him to count and pray in German), and he grew up with the Slovak-Moravian dialects spoken in the villages near the border. Unfortunately the family was continually transferred from village to village, the result being that the student and scholar Masaryk had considerable trouble with the literary Czech and educated German in which he was to teach and publish. In village schools, some Czech and more German were taught; after he had attended a Catholic Hauptschule with good success, his father sent him to Vienna (where his mother had worked as a cook) to be apprenticed to a locksmith; in practice, he had to operate a primitive contraption to punch out heel protectors; after running home from Vienna, he was put up with a local blacksmith in order to learn how to shoe horses and in the hope that the blacksmith would reveal to him something of his art in healing animals and people. A former teacher and an honest village priest, who taught him Latin, told his parents that he should go on to school; after preparing for an entrance exam he entered the Gymnasium in Brno (Brünn). He had to tutor to eat and, in a surprising chain of events, was hired by Brno’s chief of police, Le Monnier, the very man who had once checked on Havlíek’s passage through Salzburg, to tutor his son; he also had a good chance to learn French and to read the German classics, including Lessing and Goethe, which stayed with him all his life. When the strong-willed lad from the provinces almost came to blows with the headmaster and was told to leave, Le Monnier, now appointed police chief in Vienna, welcomed him in his home; young Masaryk was accepted into the elite Akademisches Gymnasium, where among his fellow students were three future Austrian ministers and the later president of the Republic of Austria. Masaryk did excellent work in religion, German, and Greek, less so in history and philosophy, and passed his final examinations in the summer of 1872.
After his youth of dire poverty, Masaryk’s years as a student at the University of Vienna were free of difficult financial problems, and he devoted most of his time to classical philology and later to philosophy. He was also active in the Czech Academic Union and wrote his first essays, which editors in Prague usually turned down because of his “crabby Czech” (actually, a Slavic language he concocted out of Russian and Slovak elements). He lived as resident tutor in the opulent home of Rudolf Schlesinger, director of the Anglo-Austrian bank, teaching his oldest son, also interested in philosophy; he had no reason to complain either about his open-handed employer or his new academic friends. His early love for Plato prompted him to study Latin and Greek and to attend the lectures of the famous scholar Theodor Gomperz (from a Brno Jewish family), who kept an eye on the young and serious Moravian; Gomperz’s colleagues were pedants, however, and Masaryk, perhaps seeking consolation after the death of his younger brother, turned from classics to philosophy. He was attracted by Franz Brentano, ex-priest and newcomer to the university, who urged him to read Aristotle and to study the British skeptics and the French positivists; following Brentano’s ideas and Vienna tradition, Masaryk early turned away from Kant, Hegel, and the idealist tradition. But he never resolved, in his own mind, the conflict between his Platonic aspirations and British empiricism, and (as it would appear later) his sincere religiosity, ever in search of a fitting church, and his sociological view of a world accessible to reason and patient research.
In 1876, Masaryk submitted his doctoral dissertation, in German, on the essence of the soul as defined by Plato, and his Doktorvater, Brentano, though somewhat puzzled by his written German, which obscured the argument, readily accepted the dissertation, saying, “The labor expended on the thesis must be rated higher than the thesis itself.” After passing his oral examination in mid-March 1876, Masaryk received his Ph.D. in philosophy and left for Italy with his student Alfred Schlesinger, all expenses paid by Schlesinger père. It was resolved that later they would go to Leipzig to continue their studies in philosophy. Arriving there on October 15, 1876, they rented rooms with Mrs. Augusta Goering (no relative of Hermann) in a little pension in which many American visitors also stayed. Masaryk liked Leipzig, attended lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, and enjoyed conversations with his fellow Moravian Edmund Husserl, but in the summer of 1877, studious Masaryk, twenty-seven years old, turned away from the abstractions of philosophy to the enchantments of life. He met Charlotte Garrigue, a young American student of music, who took lodgings at Frau Goering’s too.
