The Czechs in a Nutshell

With the somewhat expected exception of the communists, the Lustration Law gained broad support in the Czech population (the Slovaks, on the other hand, scrapped it after the separation of Czechoslovakia, while the Poles adopted a less rigid law almost a decade after the Czechs). But those who looked forward to a massive cleansing of the public sector have been disappointed. Of the more than 400,000 lustration certificates that the Ministry of Interior so far has issued, less than 5 percent have actually been positive.

Of course, the real number of StB informers was at least four times higher, but many of those who knew they were positive logically haven’t bothered to ask for a certificate. In other cases, people who knew they would not pass the screening simply found a suitable excuse to leave their jobs silently.

Photo © Terje B. Englund

So, does the Lustration Law, almost a decade and a half after it was adopted, serve any purpose? Not if you ask the Council of Europe or the International Labour Organization.

Both of these foreign institutions condemn the law, maintaining that it’s unjust and discrimination to a part of the population. Even prominent ex-dissidents, such as Václav Havel, oppose the law as a manifestation of the outdated Berufsverbot, which was practiced by the communists. As the Polish ex-dissident Adam Michnik puts it: “I was brave under the communists, so I don’t have to be brave now when they’re gone.”

In one respect, the lustration opponents undeniably have a convincing point: the Czech Ministry of Interior has issued more than hundred negative certificates to people who evidently were positive. And, vice-versa, persons who apparently never conscientiously collaborated have been stamped as “StB positive” just because some swindling secret policeman claimed rewards for having acquired “agents” who not had the faintest idea that they had been recruited.

The lustration question is further complicated by the action of a single person. In the summer of 1992, the fervent anti-communist and Charter 77 signatory Petr Cibulka got hold of computer files containing what seemed to be an accurate copy of the StB’s archives. Cibulka was so disgusted by the new democracy’s lenient treatment of the Bolshevik regime’s loyal servants that he published a list of some 80,000 StB informers, completed with cover names and birth dates. So, since anyone is free to check out Cibulka’s lists on the Internet, isn’t it time to stop clowning about and close this dreary chapter of Czech history?

Well, a majority of Czech politicians, supported by the highest judicial body in the country, believe it’s not. In late 2001, after lengthy negotiations, the venerable judges at the Constitutional Court in Brno (see: Moravia) concluded that the Czech Republic still has both the right and the duty to defend its institutions against persons who during the communist tyranny didn’t behave loyally to democratic principles.

In March 2003, the Czechs took a further step towards a settlement with the country’s totalitarian past when the StB’s archives, with all their stories about human bravery and treason, were opened to the public. In other words, lustres will be falling on Czech heads also in the twenty-first century.

Mácha, Karel Hynek

The intellectual elite, who in the second half of nineteenth century launched a cultural revival that would subsequently lead to the creation of a Czech political nation, used two literati as their standard bearers.

While one of them, Božena Němcová (see: Feminism) wrote a boring, pathetic and from a literary viewpoint completely worthless “novel” about the goody-goody Babička (Grandmother), the second, Karel Hynek Mácha was a poet whose brilliance is absolutely unquestionable. His large lyrical poem Máj (May) is probably the best piece of literature ever written in the Czech language, and his compatriots are too modest when they praise him as Lord Byron’s equal.

Incredibly enough, this literary genius is virtually unknown outside Bohemia and Moravia.

Mácha was born in 1810 in the Czech-speaking family of a poor miller’s assistant and grew up at Prague’s Malá Strana. As practically bilingual — all schools at that time taught in German — the young literate became an ardent fan of Goethe and later also of Mickiewicz, the romantic superstars at that time. When not writing, he enjoyed taking mortally long walks in the idyllic Bohemian nature, visiting castle ruins and, most of all, chasing women. “I’m looking for the ideal in every woman I meet, but I only find women in beautiful creatures,” he once complained.