Prague Winter

by Madeleine Albright

  Such complexities only caused activists to become more insistent. To their way of thinking, national identity was not some article of clothing to be shopped for and then put on and taken off; it was the key determinant of who one was. People had an obligation to choose and, having chosen, to conform. A German should vote for German politicians, patronize German stores, eat German food, dress in German clothes, join German clubs, and give one’s heart to a German mate. The same catechism applied to Czechs. This elevated national identification to an absurd level. Some partisans claimed qualities for their people that were grossly exaggerated; others focused on magnifying the faults of their neighbors. Still others were angered by families—referred to derisively as “hermaphrodites”—who neglected to choose a side or, even worse, chose the wrong one. According to a 1910 Czech newspaper editorial, “If every Czech person could double their hatred and contempt for the renegades . . . enough people would think twice before Germanizing themselves and their children.”

  As Czech nationalism took hold, the frustration of being confined within the Austro-Hungarian Empire increased. The Czechs had minority rights, but these did not translate into political and social equality. Whether at the imperial court in Vienna or in the typical Bohemian town, German speakers still held most of the leading positions. The Czechs in 1910 believed themselves to be less free than their ancestors had been in 1610, a sense of grievance that prompted some to look abroad for allies. A number of writers envisioned a future of unity for all the Slavic peoples, from Russians in the east to Bohemians in the west. The fly in this ointment was that the Czech intellectuals who traveled to other Slavic lands did not like what they saw. Neither the Polish nobility nor the czarist courts appealed to populist thinkers, while the idea of a pan-Slav brotherhood seemed far-fetched after hearing Poles describe Russians as Mongols and Russians dismiss Poles as a race of backward peasants. The consensus among Czech nationalists, then, was that their best option was to assert their identity within rather than outside the empire. Perhaps with time and the emergence of the right leader, circumstances would change, and the black-and-yellow Habsburg banners could be replaced by the Czech colors of red and white, with possibly a touch of Slovak blue.

  ALL THIS SQUABBLING was no bar to prosperity. By 1900, 80 percent of the empire’s industrial production was based in the historic Czech lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. The literacy rate was 96 percent, twice that of Hungary and higher, even, than the German. The economy was expanding more rapidly than that of England or France. The Czechs were leaders in rail service, coal mining, iron and steel production, chemicals, paper, textiles, glass, armaments, and industrial machinery. Guided by the motto “In work and knowledge is our salvation,” they developed novel techniques for processing ham and fermenting beer, made a popular liquor from beets, invented a convenient way to market sugar (in cubes), introduced the assembly-line production of shoes, and were among the first to install electric rails and trams. Lecturers attracted to Charles University included the Austrian sound wave pioneer Christian Doppler, the shock wave expert Ernst Mach, and a young German professor working on a theory of physics, Albert Einstein. The credit for introducing the safety helmet into workplaces belongs to a bilingual insurance employee from Prague; a writer in his spare time, his name was Franz Kafka.

  The improved legal status of Jews did not always mesh well with the intensification of national feelings. People of Jewish background achieved extraordinary success in business, the professions, and the arts, but their position within society resisted easy summary. Slovak Jews were more rural and tended to be conservative; the opposite end of the spectrum could be seen among the emerging intelligentsia in and around Prague. For some Jews, the rising sense of nationalism was translated into Zionism or into a deeper study of ethical and scholastic traditions. For others, it meant a growing association with the movement for Czech rights; but this desire to be part of the Bohemian national movement was not always welcomed.

