Liberal Studies Abroad: Prague 2004
Some Introductory Historical Observations
[The following lecture, which has been prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC (now Vancouver Island University), is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in whole or in part, without permission and without charge, provided the source is acknowledged. Released April 2004]
This lecture was last revised on April 5, 2004
Introduction
This course of studies we are embarking on, the Liberal Studies visit to Prague and the Czech Republic, marks something of departure for Liberal Studies Abroad programs and for Liberal Studies at Malaspina. The central coordinating theme for Liberal Studies courses up to this point has been the deliberately ambiguous phrase Issues in Western Culture, and while this has never meant or led to the exclusion of anything from elsewhere, it has meant that, for the most part, our attention is focused on works obviously relevant to the history and development of what we call Western Culture, loosely defied.
Making Prague and the Czech Republic the focus of a cluster of courses is something of an exception to this tradition simply because until very modern times for most of the history of those countries we normally associate closely with Western Culture, the experience of people living in the Czech lands—and particularly the culture of the Czech-speaking part of that population—has been largely ignored, unknown, or misunderstood. As Derek Sayer points out in his excellent history of the Czechs (a book I am relying on heavily throughout this lecture) Shakespeare gave land-locked Bohemia a coastline, and as late as 1938, in the week when I was born, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could justify selling out the Czech people to Hitler by speaking about a distant land people in England knew nothing about.
For much of my life, I must confess, my knowledge of and interest in Czech history and culture were virtually non-existent. Yes, I knew a few things about a very short list of some famous Czech names (although for a long time I assumed Alfons Mucha was French and Gregor Mendel an Austrian), I could recite by heart the words to “Good King Wenceslas,” and I was vaguely aware that the Czechs were important in the history of beer making. But that was about it. Reading and studying and teaching works in the Western tradition did not require or encourage any great familiarity with the history of the Czech territories (except for some passing references to Prague when dealing with Mozart and Kafka). Nor, given the strong censorship under the Communist regime, was there much to tempt me to learn about what was going on in contemporary Czech culture.
All this changed very quickly in the past few decades, of course, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the eventual emergence of the new Czech Republic eager to create cultural and economic links with the West, and the flood of tourists from Western countries to one of the world’s most beautiful cities, made even more attractive by the exchange rates. This removal of earlier barriers has permitted the gradual emergence of important studies evaluating entire periods of Czech culture we knew little about (e.g., modernism, especially in the 1930's and 40's). In addition to discovering things about Czech culture that had long remained hidden, we have had full access to major contemporary contributions made by Czech artists to our own cultural traditions, particularly in fiction and films. This is especially the case in Canada where one of our finest and most internationally acclaimed writers is a Czech who teaches at the University of Toronto. And how could we avoid wanting to know more about the Czechs when they defeated Canada in Olympic hockey?
The fact that the culture of the Czech lands was long isolated, even sealed off, from the West creates some problems for anyone organizing a curriculum for Liberal Studies students. How is one to answer the question: What should one study about Prague? What is there in Prague which might serve as the theme for a coordinated Liberal Studies curriculum based on a visit to the city? What criteria do we use to decide what to read, discuss, and visit? Such questions hardly arise in connection with, say, an educational visit to Florence, Rome, Athens, or London, since the immediate influence of the culture of those places is obvious enough. The major problem with such places is often which particular cultural period to choose—once that choice is made the curriculum virtually organizes itself.
What complicates these questions even more in the case of the culture of the Czech lands is the ethnically diverse traditions of that culture. For almost all of its history, Czech territory—especially Prague itself—has been an arena for competing cultures—Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and others. The name of the territory has changed repeatedly (hence the awkward phrase “Czech lands”)—as has the area defined by the name. In the past hundred years, the generally brutal ironies of history have “solved” most of the long-lasting internal problems posed by these rivalries: World War I got rid of the Austrians, the Nazis got rid of the Jews, the aftermath of World War II got rid of the Germans and Hungarians, and the Velvet divorce in 1998 got rid of the Slovaks. And so now, for the first time in centuries, the Czech people have a country, the Czech Republic, where people of the same ethnic origins make up about 98 percent of the population, and there is one official and uncontested language and a flourishing national culture (a reminder of the ethnic divisiveness of earlier times remains, however, in the Romany minority of about 250,000 gypsies).
