moderates, and the constant strife between these factions and with outsiders “seriously weakened the Bohemian kingdom both economically and politically” (43). One important development for the history of Protestant religion in these developments was the group born from the extreme wing of the Hussite movement, the Unity of Brethren or Moravian Brethren (many of whom who were forced to scatter beyond Bohemia and who set up communities all over Europe and in America).
The Hapsburgs
When George of Podebrady died, a Polish dynasty (the Jagiellonians) ruled Bohemia from a distance, leaving effective power in the hands of the local nobility. And when that family died out in 1526, the Czech nobles elected the Roman Catholic Ferdinand I (1526-1564) as king of Bohemia. This initiated the rule of the Hapsburg dynasty, which was to last until the end of World War I (there had been Hapsburg kings before, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, but the family had not continued to rule for very long). The Hapsburgs were a well-established power in European politics, who through diplomacy, marriage, and force had, by the end of the fifteenth century, gained control over much of Europe (Spain, parts of Italy, the Netherlands, and their traditional regions in Germany and Austria).
By now the Reformation was fully launched, and the Czech lands were, like so many other places, subject to intense and often bloody feuding between Protestants and Catholics. The second Hapsburg king, Rudolf II (1576–1611), who was also Holy Roman Emperor, made Prague his royal capital (over Vienna) and initiated a second golden age for Prague, enriching the city enormously with art and bringing some of Europe’s most important scientists to his capital (Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, who is buried in Týn Cathedral in Prague). He also introduced a measure of religious tolerance.
The Battle of White Mountain and The Dark Ages
Soon after Rudolf was compelled to give up the throne (for reasons of mental instability) the history of the Czechs took a decisive and disastrous turn when the Protestant nobility turned against the Catholic king Ferdinand II. Their hostility led to the second defenestration of Prague in 1618, when two Catholic governors and their secretary were thrown out of the windows of Prague Castle (they survived). This launched Europe’s first totally catastrophic international religious conflict, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), and led to the most calamitous event in Czech history, the Battle of the White Mountain (1620), when the Czech protestants were defeated by the Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor in a battle near Prague. A number of prominent Czech nobles were executed and their heads put on display on the Charles Bridge (where they remained for a dozen years). The devastating effects of the Thirty Years’ War on the Czechs in Bohemia can hardly be overestimated:
An estimated five-sixths of the Bohemian nobility went into exile, their properties handed over to loyal Catholic families from Austria, Spain, France and Italy. Bohemia had been devastated, with towns and cities laid waste, and the total population reduced by almost two-thirds; Prague’s population halved. . . . All forms of Protestantism were outlawed, the education system was handed over to the Jesuits and, in 1651 alone, more than two hundred “witches” were burned at the stake in Bohemia. (Humphreys 244)
The century following the Thirty Years’ War almost witnessed the extermination of Czech culture entirely. German-speaking Catholics (spearheaded by the Jesuits) under the direction of Vienna and Rome took over religious and educational centres and brought in waves of German immigrants. The authorities forcibly transformed the city’s appearance with Baroque architecture as an overt manifestation of their power and wealth and pushed spoken Czech out of education and virtually all civilized discourse. Even the protests against this trend and exhortations for a Czech revival, when these eventually began to appear, had to be written in German to gain an audience. Before that, however, books encouraging Czech patriotism or reminding readers of a national Czech past were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, including Pope Pius II’s Historica Bohemica of 1458 (Sayer 49).
What this amounted to was a concerted attempt to redefine the identity of the people of Bohemia to make them obedient Catholic subjects of a German-speaking empire ruled from Vienna. In recounting one of the more significant episodes in the cultural campaign, Sayer (50-52) writes about the attempt of the Catholic officials to replace Jan Hus as the great national hero with Jan Nepomucky, who, according to local legends, had been thrown from Charles Bridge into the Vltava three hundred years earlier (in 1393) for refusing to reveal to the king the secrets of the confessional. By exhuming his body, making him a saint, erecting his statue on Charles Bridge (along with other Catholic saints), and promoting an annual Jan Nepomucky festival, the authorities hoped to transform the allegiances of the thousands of Czech peasants who came to the city. The entire hagiography was made up by the Jesuits, a composite of two old stories, and once the fabrication was exposed the Vatican eventually stripped Jan Nepomucky of his sainthood in 1963. Nonetheless, this effort did succeed in making the Czech lands predominantly Roman Catholic (in The Good Soldier Svejk, written in the 1920's, the cult of this saint is still alive and well).
The most internationally famous legacy of the Catholic Counter-Reformation in Prague, something no tourist can avoid confronting, is the cult of the Bambino de Praga (the Baby Jesus of Prague), a wax effigy of Jesus as an infant, given to the city in 1628. Replicas of the doll are sold everywhere in the central part of the city, and there are many commercial sites on the Internet marketing copies. The original doll itself is on display in the church Panna Maria Vítězná, where thousands of tourists still flock to see it.