  Siegfried Kapper, a Czech Jew, composed patriotic verse while vigorously asserting his dual heritage. Among his works was an 1864 poem titled, “Do Not Say I Am Not Czech.” Karel Havlíček, the journalist, responded by arguing precisely that; it was impossible, he insisted, to be both Semitic and Czech. This theory, widely held, posed an obstacle for Jews seeking to associate with the patriotic feelings of the place in which their families had lived for hundreds of years. Did blood (to the extent it could be determined) define nationality, or was it a mix of geography, language, customs, and personal preferences? An endless argument. Regrettably, even where vitriolic anti-Semitism was rare, the more casual variety was widespread. The brilliant Jan Neruda, often compared to Anton Chekhov, was typical. His fictional Jewish characters consisted almost entirely of greedy moneylenders whose race was castigated as cruel and thirsting for power. Neruda didn’t bother to furnish evidence; he simply assumed that his readers would agree. In this atmosphere, many Jews were unsure in which direction to turn. Dr. Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, captured the dilemma:

  Poor Jews, where should they stand? Some tried to be Czechs; these were assaulted by the Germans. Others wanted to be Germans, and both the Czechs and the Germans attacked them. What a situation!

  ODDLY, THE INDIVIDUAL who would do most for Czech independence—and also much to fight anti-Semitism—was the son of a Roman Catholic Slovak coachman. Tomáš Masaryk was born on the seventh of March 1850; he grew up speaking the local dialects but was instructed by his mother, a Moravian, to count and pray in German. As a youngster he was trained briefly as a locksmith, then a blacksmith. Years later, he recalled the skills demanded of a nineteenth-century boy: how to whistle, run, swim, walk on his hands, ride a horse, climb a tree, catch beetles, kindle a fire, toboggan, walk on stilts, throw snowballs, skip stones, whittle, tie knots of horsehair, use a jackknife, and fight “all kinds of ways,” adding, “I can’t say what sort of life the girls lived, since we had nothing to do with them.”

  When young Masaryk was not otherwise occupied, he was studying. A local priest taught him Latin and recommended that the boy be sent to school. While earning his way as a tutor, he ascended the academic ladder. In 1872, he graduated from the University of Vienna; four years later, he earned a PhD in philosophy and moved to Leipzig, where he attended lectures on theology. Having met one challenge through meticulous study, he moved on to the next, borrowing from the library a stack of books about the psychology of women. Thus prepared, he met Charlotte Garrigue, a young American blessed with fine auburn hair, a talent for music, and an independent mind. At first, she responded reticently to his courtship and left to vacation at a spa. Masaryk followed her there in a fourth-class railway car, took her for long walks, and soon won her over. The couple married in March 1878 in Charlotte’s hometown of Brooklyn, establishing not only a matrimonial connection but an international one between the people of the Czech lands and the United States. In a sign of respect rare then and since, Masaryk adopted Charlotte’s last name as his middle one. They had four children, the youngest a boy named Jan.

  T. G. Masaryk began teaching at the university in Prague and quickly developed a reputation as a freethinker. No one could ever claim that he lacked convictions or the spine to defend them. As an academic, he startled senior faculty with his frank lectures on such matters as sex education and prostitution. Upon becoming a member of parliament, he denounced the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Along the way, he incurred the enmity of the Catholic Church by lauding Jan Hus and by transferring his allegiance to a fervent but anticlerical Protestantism. Then, as a journalist, he ran headlong into the locomotive of Czech nationalism.

  In 1817, two supposedly ancient Czech manuscripts were discovered in Zelená Hora, a town in the Plzeň district in western Bohemia. The documents purported to show that the nation’s literature predated that of the Germans and that the old Bohemians had attained a higher standard of education and culture. For dec
ades, Czech propagandists used the writings as a starting point in discussing their people’s history; artists, meanwhile, employed them as a source for patriotic works. In February 1886, an article endorsed by Masaryk offered convincing evidence that the manuscripts were fraudulent. This puncturing of the nationalist balloon was not happily received. Masaryk recalled that, a few days after the article appeared, a local businessman engaged him in a heated conversation:

  He didn’t know who I was, and started going on about me, saying I’d been bribed by the Germans to drag the Czech past through the mud and so on. . . . Another time I joined some people on a tram cursing that traitor Masaryk. I found it amusing. What made me angry was to see people defending the manuscripts when they did not believe in them but were afraid to admit it.