Masaryk is often described by his biographers as a Victorian and a puritan, and he certainly was (not only judging from his literary opinions about European “Decadents”), but in the summer of 1877 it must have dawned upon him that something was missing in his experience. Curiously, he felt what was coming; he read more voraciously than ever (three novels a day), went to the opera to immerse himself in Richard Wagner, and perused a spate of sociological and anthropological studies about women. When Charlotte turned up with her grave eyes, energetic nose, firm chin, and the bearing of an independent young American woman, his awkward hesitations were gone; he wrote to a friend that the idea had occurred to him that he might be capable of cherishing affections for Charlotte. She was giving English lessons to the landlady’s handicapped daughter, Masaryk joined the ladies (who were reading Lord Byron), and upon his recommendations they went on to study Henry Thomas Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, not exactly a literary aphrodisiac; when Masaryk, on an excursion, helped to save Frau Goering’s life (she had slipped and plunged into the Elbe River) he came down with a cold, so the English reading lessons decorously shifted to his room. Romance was in the air.
When Charlotte went to the little Thuringian spa of Elgersburg, Masaryk sent her a letter proposing marriage (she must have thought he was out of his mind), then shortly appeared in Elgersburg himself, and after a few days of walking and arguing, the two announced their engagement on August 10. Charlotte then returned to Brooklyn and Masaryk to Vienna to work on his treatise about the principles of sociology, which was to be submitted to the university. Perhaps it is not impossible to assume that Charlotte’s father—a Huguenot by extraction, of Danish birth, a Leipzig bookseller by training, and more recently director of the Germania Insurance Company—and her midwestern mother wanted to meet her fiancé personally; they wrote to him that she had suffered a little accident and wanted to see him, and in February 1878, T. G. Masaryk went aboard ship in Hamburg. Seventeen days later in New York he found Charlotte much improved (if there had been any danger to her health at all). Young Masaryk expected, perhaps in the European way, that Garrigue Sr. would financially contribute to setting up the new ménage, and he sulked around Brooklyn when his father-in-law refused, but on March 15 Charlotte and Thomas were married nevertheless. Garrigue Sr. then relented as far as financial matters were concerned, and the two newlyweds immediately sailed back to Europe, where they eventually settled in a spacious apartment in Vienna. Their daughter Alice was born within the year, and later Herbert, Olga, and Jan.
Masaryk did not have an easy time trying to fulfill the requirements for his appointment as university lecturer. His disquisition on the principles of sociology was not accepted, and his manuscript “Suicide as a Collective Social Phenomenon” barely squeezed through, a curious and yet remarkable mixture of a romantic philosophy of culture and statistics that ascribed modern frustrations to the loss of religious certainties; his amiable professors argued that their positive evaluation was based on his personal commitment rather t
han on the manuscript’s intrinsic merits. He was duly appointed lecturer, teaching Plato, while Charlotte tried to make ends meet, and when it became known that Prague’s Czech University was to be established formally, he applied there, though he had qualms about Prague, which he did not know well, and about his Czech. Charlotte did not like Vienna and welcomed the possible move.
In the fall term of 1882, Masaryk gave his first lecture in Prague, entitled “Hume and Skepticism,” immediately challenging his older colleagues by turning to British and French thinkers, by inviting his students to his home on Friday evenings, and by speaking, in a special lecture series for young lawyers, about problems of the state, morality, and prostitution (he was the first professor to utter that terrible P-word, though he abhorred the phenomenon, in the hallowed halls of the university). There were many reasons why the conservatives disliked the newcomer; when in February 1886 the distinguished philologist Jan Gebauer, in a periodical Masaryk edited, again raised the question whether the famous Rukopisy were authentic (those allegedly ancient manuscripts, falsified by Václav Hanka in 1817-18, to make certain that the Czechs had an older literature than that of the Germans) and Masaryk in a friendly editorial letter revealed that he too did not believe in the authenticity of the documents, nearly everybody turned against him, accusing him of nihilism. But the young philosopher merely insisted that, from a moral point of view, it was important that national consciousness was not mired in fabrications lacking real historical existence. People called him an abominable traitor to his nation, and the worst was yet to come.
