Orzoff Andrea. Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914-1948

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86 Battle for the Castle

was being attributed to the “Great Leader Masaryk” and the Legions. Sim-

ilarly, a 1924 debate in the pages of Pˇrítomnost raged over the Legionnaires’

level of education (implicitly, whether they were just a bunch of uneducated

belligerents who happened to be in the right place at the right time), and also

over the alleged holy or untouchable Legionnaire cult.

157

Former Legion-

naire and diplomat Lev Borský in his 1929 memoirs attacked Masaryk and

Beneš for betraying the Legionnaire ideal. Masaryk had committed treason

to the warlike, nationalist Legionnaire spirit, Borský wrote, by describing

Czechoslovak independence as a moral victory more than a military one,

by withdrawing the Legionnaires from Siberia to France where they were

just “another little troop,” and by bringing German political parties into the

governing coalition in 1926.

158

While the Legionnaires served as a powerful and contentious sym-

bol throughout the interwar period, concretely they also served the Cas-

tle. For most Legionnaires, Masaryk’s political and moral authority was

unshakable; Beneš’s position as Masaryk’s hand-picked successor granted

him a similar status. Masaryk and Beneš attended Battle of Zborov com-

memorations, approvingly observing extensive military formations and

displays.

159

Legionnaires played leading roles in public state ceremonies;

they helped create both the physical memorials and the public rituals

associated with them, such as the Memorial of the National Liberation

onŽižkovHillinPrague(seeﬁgures2.1 and 2.2). They even wrote plays

and ﬁlms romanticizing Legionnaire exploits.

160

When the Legionnaires’

noble deeds were lauded, so was the President-Liberator. Still, Masaryk

remained dubious of the Legionnaires’ commitment to the new democratic

republic.

The Castle leaders also cultivated prominent writers and intellectuals,

particularly those a generation younger. The two best-known Castle writers

and helpmeets, essential popularizers of the Castle’s mythology, were among

the most signiﬁcant literati of the interwar era: playwright, journalist, and

novelist Karel

Capek and master essayist and journalist Ferdinand Peroutka.

These two writers set the intellectual tone for the younger Castle intelli-

gentsia, frequently referred to as the lost generation, the generation of prag-

matists, or, most tellingly, the

Capek generation, a term ﬁrst used by Czech

literary critics in 1913 to describe the generation of artists born between 1880

and 1895.

161

In a 1931 set of essays, František Goetz described the

Capek

generation as powerfully inﬂuenced by the Great War, the formation of

Czechoslovakia, and Tomáš Masaryk. Previous generations had engaged in

destructive revolt; the

Capek generation had overcome its early nihilistic ten-

dencies to devote itself to the representation of Czech culture on the world

stage and the good of the state and nation. “[T]he most essential foundations

ofCzechnationallife...[are]simultaneously personiﬁed in the fundamental

The Castle 87

Figure 2.1. November 8, 1928: Celebration to mark the beginning of construction of the

Legionnaire “Pantheon” and mausoleum on Žižkov Hill in Prague. Masaryk is in the

center of the photograph, hatted, looking downward. He is ﬂanked by an uncomfortable-

looking Edvard Beneš to his left and Karel Kramá

r to the right. Source for this and ﬁgure

2.2: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2

∗

389/1–3, 3741, 3742, 3745.

Figure 2.2. Masaryk during the same event, reviewing soldiers (some of them former

Legionnaires) at arms.

88 Battle for the Castle

experiential, social, and artistic opinions of this generation, which has never

denied that [these opinions stem in large part] from Masaryk’s work.”

162

Peroutka agreed that his generation owed Masaryk a political and intel-

lectual debt. Unlike Masaryk, Peroutka wrote, the

Capek generation lacked

a metaphysics, drawing instead on Henri Bergson’s “vitalism,” American

pragmatism, and Nietzsche’s “antimetaphysical radicalism.” The focus of

their gaze and their art had been the world: they sought inspiration and

joy in what they could see, and found the past irrelevant. Despite their

diﬀerences with him, Masaryk was a crucial exemplar of passionate praxis,

idealism translated to reality. Masaryk’s philosophies—political realism and

existential humanism—were close to the

Capek generation’s vision of the

world, although they and the president had traveled utterly diﬀerent paths

and continued to diﬀer, Peroutka wrote. “[We] do not link humanity with

being Czech, or even with being a Slav, but rather with being a good

European.” For Peroutka, Masaryk was the last and greatest of the Czech

Awakeners: his vision of Czech history, linking the Hussite past to the

republican present, oﬀered the Czechoslovak nation a new, enlightened,

powerful vision of itself.