  As a child, Masaryk had been told by his mother that Jews used Christian blood in their rites. The adult Masaryk had no use for such superstitions, but not all his countrymen felt the same. In 1899, a nineteen-year-old seamstress was found in a forest with her throat slashed and clothes torn. A rumor spread that a ritual murder had taken place. Police had no good suspects and so—egged on by local sentiment—arrested Leopold Hilsner, an itinerant Jew who had been seen around the forest. In a trial that traumatized the country’s Jewish population and attracted attention across Europe, Hilsner was convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Masaryk successfully appealed the verdict, prompting a second trial, and wrote pamphlets denouncing bigotry and raising questions about the facts.* The episode gave Masaryk’s enemies fresh ammunition; he was accused of accepting payments from Jews and forced by his university to suspend classes until the protests against him died down.

  Masaryk was a product of the Victorian Age, but his intellect and sensibility were thoroughly up-to-date. He inquired into almost everything and wrote with insight (if not always accuracy) about suicide, the Soviet Union, Greek philosophy, hypnotism, evolution, the virtues of physical exercise, and the tug-of-war between science and religious faith. He had what might even now be considered advanced ideas about the equality of women and the connections between a clean body and a long life. He was impatient with dogma and had a special contempt for the kind of partial education that caused people to believe that they knew more than they did.

  Masaryk’s view of nationalism was especially relevant as the twentieth century began. The professor prized patriotism for furnishing an incentive to undertake productive work but stressed that “love of nation does not imply hatred towards another.” He insisted that racial purity in the modern world was neither desirable nor possible and that no group should consider itself without fault. He cited pointedly the times when, as a child, he had fought with boys from the next town. “Every Sunday,” he said, “we’d come to blows with the Podvorov gang over who would ring the church bells. There you have nationalism in a nutshell.”

  Tomáš Masaryk

  CTK PHOTO

  Masaryk saw a world in which the settled verities of religious conviction, political order, and economic status were under attack. Modernization was essential but also dangerous because it could leave people without a way to anchor themselves either intellectually or emotionally. The solution, in his eyes, was to embrace religion without the straitjacket of the Church, social revolution without the excesses of Bolshevism, and national pride without bigotry. He believed in democracy and the capacity of people to learn and to grow. His dream was to build a Czech society that could take its place alongside the Western countries he admired.

  4

  The Linden Tree

  My father was five and my mother four when, in June 1914, shots were fired in Sarajevo, mortally wounding Archduke Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Habsburg throne. The assassination ignited World War I, or the Great War, in which Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Turkey were aligned against the leading Western countries, including czarist Russia and later the United States. The gargantuan conflict brought low three once mighty empires: the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov. In their place would arise a newly combustible European mix featuring the first Communist state, a sullen Germany, a weary England, a wary France, and seven freshly spawned independent states, including the Czechoslovak Republic.

  These outcomes had not been foreseen. The less adventuresome Czech nationalists hoped to curry favor with the Austrian Crown by supporting the war; they sought in that way to improve the prospects for autonomy. Tomáš Masaryk led a bolder contingent whose members saw the conflagration as an opportunity to break completely free. In April 1915, he prepared a lengthy memorandum that characterized Austria-Hungary as an “artificial state” and pledged the creation of a “constitutional and democratic Bohemia.” In July, on the five hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Hus, he identified himself publicly as an opponent of the empire. During the next three years, he traveled to friendly capitals throughout Europe and the United States in support of his nation’s independence.

  As subjects of Austria-Hungary, Czechs and Slovaks were required to serve in its military. However, many were loath to risk their lives on behalf of a German-speaking coalition against a Russian army consisting of fellow Slavs. This clash between duty and desire was wittily captured in Jaroslav Hašek’s stories about the good soldier Švejk, a Bohemian everyman who, when called by his draft board, showed up in a wheelchair. “Death to the enemy!” he shouted while waving two crutches above his head. Inducted nonetheless, Švejk is asked by his lieutenant how it feels to serve in the imperial army. “Humbly report, sir, I’m awfully happy,” comes the reply. “It’ll be really marvelous when we both fall dead.”

