The Czechs in a Nutshell

To be fair, nobody can dispute that there really are lots of handy people in this country. And many a Czech craftsman demonstrates an ability to improvise that dwarfs the qualities of his average Western colleague. The reason for this, however, is not because the Czechs have any natural talents which people of other nations lack (as many people in this country apparently believe). Instead, it seems to be based on two quite obvious facts.

Firstly, since kutilství is commonly regarded as the primary malecreating rite of passage, the mental pressure to become a kutil is strongly felt by most Czech boys. Secondly (and more importantly), the communist era was infamous for its large-scale absence of both decent services and modern consumer goods. When something broke down (which happened all the time), the simplest — and often only — way of fixing it, was to do it yourself. And since the necessary spare parts could usually not be obtained, you had to improvise and find something else.

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

Thus, the communists quite unwillingly contributed more to the development of ordinary people’s handiness, creativity and ingenious improvisation than any other rulers in their turbulent history.

However, the widespread conviction that all (male) Czechs are equipped with golden hands has led to one rather unfortunate phenomenon: this country boasts an incredible number of self-proclaimed experts. For instance, when Austrian specialists some years ago warned that the cooling system of the newly erected Temelín nuclear power plant might be unsafe, thousands of Czech kutils brushed the warnings off angrily, because they had all installed “something similar” in their kitchens, and it had worked perfectly!

The author Ondřej Sekora aptly describes this feature in his immensely popular children’s books about Ferdinand the Ant, whose clumsy companion, Pytlík the Beetle, “knows everything and understands everything, because he has seen it all in cinema” (see: Klaus, Václav). In the real Czech world, however, millions of kutils know everything and understand everything because they have managed to fix a leaking sink.

Gott, Karel

Take Tom Jones and mix him with Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor-cum-castrato singer. Then add tons of pathetic love songs, faked sex appeal and musical kleptomania focusing on Western hits from the 1970s. Spice it up with a political flexibility rare even for Central European standards and a personal status close to that of the Pope. What do you get? Karel Gott, Czech pop music’s most mega-super, long-lasting and brightest star.

As his very name (which is not faked!) indicates, Gott was predestined to become a god from his birth in 1939.

His unique career as a singer started in the early 1960s when Gott still was a pimpled electrician’s apprentice at Prague’s ČKD engineering factory. After surprisingly winning several talent competitions, he made an astonishing breakthrough at the legendary Semafor Theatre in 1963. Virtually overnight, an unknown, 24-year-old electrician from Plzeň had become Czechoslovakia’s leading pop star, who later also performed in some of Czech cinema’s most popular films ever.

So far, so good — nobody has ever disputed Gott’s talents or his hard work, and in the 1960s, he definitely deserved the people’s admiration, which reached a peak during the Prague Spring’s euphoria (see: Communism).

A bit more disputed, though, is his behaviour after Czechoslovakia was invaded, in 1968, and the Russian-backed Husák regime launched its neo-Stalinist normalization. Gott’s first reaction was to emigrate, but after a few months in German exile, he returned to the mother country, where he energetically pursued his career further. After all, life went on for bus-drivers, plumbers and doctors, so why shouldn’t it also go on for pop stars?

The price Gott paid for his success, however, was a very cosy relationship with the Bolsheviks. Too cosy, lots of critics would say. When the Husák regime, in 1977, launched its rabid attack on Charter 77 in the form of the infamous Anti-Charter petition that cried for the protection of “socialist law and order”, Karel Gott was the very man for the job of reading the proclamation when it was broadcast live on TV. As expected, Gott was soon thereafter awarded with the state title “National Artist”, the Communist equivalent of a knighthood from the Queen, and the official media presented photos of a pop star who smiled so sweetly at Comrade President that one almost got the impression that the two of them were registered partners.