Yet younger intellectuals, scholars, and professionals were attracted by Masaryk’s honesty and sobriety. Together with Masaryk himself, they formed a political alliance with the Young Czechs; from 1891 to 1893, Masaryk commuted from Prague to Austria to serve in the Vienna parliament, where he learned fast; his maiden speech touched on the academic problem of reforming the study of the law; later he resolutely condemned the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and turned his attention early to Slovak and South Slav problems.
When the alliance Masaryk had made with the Young Czechs not surprisingly broke down, he returned to his studies, published a series of temperamental books—e.g., about Jan Hus (he could not bear the Young Czechs’ disregard of his religious engagement) and Karel Havlíek—and in 1896, after thirteen years of near-disgrace, the associate professor was finally promoted to a full professorship, with a somewhat higher salary. Again, he was not a man to withdraw to his library and to learned discussion; when a young Bohemian Jew was accused of ritual murder and Masaryk fought against the ancient superstition, even his students revolted against him. He thought of going to America until Charlotte, now almost Czech and in strong sympathy with the Social Democrats, encouraged him to fight his adversaries vigorously.
On March 29, 1899, the seamstress Anežka Hrzová had been found murdered in a little forest near Polna, a provincial Bohemian town, a terrible gash through her throat, and since there was, or seemed, so little blood on the corpse (which had been dragged from another spot closer to the road), local people began talking about ritual murder, and twenty-two-year-old Leopold Hilsner, unemployed and of uncertain means, was arrested on suspicion of murder; after a first trial in Polna based on circumstantial evidence, he was sentenced to death by a second Bohemian court (though found not guilty of another murder which had been thrown in for good measure). The trial of Leopold Hilsner was a European cause célèbre; the emperor commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, of which Hilsner served twenty-eight years in an Austrian prison.
Masaryk at first did not want to participate in public discussion of the case, but Sigismund Münz, a former Vienna student, asked him about his views, published them in the Vienna liberal Neue Freie Presse, and prompted Masaryk to investigate the legal procedures against Hilsner; by 1900, Masaryk had published a number of analyses of the trial and its implications. At that time, many Jewish families in the countryside (among them my Jewish grandfather) fled to Prague because their shops and homes were being attacked by local patriots, and the government persecuted Masaryk for allegedly interfering with the process of justice. Jií Kovtun, curator of the Slavic division of the Library of Congress, who recently has written the definitive story of the Hilsner case and its repercussions, comes close to saying that Masaryk did not really care about Hilsner personally but only about the principles involved; it is certainly true that he did not have a high opinion of the young Polna drifter, who had never held a regular job (a cardinal sin in Masaryk’s view)—and yet, studying the Talmud and the Zohar, Masaryk was fighting a “European disease” for the sake of his own nation, which he wanted to be untouched by intellectual perversions. Leopold Hilsner had a sad life; after the Austrians let him go, against the wishes of a Czech court, he sold needles, beads, and combs from house to house, married, and died in Vienna in 1928. The historian Wilma Iggers reminds us that a Czech newspaper, on May 4, 1968, reported that Anežka Hrzová’s brother on his deathbed in 1961 confessed that he had killed his sister: he had not wanted her to have the dowry she asked for.