163

Peroutka personally introduced Masaryk to the group of intellectuals and

literati at

Capek’s Friday evening salons (Friday is pátek in Czech; the group

was dubbed the Páte

cníci, or Friday Men). Just before the war,

Capek began

holding weekly gatherings with a few friends at Prague cafés to drink black

coﬀee and expound on their art. In April 1925,when

Capek, his father, and

his brother’s family moved into a double “villa” in the Prague suburb of

Královské Vinohrady, a room was reserved for the Friday meetings, which

grew to include more participants (ﬁgure 2.3).

164

First-time guests to

Capek’s

salon had to be escorted by a regular attendee. If the new guest seemed

congenial, he was welcomed back into the group on his own. “Karel

Capek

sat at the door of the little room. ...He did not get up when a new guest

entered. He just extended his hand. ‘So, take a seat somewhere!’ ”

165

Regular

attendees tended to sit in the same easy chair, or next to the same people.

A table held drinks and refreshments, and

Capek solicitously poured coﬀee

and oﬀered food, libations, and cigarettes.

166

Friday Man Adolf Hoﬀmeister

described the room where the Friday Men met as the “kitchen of conver-

sations; they cook all afternoon.” Hoﬀmeister’s

Capek was a “small, black-

haired, rosy-cheeked host, with a coﬀeepot in hand and half a cigarette in

his holder, attentive to ideas and to guests.”

167

Discussion topics ranged

widely, from issues in the public eye to wine, women, and song. Friday Men

would kid one another about female companions or attending séances, and

mock academic politics.

168

The group’s custom was to treat one another with

blasé courtliness. Not even those who had known each other since boyhood

addressed one another with the intimate ty; all Friday Men used the formal

The Castle 89

Figure 2.3. Adolf Hoﬀmeister’s cartoon of the Friday Men. First row, from left: Ferdi-

nand Peroutka, J. B. Kozák, Arne Laurin. Second row: Karel Kraus, František Langer,

Karel

Capek, Josef Kodí

cek, Josef Macek. Third row: Josef

Capek, Vladimír Van

cura,

Masaryk, Edvard Beneš, Karel Polá

cek. Fourth row: František Kubka, Josef Kopta, Dr. L.

Procházka, Vilem Mathesius, Josef Šusta.

vy, and last names. No women, not even

Capek’s housemaids, were allowed

save on rare occasions such as New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Tolerant

Capek wanted to . .. bring opposing views closer to one

another. Only he could have managed to surround himself with such

heterogeneous talents and ideological opponents, and create for them

a reconciliatory atmosphere in which communist writers and Marxist

aesthetes sat companionably alongside Legionnaires, militant

Catholics next to liberals.

169

There were many overlapping groups and generations within the Friday

assemblées, which drew on some forty members, although no more than

twenty generally appeared any given Friday. Among the Communists,

many of whom also participated in the Left avant-garde group Dev

etsil,

were journalist and artist Adolf Hoﬀmeister, novelist Vladimír Van

cura,

and more occasional visitors such as poet Vit

ezslav Nezval and journalist

Ivan Olbracht, writer for Rudé právo and editor in chief of Rudý veˇcerník.

There was a Lidové noviny contingent, including publisher Jaroslav Strán-

ský, reporters Karel Polá

cek, Eduard Bass, and Jan Herben, and Prague

editor in chief Karel Zden

ek Klíma. (Ferdinand Peroutka, one of the

90 Battle for the Castle

earliest members, stopped coming to the Fridays by the 1930s.) František

Langer and Josef Kopta, Legionnaire novelists and writers for Národní

osvobození, came, as did publisher Bohumil P

rikryl of the centrist Legion-

naire publishing house,

Cin. Other journalistic members included Prager

Presse chief editor Arne Laurin and reporter František Kubka; Josef Kodí

cek,

Tribuna drama critic and theater director; and friendly reporters from hostile

papers, such as Národní listy’s Karel Scheinpﬂug.

170

The older generation

of Friday Men generally came from the professoriate or the civil service,

and sometimes both. Among them were Germanist Otakar Fischer, his-

torian Josef Šusta, philosopher J. B. Kozák, and Anglicist Vilém Mathe-

sius. Fischer, also a poet, would eventually head Prague’s National The-

ater; Šusta and Mathesius engaged in various kinds of government service,

Šusta serving brieﬂy as minister of education. Mathesius was the group’s

link to the well-known Prague Linguistic Circle of the 1930s; articles by

Capek and other Friday Men appear in the early issues of the Linguis-

tic Circle’s journals.

