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Pick! Czech Culture
 Understanding and Appreciating Czechs & Czech Culture
A Brief History of
the Czech Republic
Written by David Showalter
The Czechs have a grand, glorious and beautiful history that spans 1500 years, and includes some of the most famous kings and grandest achievements in all of Europe and in fact the world. It is well worth studying in its own right, and because it still lives in the hearts of every Czech right up to today.
But that is not the history we are concerned with. Instead, I will concentrate on recent Czech history as it affects the lives of everyday Czechs you will meet during your stay here.
This region suffered through the horrors of the Nazis, and then 40 years of terrible oppression under Soviet Communism.
You don't live through that kind of terror, murder, poverty and oppression without it leaving it's scars upon you, your culture, and your outlook on the future.
And the scars are definitely here, everywhere you look.
So, skip this section and the section on the EU and you will surely:
A. Misunderstand nearly every aspect of social and bureaucratic life here, which will be a constant stumbling block for you as you go through the motions everyday life.
B. Completely miss out on the opportunity to truly understand the culture of the Czech Republic, it's people, and what they've endured and are striving for in the future.
C. Neglect the immeasurably valuable opportunity to experience tremendous personal growth, as you experience and adapt to life in a culture that was vastly less privileged than your own.
Like I said, I'll make it so quick that you'll barely feel it. But I will also encourage you to do your homework and read up on some of these issues on your own.
Realistically, you will experience many additional problems on a daily basis, and miss a lot of what you could learn from this experience, if you don't understand the history of the country you'll be living in. So take the time to do it right.
Let's Begin
Czech Self Republic as an Independent Nation
The Czech Republic as it is known today is only 10 years old.
As for having an independent country, the Czechs have had a pretty unlucky history over the past 500 years. Whenever something could have gone wrong for them as a unified, autonomous country, it did. Their friends often let them down. The rulers they found themselves living under were generally less than benevolent, and oftentimes in this past century, less than human.
That's not to say that the Czechs didn't have many grand cultural acheivements during this period, they certainly did.
The Czechs are famous throughout history, continuing right up until today, for a dynamic and resourceful populace that values higher education, skilled workmanship and industry, has an extraordinary work ethic, and has contributed substantially to European culture in the areas of the arts and humanities.
The Czechs are also a very proud, capable and independent people.
Throughout history, Prague was many times the center of Europe, both in trade and culture. It boasted Central Europe's first university, and was known as the heart of Europe. At one time, the population of the city was greater than both London and Paris.
But during the past 5 centuries, the Czechs have experienced autonomous self-rule for a total of only 30 years, split between two short periods of the 20th and now 21st Centures.
So what went wrong?
The Habsburg Empire
In the mid 1500s, the Czech lands were forcibly united and brought under the rulership of the Austrian empire, by Ferdinand I of the Habsburg family. Although they were allowed minor forms of local self-rule, the Czech language and culture was suppressed almost completely. Neither could Czechs hold any important government offices, or petition the Habsburgs for much of anything of value.
This unfortunate state of affairs continued for the next 400 years, until…
World War I
On July 28, 1914, the Austro-Hungarian empire declared war on Serbia, after their heir to the throne was assassinated in Sarajevo by a young anarchist. Thus began a war which killed some 35 million people - half of which were lost after the last shot was fired, due to the Spanish Flu which spread like wildfire due to the poor living conditions left in Europe, which had all but been destroyed by the war.
On November 11, 1918, the war ended with the Austro-Hungarian empire on the losing end. Under the bold leadership of Tomas Masaryk, the Czechs petitioned the U.S. and U.K. for an independent state, which was granted one month later.
The Czechoslovak Republic established its constitution on February 29, 1920, and the new country included all of the former Czech and Slovak lands, as well as sub-Carpathian Ukraine. Of critical importance from an economic standpoint, the newly formed territory also included nearly 70% of the former Austro-Hungarian empires industrial base, and nearly overnight became a world leader in the production of steel, engineering works and military armaments.
The resulting economic boom, under the competent leadership of the internationally respected president Tomas Masaryk, rocketed the Czechoslovak Republic to the 8th spot of the world's largest economies, and earned it the title of "Friend of America" from the Wilson administration.
However, far from furthering the stability of the newly independent state, this world-wide distinction in light industry was very tragically to be their downfall, just 20 years later.
World War II
Many of the regions of the Czechoslovak Republic were inhabited mainly by Sudetenland Germans, who posed a constant threat to the Czech leadership due to increasing political demands and strong cultural ties to neighboring Germany.
When the Sudetenlands proposed reunification with Germany, by then under the sway of rising Nazi power, the Czech government sent the bulk of their military to prepare defensive fortifications in the mountains of the Sudetenland region, South Bohemia.
Hitler realized that to invade the Czechoslovak Republic, he would be forced to hit these formidable mountain defenses head-on, which could take years, inalterably slowing or nullifying his strategy to conquer continental Europe in a matter of months, with limited military losses.
(Called the Blitzkrieg, or "lightning war," Hitler's forces ransacked Europe at frightening speed, vastly outstripping his army's supply lines, in an attempt to topple European governments and bring all of its resources under the Third Reich with limited military equipment losses. With the exception of the United Kingdom, Hitler was utterly successful, and turned his military's attention to his real prize, Moscow, and the nearly limitless resources of Russian Asia).
On September 29, 1938, Hitler won a diplomatic coup that began another monumental tragedy for the world, just 20 years after the end of World War I.
An agreement between Germany (having already annexed Austria into its territory), Italy, the United Kingdom and France allowed Germany to annex the Sudetenland region of the Czechoslovak Republic under the auspices of "reuniting the German peoples separated by the war (WW I)." The Czechs, who had not been invited to the meeting, had no choice but to agree if they were to remain in agreement with their critical European allies, the U.K. and France.