In fact, the most salient point about the development of the modern history of the Czech lands is the emergence at last of an independent and democratic Czech-speaking state relatively free of the traditional internal divisions and hostile external pressures, after hundreds of years of subservience to German-Austrian culture and political control, major internal conflicts, and a series of short-lived and often unhappy experiments (to use the mildest word available) with different political systems. It’s worth remembering that in the last century, the Czech people have undergone five major re-definitions of the political foundations of the country, from imperial oppression, to social democracy, to occupation by German fascists, to communism, and now to Western-style democracy (more about this later). And these changes have constantly altered the size and shape of the country. Each of these "experiments" has brought with it radical transformations in all aspects of life, from the forms of government and the understanding of the past to the names of streets and statues on display in public places. Milan Kundera has eloquently evoked a sense of the absurd dislocation this process has brought with it:
The street Tamina was born on was called Schwerin. That was during the war, and Prague was occupied by the Germans. Her father was born on the Černokostelecká Avenue—the Avenue of the Black Chruch. That was during the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. When her mother married her father and moved there, it bore the name of Marshal Foch. That was after World War I. Tamina spent her childhood on Stalin Avenue, and when her husband came to take her away, he went to Vinohrady—that is, Vineyards—Avenue. And all the time it was the same street; they just kept changing its name, trying to lobotomize it.
There are all kinds of ghosts prowling these confused streets. They are the ghosts of monuments demolished—demolished by the Czech Reformation, demolished by the Austrian Counterreformation, demolished by the Czechoslovak Republic, demolished by the Communists. (qu. Sayer 287 from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting)
If we take the emergence of this new country as a starting point for our reflections on the curriculum (and that would seem a logical thing to do), then our emphasis will fall on the closing years of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the 20th century, a period when the Czech people argued about, experimented with, and in large part created their modern identity. We will need also to pay some attention to the way in which that process was affected by World War II and the Communist years which followed. That will enable us perhaps to get some sense of how the Czech people are still in the process of defining who they are exactly, given that they have had control of their own destiny for such a short period of time and are still faced with the competing claims of more dominant cultures. It may also help to explain some of the major contradictions and ironies we will encounter in our reading and some of the paradoxes we experience in our responses to Prague itself.
This course is not a history of modern Prague or of the emergence of the Czech Republic—we are still, as in all Liberal Studies courses at Malaspina, centrally concerned with detailed seminar treatment of particular works, without an immersion in contextual matters. We need, however, to take that history into account to the extent that it emerges from or informs the works we study and the places we visit. That is particularly the case with the development of modern Czech culture, because in the forging of the modern Czech identity artists and intellectuals have played a major role and were frequently very conscious of the importance of their work as a contribution to a still-unfolding and contested national story, a narrative in which the very existence of a Czech-speaking culture had become so threatened by the end of the eighteenth century that its recovery required a century of massive effort on the part of historians, linguists, educators, novelists, and artists of all kinds, who were fully aware that they were working in a politically charged climate where the stakes were high.
It’s no accident that the modern Czechoslovakia which emerged from the first World War was seen as an achievement in which intellectuals had played a major role, “a revolution made by professors, and thus romantic in a way that few events in contemporary history have been” as Karel Čapek put it in 1938 shortly before his early death (Čapek 405), reminding us of three key figures in the emergence of the new country—Tomáš Masaryk, the social philosopher, Edvard Beneš, the sociologist, and Milan Štefánik, the astronomer. That “romantic” tradition has continued since 1918 with, for example, the internationally known playwright and political essayist Václav Havel, the first president of a post-communist Czechoslovakia, playwright Milan Uhde, the Speaker of the Czech Parliament, and Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus, a published author and member of the Czech PEN Club (Holy).
Hence, in modern Czech intellectual and artistic life for most of the past century and a half political issues have been deeply involved in a way we do not witness nearly as much in the modern West (how often, for example, has the funeral of an artist here been an occasional of national political significance or even an expression of popular political sentiments or national identity?). These connections are something we need to address. We can, of course, study, say, Mucha’s Slav Epic or Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk without reference to their historical context or to the explicitly politicalcultural aims of the artists, but that would surely be to miss some important things we need to know in order to understand why these works matter as much (or as little) as they do.
This engagement of artistic and intellectual works in the immediately political climate may be all the more significant in Czech culture because of what some have characterized as the tendency of the Czechs to confront political oppression with passive resistance rather than overt rebellion—a characteristic aptly named Schweikism after the country’s most famous modern fictional hero (Parrott xv). In such a climate, so the analysis runs, the artists and intellectuals carry a special responsibility to maintain a spirit of Czech defiance in the face of oppressive political realities and the absence of organized and effective political resistance, if necessary by an effort of underground self-publishing (samizdat) in defiance of official