171

Otokar Vo

cadlo, who taught Czech language and

literature at the London School of Slavonic Studies, attended when in

Prague.

172

But the most famous Friday Man was President Masaryk. Beginning in

1926, Masaryk, Beneš, and other KPR and Zamini leaders—Vasil Škrach,

Josef Schieszl, Václav Bou

cek, and Masaryk’s son Jan—occasionally visited

the Fridays.

173

When Masaryk was to attend,

Capek placed a vase of ﬂowers

on the table near the president’s chair, otherwise kept ceremoniously empty,

and served only black coﬀee. Masaryk rarely spoke much, according to Fri-

day Man memoirs, and heightened the group’s formal air by addressing each

member according to his profession: “Mr. Reporter [pane redaktore],” and so

on. Peroutka recalled that when he attended, “Unfortunately a few people

spoke ‘presidentially,’ always positively and in defense of the state: ‘And,

Mr. President, just as the sun shines above us, etc etc.’ This was hideously

irritating.” But the Communist members of the group openly baited the

president and were met with good-natured humor. “Once [poet Vit

ezslav

Nezval] with his customary enthusiasm declared to Masaryk, ‘The petit-

er the bourgeois, the worse! [ˇcím menší buržoa, tím horší]’ Masaryk smiled

widely; this was more pleasant for him than hearing serious opinions.”

174

But

the president recalled things diﬀerently. During a 1934 visit from Friday Man

Josef Macek, Masaryk commented that he had stopped attending the Friday

meetings because they were a waste of time. Macek explained that the Friday

Men wanted to enjoy tranquil conversation, not exhaust themselves with

problems. “Entirely wrong,” Masaryk responded acidly. “Nothing’s more

tiring than talking about nothing.”

175

The president’s presence intimidated most attendees into careful conver-

sation or awkward silence. František Kubka wrote, “We did not speak about

The Castle 91

women in front of the president, nor did we tell each other anecdotes, curse

about politics, or use words which were inappropriate for conversation.”

176

Masaryk dampened the Friday discussions, Beneš enlivened them. Peroutka

wrote that “Beneš was a debater. He led argument, would discuss absolutely

anything, and argued openly, as was his habit.”

177

Masaryk considered the Fridays to represent a political grouping, and

once told some of the Friday Men, “Your ‘Friday’ is already a [political]

program in and of itself.” František Kubka disputed this: “The Friday Men

in fact had no political program, and were unwilling to organize themselves

as a political unit. Especially when even the host, Karel

Capek, was unen-

thusiastic about the matter.”

178

Although the Friday Men did not in fact take

up the president’s call as an organized group, many responded individually,

especially

Capek, Peroutka, Stránský, and the many Friday Men working for

Zamini. Masaryk’s impression was strongest on the younger members, as

Capek explained in a grateful letter after the president’s ﬁrst visit:

I can say for almost everyone you saw at my house on Friday that we

had been prepared for you in our youth; you had ceased teaching

when we were at university, and thus we missed [contact with] the

single philosophical ﬁgure who aﬀected us directly and vividly. How

we came to ﬁnd you despite this, not just from books but from our

lives, is another story; but, along with our sincere thanks, I wanted to

say to you, that last Friday you gave our generation back what we had

missed then.

179

After 1926, the Friday meetings became a locus for Castle intellectuals

and the center of a constellation of Castle-loyal cultural institutions, from

newspapers to political parties to publishing houses. The Friday Men’s close

personal relationships with Masaryk and Beneš, their centrality to interwar

Czechoslovak culture, and their willingness to take up political activity made

them uniquely placed observers and actors in interwar Prague political life.

And although the group welcomed diverse members, its members shared the

same basic political assumption: “loyalty from one human being to another,

and...to Czechoslovak democracy, and to the so-called humanistic ideals

on which it relied.”

180

Not a single German speaker or Slovak, much less a Hungarian, attended

Capek’s Fridays: their absence was not coincidental. The Castle’s rela-

tionships to Czechoslovakia’s subject nationalities were among the trick-

iest to negotiate. Masaryk and Beneš wanted the country’s nationalities,

especially the Germans, involved in parliamentary coalitions; the Castle

helped bring German “activist” (pro-Czechoslovak) parties into the “gen-

tlemen’s” or “all-bourgeois” governing coalition of October 1926 through

92 Battle for the Castle

October 1929. The National Democrats publicly accused them of betraying

the new republic’s ideals, calling out “Germans into the government—

we into revolution!”

