The Czechs in a Nutshell

Ever since the media after the Velvet Revolution started to publish ranking lists of the greatest Czechs of all times, Masaryk (1850 — 1937) has been the unquestioned winner. This is not too surprising, since he is personally regarded as the decisive force in the creation of Czechoslovakia, and he is the unrivalled symbol of Czechoslovakia’s First Republic (1918-1938). In other words, Masaryk is to the Czechs and also quite a few Slovaks what Kemal Atatürk is to the Turks — although he didn’t share the latter’s love for booze and military parades.

Admittedly, the Masaryk cult has a substantial basis. Compared to the dictators and generals that ruled elsewhere in Central Europe in the interwar years, the sociologist and philosophy professor stands out as an uncommonly educated, broadminded and responsible politician. Yet the 40 years of Bolshevik rule, when his name was practically erased from the history books and every single Masaryk statue in the country was torn down, make him look almost supernatural today.

The funny thing, though, is that this “greatest Czech of all time” has a somewhat non-Czech origin. His father was a Slovak coachman, working at an estate in Hodonín in southern Moravia, which explains his Slovak-sounding surname (Masar meant “butcher”), while his mother was a Czech with German ancestors. According to rumours, though, Tomáš' real father was the owner of the estate where his parents worked, a Jew named Nathan Rädlich. Although this would have explained why the bright, but pitifully poor Masaryk was sent first to gymnasium in Brno and then to the University in Vienna for education, these rumours have never been proven.

It’s undisputed, though, that his wife Charlotte Garrigue, an emancipated American lady whom he met in Leipzig in 1877, had a very strong influence on him. Charlotte’s social democratic viewpoints were not least evident in Masaryk’s later stance towards women’s liberation (see: Feminism), where he admitted that he was “just conveying the opinions of my wife”. When he officially took his wife’s surname as his middle name Masaryk was branded as the first Czech feminist, and this was cemented when he later formulated a much-acclaimed paragraph in the Czechoslovak constitution of 1920: “No privileges connected to origin, gender or profession will be recognized.”

The coming statesman’s liberal and progressive image was further fuelled by two “scandalous” incidents. In 1886, he published an article in a Prague magazine claiming that two famous historic manuscripts, which allegedly proved that the Czechs’ literary traditions were almost a thousand years old, were actually fakes. Good Czechs had just stomached the fact that Masaryk was right when the hard-hitting professor publicly defended a mentally retarded Jew, Leopold Hilsner, who had been sentenced to death for committing an alleged ritual murder. Thanks to Masaryk’s campaign against the hysterical anti-Semites, Emperor Franz Josef saved Hilsner from execution, a fact, which Czech chauvinists later never forgot.

“A nation’s honour lies in it’s ability to find the truth,” Masaryk echoed another Czech superstar — Jan Hus.

TGM was elected Czechoslovakia’s president in November 1918 — at the age of 68, he was older than most Czechs at that time could hope to live — and re-elected for the third and last time in 1934, then almost blind and evidently reduced mentally. Many Czechs still consider the 17 years, during which Masaryk ruled Czechoslovakia as a “republican monarch” (Prague’s Hradčany Castle is more majestic than most of Europe’s royal palaces) to be one of the highlights in their history. Similarly, when Masaryk died in September 1937 less than two years after he abdicated, his state funeral quite literally symbolized the end of democratic and liberal-minded Czechoslovakia (see: Munich Agreement).

The First Republic nostalgia that emerged after the Velvet Revolution has had an understandable tendency to glorify both Masaryk and his republic. True enough, Czechoslovakia’s policy towards its minorities was, by interwar standards, liberal, but hardly praiseworthy today (Masaryk once described the country’s role as that of a bulwark against German expansion). Nobody disputes that Masaryk was a sterling humanist, but he seldom missed a chance to bash the Catholic Church (“theocrats”) and publicly praise the Hussites, whom Czechoslovakia’s Catholic majority, not least the Slovaks, perceived as chauvinistic Czech nationalists.

“Masaryk was no doubt a democrat, although his interpretation of democracy was sometimes rather peculiar,” the historian Antonín Klimek says. “He claimed that democracy, in certain situations, is compatible with dictatorship, and he considered a revival of the Austrian monarchy to be a bigger threat than Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933.”