The Czechs in a Nutshell

Simply because it belongs to the group of arguments, which Czechs often use to explain some of the most basic features of their alleged national character. You may, of course, consider this term to be a bit woolly, but in this country, most people take it deadly seriously, so a foreigner should at least know it in theory.

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

According to common Czech wisdom, the sea is something that literally enhances big visions and great deeds. In a maritime nation, people walk on the seashore and stare out at the endless ocean. Almost physically, they feel there is something bigger and better out there behind the horizon. The Czechs, on the other hand, have at best a small rybník (a fish-pond) at their disposal. “That’s why we are so petty-minded, sceptical and timid,” the saying goes.

President Masaryk put it even more harshly: “Because we don’t have any sea, we sit by the pond and croak like small frogs.” The poor frogs have even found their way into the Czech language in the familiar saying žábomyší válka (a war between frogs and mice) which equals the petty and meaningless quarrels which are so often demonstrated by the country’s politicians.

Of course, the Czechs don’t have a monopoly on attaching symbols to entire nations. The Nobel Prize laureate Elias Canetti wrote an essay where he compared the broadminded and fearless Englishmen to the sea, while the Germans, according to Canetti, were as dangerous and unpredictable as a deep forest.

To develop this somewhat dubious theory a bit further, let’s take a quick look at the map: the Czechs not only lack the ocean’s horizons, but mountains or deep forests surround them to the north, west and south-west. Bohemia, it’s often said, is even submerged in a basin (which it in reality isn’t). To the protagonists of the absence-of-ocean-theory, this has an evident result: even though the Czechs are living in the middle of Europe, geography has made them feel protected from the outside world.

Add forty years of isolation behind the Iron Curtain, and what do you get? An inwardly-looking atmosphere, unruffled by fresh maritime winds or oceanic perspectives, where the Czechs have been happily chewing their knedlíks (see: Czech Cuisine), downing beer and producing unique characters such as Jára Cimrman, Karel Gott and Václav Klaus.

Ostrava

If Prague and the rest of Bohemia, with all their charming hospodas, delightful architecture and pretty landscape should become too cosy for you, Ostrava, the Czech Republic’s third largest city with about 330,000 inhabitants, will rapidly cure your spleen. Tucked away in the country’s north-eastern corner on the border between Moravia, Silesia and Poland, the former Czechoslovakia’s “heart of steel” offers the true flair of the Wild East. As an Australian probably would have put it, this is a city where men are men, and sheep are nervous.

Contrary to most other Czech cities, which were established in the Middle Ages, Ostrava emerged only in the 1920s, when small-town Moravská Ostrava was merged with 30-odd villages in its surroundings. What Ostrava lacked in historic patina, however, it fully compensated for with an incredible ethnic blend. Pre-war Ostrava’s population consisted of Czechs, Germans, Jews and Poles, all of whom were in one way or another economically dependent upon the Vítkovice steel mill (established in 1828) and the extensive coal mining industry.

Now, guess what happened to Ostrava when the Bolsheviks came to power in 1948?

Correct: the already heavily industrialized and ecologically disturbed region became even more industrialized and ecologically disturbed. By the end of the 1950s Ostrava had been transformed into Czechoslovakia’s unquestioned centre of heavy industry. Thanks to the region’s economic importance, local Party bosses had great influence in Prague, and propaganda portrayed Ostrava’s miners as the nobility of the ruling proletariat.

Surprisingly enough, the city stayed an ethnic hotchpotch also under Bolshevik rule. True, most of Ostrava’s Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, and the city’s German inhabitants were kicked out of the country right after the war (see: Munich Agreement). But these two minority groups were soon replaced by a strong influx from the eastern part of Czechoslovakia — be it Slovaks, Roma or Ruthenians. And since the hordes of industrial labourers needed a place to live, architects relished designing houses according to the Stalinist brutalism style.

As a result, most Czechs tend to see post-communist Ostrava as a living monument to the Bolshevik era’s crazy command economy mixed with failed social engineering, while the city’s inhabitants, the Ostraváci, are often perceived as a mixture of East-European gastarbeiters who didn’t make it to the West.