  Hašek was among the thousands of Czech and Slovak soldiers who switched sides during the war either by deserting or—as in his case—being recruited out of a Russian prisoner of war camp. In 1917, the men were organized into a Czech and Slovak Legion, a ragged but intrepid band that fought bravely and well against the Germans. Matters became more complicated when the Bolshevik Revolution turned Russia upside down, causing the country to withdraw from the war and stranding the legionaries thousands of miles from home. They were left with the choice of surrendering or of trying to escape to the east by dodging warlords, bandits, and hostile Bolsheviks all the way to the Pacific. Masaryk did his best to help by securing a secret promise from the Communist leader, Vladimir Lenin, to grant safe passage. However, the deal soon broke down in a dispute over weapons, and the men had to fight from station to station along the five thousand miles of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

  Upon reaching the coast, the men discovered to their shock that the Western Allies would not allow them to return home. Instead, the tired fighters were ordered to retrace their steps and lead a hastily conceived and poorly coordinated attempt to oust the Bolsheviks. By that time, the weather had turned frigid and the war in Europe had been won. For an additional year, the legion was enmeshed in a multisided conflict over the fate of Russia in which it had no immediate stake. Allies came and went while one Russian side and then another gained the advantage. Finally, with help from the U.S. military, the legionaries were able to depart, but not before many had had to walk the last several hundred miles to Vladivostok.

  Due to the timely presence of newspaper correspondents, the legion’s exploits had been reported widely in the United States and became a significant diplomatic asset for Masaryk. Arriving for an event in New York City, he was greeted by a giant map on display in front of the main public library, permitting observers to monitor the legion’s progress as it fought its way to the Pacific.

  In America, the campaign for Czechoslovak independence had been launched by an immigrant-run newspaper in Omaha, Nebraska. “It is up to us living outside Austria to take the first step,” wrote the editor of Osvĕta on August 12, 1914. “Long live the United States of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Slovakia!” This summons was taken up in Cleveland, Cedar Rapids, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities, culminating in Pittsburgh, where Masaryk joined local organizations in
a pact demanding immediate freedom. Such demonstrations garnered publicity but had no legal effect. Masaryk’s goal was to change the policy of the United States. In this, he was simultaneously encouraged by President Woodrow Wilson’s support for the principle of national self-determination and stymied by Washington’s desire to separate Austria-Hungary from Germany in order to shorten the war. Throughout 1917 and the early months of 1918, the State Department opposed dismembering the empire in the hope that Vienna would agree to a separate peace. This pragmatic policy was hard to sustain because of its contrast with Wilson’s idealistic words. As the negotiations with Austria dragged on, the administration expressed sympathy for the Czechoslovak cause but withheld formal recognition.

  In June, Masaryk met Wilson at the White House. As a child, I had been taught to believe that the two presidents warmed to each other immediately, but there is always a risk of friction when two professors are given the chance to compare brains. Wilson admitted to Masaryk that, as a descendant of Scots Presbyterians, he had a tendency to be stubborn. Masaryk found the U.S. president “somewhat touchy.” Both wished to talk more than to listen. Masaryk outlined the case for independence; Wilson discussed the Czechoslovak Legion’s ongoing battle with the Russian Bolsheviks. Whether or not the two men enjoyed each other’s company, the results from Masaryk’s perspective were satisfactory. Within days, the State Department declared that “all branches of the Slav race should be completely freed from Austrian rule,” and in September, the United States formally recognized Masaryk’s National Council as a belligerent in the war. These steps, coupled with Wilson’s image as the instigator of a new and more honorable global order, would make the American president a hero throughout Czechoslovakia and add unprecedented luster to his country’s international reputation.