Hitler's real motivation was the industrial might of the Czechoslovak Republic, which would become the main source of supplies for what became the greatest army the world had ever seen.
From the Nazis to Communism
If you've been following my story closely, you'll know that as soon as Hitler annexed the "Sudetenlands" of the Czechoslovak Republic under the guise of "reuniting the German people," he also took command of the Czechs mountain fortifications - their only defense against an aggressive Germany, and the bulk of their defensive military equipment.
Other petitions from neighboring countries soon followed, and the Czechoslovak territory disintegrated in a matter of just three months. When Hitler dropped pretense and invaded on March 14, 1939, the world could only watch as the Czechs surrendered without a shot and the Czech lands were placed under the heel of the Third Reich as a puppet government.
The End of World War II
The fall of Germany brought Edvard Benes out of exile to resume the presidency of the new Czechoslovak Republic, and to begin the painful reconstruction of a thriving and successfully industrialized democratic society. Less than one year later, in May of 1946, the Communists took the lead in the national elections under the leadership of Klement Gottwald. This was bad news, and it was due to get much worse.
In 1948, a political crisis brought on by a severe drought the year before prompted all of the democratic ministers, with the sole exception of the heroic Jan Masaryk, to hand in their resignations in order to force the hand of president Benes. Benes responded by ordering Gottwald to form a new government, which indeed he did.
In a calculated move that utterly defines the formation of every Communist government in the world over the last century, Gottwald took only three months to institute a new Czechoslovak constitution, turning the Republic into a "people's democracy" espousing Socialism. Thus, he continued the long-standing Communist tradition of forming governments overnight that then took 20 years to process the most mundane and average of daily paperwork.
I am terribly ashamed to say, that while the Czech people turned to the allies, especially America, to honor its treaties to protect the new Czechoslovak Republic from invasion – and their terrible sacrifices in World War II to advance the allied invasion – my country and the world turned a blind eye and allowed the Czechs, and all the countries of Eastern Europe, to be swallowed up by the growing menace in Moscow, who claimed these lands under the "sovereign right to protect the homeland against future German aggression."
Tragically, Benes abdicated power and died soon after, whereupon Gottwald implemented the other infamous Communist tradition of enslaving the populace under the auspices of "freedom." Just five lousy weeks after his new constitution for a people's democracy, Gottwald, now president, implemented Stalinism on June 14, 1948, in which was to remain the utterly terrible burden borne by the Czech people for the next 40 years.
The Beginning of Freedom
In 1975, Vaclav Havel wrote his "Open Letter to Gustav Husak," the ruling member of the Communist government of the now named, Czechoslovakia. In his extraordinary way, he argued powerfully against the soul-destroying policies of the Communist system, and it's lasting effect on the ability of an individual to live with hope and dignity, and a people to survive and prosper, and build a better future for their children.
Havel also participated immeasurably in the creation of Charter 77, published in 1976, which called for the "return of basic human rights and liberties to Czechoslovakia." This brave and revolutionary publication caught the attention of the entire world, and led to the arrest of Havel in 1979, whereupon he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.
Out of jail in 1983, Havel boldly and tirelessly continued his fight for the independence of his people and their country from the tyranny of Soviet oppression. Arrested again in 1989, Havel was released after four months to lead the Velvet Revolution, which started as a student protest in Waclav (Wenceslaws) Square in Prague.
The crowds swelled to a staggering 100,000 people that caught the eye of the media world-wide, and within just a single week led to the resignation of the ruling Communist party, the end of 40 years of Soviet rule, and the formation of a newly independent Czech and Slovak Federative Republic, with Havel as acting president.
A constitution was adopted in April, 1990, and open democratic elections were held in June, where Havel was officially elected as president to lead the new Republic.
Then on January 1, 1993, after a year of internal strife, the Czech and Slovak lands peacefully separated, and the Czech Republic was born.
With just this basic background on Czech history, you'll be able to understand a lot more of the whos, whats and whys of daily Czech life. That goes from the conversations in the pubs, to the long lines at every government office, to the surprised stares of the older generation when you mouth a few words in English to your buddy while strolling down a village path.
For a true understanding of the local ways, and real personal growth during your stay in CZ, I have to encourage you to read a bit more.
My suggestions, as a minimum, are as follows:
1. Read the "Open Letter to Gustav Husak" by Vaclav Havel. Perhaps nowhere in literature is the pain, fear and indignity suffered by an individual living under the Communist system explained so powerfully and clearly. This letter is available everywhere on the internet, and in print in Vaclav Havel's "Living In Truth" essay collection. At 25 pages, I think you can manage it.
2. The Black Book of Communism
When the U.S.S.R. collapsed under it's own bloated weight, the archives were opened to researchers across the globe, and the true horror of the murders and inhumanities practiced as "daily business" by Communist governments world-wide stunned the world. The book is not an easy one to stomach, but is in my opinion utterly essential reading for anyone coming to live and work in any country in the former Eastern Bloc. Without the true knowledge of life under Communist oppression, which exceeded even the Nazis (if indeed such a thing is possible) in lasting cruelty and murder rate, you will miss the entire point of what the Czechs endured over the last century, and where they are struggling to go today.
OK, so the book is over 800 pages. If you read the first section on Russian Communism for the basics of how the system functioned, and the horrors that followed, and then skim the section on Eastern Europe, you'll have a very good base of knowledge in just under 300 pages of reading.
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Introduction
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It's critical to understand at least a basic history of the Czech Republic if you're planning on living and working here.
Remember: Europe is not America - they remember their history, and it still lives. (Sorry guys, but you know it's true - most of us slept through history class). Nowhere is this more true than in Eastern Europe.
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