In later conversations with his friend the writer Karel Capek (published under the title “Masaryk Tells His Story”), Masaryk tried to suggest that he was, fundamentally, a shy man who disliked being in the limelight. He did not resist his friends, however, when they wanted to establish a political party of high intellectual standards in the wake of the Hilsner affair and make him its leader; it was to stand on its own feet rather than be dragged along by Young Czech or Agrarian organizations. The new group was called the Czech People’s Party, or rather Realists, and when general suffrage (for which Charlotte Masaryk demonstrated in the Prague streets) was granted in 1907, Masaryk, with the help of a few sympathetic Social Democrats, was elected to the Vienna parliament from a district in eastern Moravia together with another Realist from Bohemia; after new elections in 1911, when his colleague lost his mandate, he remained the one and only Realist in the Vienna Reichsrat. In 1908 Austria had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the minister of foreign affairs tried to defend Austrian policies in the Balkan countries by a show trial in Zagreb of fifty-three Croatians accused of high treason, conspiracy, and terrorism, and by the publication of documents (provided by a respected liberal scholar) showing the grip of the Slavic conspirators. Once again Masaryk was called on by his friends, or rather his former Prague students, to intervene; he traveled to Zagreb and Belgrade, where, on discovering a conspiracy of forgers within the Austrian diplomatic service, he immediately asked for a full parliamentary investigation. The result was that Emperor Franz Josef, citing “reasonable doubt” about the legal evidence in the case, quashed the Zagreb sentences, the scholar withdrew his documents, and Count Aehrenthal, the minister of foreign affairs, went on a long leave from which he did not return to office.
When war came in 1914, Masaryk did not hurry; he witnessed the German mobilization at Bad Schandau, in Saxony, where he was spending a vacation; enjoying his parliamentary passport, he went twice to Holland to strengthen his British contacts, and at home began to establish a secret organization, his Mafie, to provide him with political information. Warned of the police, he left with his daughter Olga for Italy on December 18, 1914. When an Italian stationmaster at the border tried to stop him, he jumped back on the rolling train. He traveled light: for four years, in Paris, London, New York, Moscow, Siberia, and Washington, he conferred with foreign correspondents, ambassadors, prime ministers, and presidents to organize a new republic, which, for a long time, existed only in the realm of his Platonic ideas.
Turbulent, Republican Prague
Taking over power from the imperial and royal authorities on October 28-30, 1918, in an orderly and almost ceremonial way was one matter, but the consolidation of the new state within its intended borders was another. If Masaryk said that he did not sleep on the first night in Hradany Castle, it may have been only the first sleepless night of many yet to come. The new republic was to unify Czechs
and Slovaks—as foreseen by the Pittsburgh agreement of June 30, 1918, with the Slovaks to enjoy an as yet unspecified autonomy, and even before Masaryk, the son of a Slovak father, had returned, Czech troops had started to push the Magyars out of Slovakia, and on February 14, 1919, Dr. Šrobár was able to set up an office in Bratislava; but in May, Red Army units of Béla Kun’s Communist government in Budapest were trying to take back Slovakia (one of their political commissars at the Slovak front was the young philosopher George Lukács); after considerable military gains, they withdrew again under Allied pressure. The question of Bohemia’s German regions was not easily solved either. Insisting on their own Wilsonian concept of self-determination, the Germans had established four autonomous provinces—Deutsch-Böhmen (German Bohemia, with Reichenberg as its capital), Sudetenland (referring only to northern Moravia and Silesia), Deutsch-Südmähren (German southern Moravia), and the Böhmerwaldgau (Bohemian Forest)—declaring that they were all integral parts of a (Socialist) Republic of German-Austria which would, in turn, join Socialist Germany. The Allies immediately intervened against this plan, and postponed an Anschluss between Austria and Germany for twenty years. Within six weeks three Czech regiments had occupied the German regions, but the Germans went on hoping that the Allies would allow a plebiscite and on March 4, 1919, demonstrated in many towns to show their allegiance to Deutsch-Österreich. Czech units were trigger-happy, and in the confrontations fifty-two Germans died and more than eighty were wounded, but by September 1919 the peace conference of St. Germain confirmed that the German regions of Bohemia would be part of the historical lands of the new Czechoslovak Republic. On June 15, German citizens participated in its first communal elections, showing that more than half of the German population favored the Social Democrats; parliamentary elections of April 18, 1920, from which the Czech Social Democrats, the National Liberals, and the Agrarians emerged victorious, also confirmed that Socialists, Agrarians, and Catholics were in a significant majority among the Germans (with fifty-five seats), clearly prevailing over the two German nationalist groups (seventeen) set irrevocably against the republic. Slowly, Czech and German Socialists and Agrarians began exploring the chances of working together, but it took many years before they actually did.