The National Revival
The reawakening of Czech culture, the National Revival, began during the Enlightenment, when the Hapsburg ruler Joseph II (1780–1790) granted a measure of religious and civil tolerance throughout his empire (while at the same time ironically motivating Czech intellectuals by increasingly making German the language of official business). Czechs participated in the growing demands for political freedoms for ethnic minorities throughout the Austrian Empire (a trend powerfully reinforced by the French Revolution and its aftermath), and many Czechs directed their energies into political efforts to unite the Slavic people (a movement known as pan-Slavism).
For people whose language has never come close to facing extinction, it is difficult to imagine the complex difficulties of the task of restoration. Once Czech had all but disappeared as the language of government, education, and most artistic, religious, and intellectual life, those urging its return had, in effect, no literate Czech-speaking audience (often they themselves were not particularly fluent themselves) and had to present their defences of Czech culture in German. They had no rich tradition of printed works written in Czech (literature, history, poetry, or even school books, the essential tools for cultural development). All these had to be produced. A Czech tradition had to, as it were, be invented, so that the National Revival had an effective Czech content. It is an astonishing tribute to the untiring efforts of Czech intellectuals and artists that their efforts in the second half of the nineteenth century were so successful. Their task was all the more urgent because the Czech language, unlike, say, French, German, or English, was confined to the Czech territories and its relatively small population. If it disappeared from there, it was gone forever.
The Czechs were increasingly motivated to re-create their own culture in the face of their disappointments over the Ausgleich (meaning compromise) in 1867, which was an attempt by the government in Vienna to cope with dissent within the Austrian Empire and with the threat posed by the growing power of the Prussians. The Ausgleich established a dual monarchy in which the Magyar government of Hungary was granted almost equal status with Vienna, and hence Budapest became a much more important political centre than Prague. The autocratic conservatism of the Hungarian government prevented some long-necessary reforms in the Austrian (now Austro-Hungarian) Empire and, according to some interpretations, was a major factor contributing to World War I, initiated by an Austrian attack on Serbia.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the Czech National Revival was making important cultural gains—the National Theatre and the National Library, for example, and the growth of some important political groups advocating the cause of Czech nationalism, along with an growing tradition in Czech poetry and prose. A number of artists had turned toward Paris as the inspiration for modern Czech art (away from Vienna), and there was throughout the culture a strong sense (especially among the generation born in the 1880’s) that old traditions and established political structures were on their way out, something which may account for the pronounced note of anxiety and neurosis in many of the early Czech modernists, from Kafka to Gutfreund (see Mansbach, Chapter 1).
The National Revival also made a concerted attempt to create interest in traditional Bohemian and Moravian folk culture as central to the Czech identity (the survival of the language had owed a great deal to its continuing presence in the countryside). Artists celebrated old folk costumes, and musicians deliberately emphasized traditional folk melodies in their operatic and symphonic compositions. This trend culminated in the Czechoslavic Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895 (Sayer 124 ff) based on a reconstruction in a park outside Prague of traditional Czech farms, churches, handicrafts, and peasant work places, all designed to insist upon the uniquely Czech character of the people (most of whom, of course, now lived in large urban centres far removed from such traditional ways of life). At the exhibition there was only one official language, Czech. An important part of the celebrations was a re-creation of the Ride of the Kings, an old village ritual of obscure origin, which had almost died out (I mention this point because the continuation of the traditional ride is an important element in the Kundera novel we will be reading).
World War I
The World War pitted the Czechs (and Slovaks) against their fellow Slavs, the Russians and the Serbs, in the service of their oppressors, the Austrians and Hungarians. Not surprisingly, there was little national enthusiasm for such a cause, as we shall see in the most famous novel to emerge from that conflict, The Good Soldier Švejk. The most important Czech military contribution to the war was made by those who defected from the Austrian cause to form the Czech Legion, which fought against the Austrians, before getting involved in the Russian revolution. This service made the victorious allies especially receptive to the Czech national cause, and they had little difficulty in agreeing to the formation of the first Czechoslovak Republic (declared on October 28, 1918).
The new republic was, relatively speaking, economically prosperous, since it preserved about eighty percent of the industrial capacity of the AustroHungarian Empire (Humphreys 248), and the cultural life of Prague flourished in the 1920’s. But the Great Depression of the 1930’s and the inherent instability of a country marked by major ethnic differences (Czechs, Slovkas, Germans, Hungarians, Jews, Poles, Ukrainians) exacerbated the political tensions within Czechoslovakia, particularly the secessionists desires of the right-wing German political party.
Munich Crisis and World War II