181

The Castle had reliable German and Slovak allies,

among them Samuel Saenger, chargé d’aﬀaires in the German embassy

in Prague; professor and Christian Socialist leader Robert Mayr-Harting;

German Social Democrat Ludwig Czech; German Agrarian leaders Franz

repek and Franz Spina (also a Slavic studies professor at the German

University in Prague); Slovak Agrarians Vavro Šrobar and Milan Hodža

(although Hodža’s relationship to the Castle alternated from opposition to

close collaboration and back); and Slovak Social Democrat Ivan Dérer.

182

Non-Czech intellectual ﬁgures also associated with the Castle or accepted

support from Zamini to act as cultural ambassadors for the new state:

among these were German writers Max Brod, Otto Pick, and Pavel Eis-

ner, and the Slovak and Hungarian members of Czechoslovakia’s P.E.N.

Club.

183

Still, the Castle frequently played both ends against the middle when

it came to the minorities. Robert Mayr-Harting can stand as an example:

even as the Castle relied on him, they also reported on him, monitoring

his activities through 1936.

184

Masaryk and Beneš considered Czechoslo-

vakia’s creation a “national”—that is, Czech—revolution. They defended

Czech interests, assuming that the minorities had little real justiﬁcation for

complaint, and that their caviling would ebb in a generation or so. Histo-

rians have discussed Masaryk’s relative popularity in Slovakia; the Castle-

sponsored National Labor Party polled surprisingly well in Bratislava in

1925.

185

But Slovaks voted consistently throughout the interwar period for

the autonomist Slovak L’udak (Populist) Party (SPP) led by outspoken Castle

critic Father Andrej Hlinka; the SPP criticized Masaryk for supposedly

promising Slovaks autonomy in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 and

then reneging upon his return to Czechoslovakia. They also disagreed with

Beneš’s reliance on the West and his hostility to right-wing, but Catholic,

states like Poland and Austria.

186

The SPP occasionally sparred directly with

the Castle throughout the interwar period, for example in 1925, when Hlinka

was sentenced to eight days in jail for insulting the president.

187

Nor did the

Castle possess widespread popular support among the country’s Germans

or Hungarians. The Czech-led land reform, described as an instrument

of social justice but administered as a tool of nationalist retribution for

mythologized losses—speciﬁcally White Mountain, in 1620—angered these

groups throughout the interwar period.

188

Although Zamini argued before

the League of Nations committee for minority complaints that Czechoslovak

land reform had been fair, Beneš later admitted to the British minister to

Prague that “Before the war, the Germans were here [pointing to the ceiling]

and we were there [pointing to the ﬂoor]; now, [reversing the gesture] we are

The Castle 93

thereandtheyarethere....Thelessonhadbeen necessary, and land reform

had been necessary if only as part of it.”

189

German-Castle disputes on this

and other matters continued throughout the interwar years, within domestic

and international politics.

190

Conclusion

Ferdinand Peroutka once recalled longtime Prime Minister Antonín Švehla

as “a politician of small rooms.” The much-vaunted democracy of the First

Republic was clearly a democracy of small rooms, since most important

decisions were made there, among a small circle of leaders, rather than in

the voting booth.

191

Neither parliamentarians nor the electorate had any real

say over policy in the interwar period. Since the judiciary had little power

or independence, “the fate of Czech democracy was solely in the hands

of the executive, i.e. the government (and the parties backing it) and the

President.”

192

The P

etka, particularly the Agrarian Party, also wielded power,

frequently in opposition to the Castle. But historians have been far less kind

to the P

etka than to the Castle, despite their commonalities.

While claiming to represent transcendent European ideals, Castle polit-

ical methods were decidedly earthbound: they included the questionable

and the unsavory. Certainly Castle political inﬁghting was no less forceful

than the P

etka’s. Masaryk and Beneš created the KPR and Zamini as their

de facto political organization, staﬀed by their closest supporters and with

control of “dispositionary funds.” It was within these institutions that Castle

priorities were established, Castle contacts and attempts at persuasion made,

information and policy assembled. The press was also central, not just for the

Castle but for interwar Czechoslovak politics overall. The Castle tried to buy

out oppositional newspapers, and was not above bribery of individuals or

of entire parties. Castle personnel cultivated literati, but rewards for loyalty

were infrequent.

The Castle’s political philosophy was probably closest to the Social

Democrats: reformist moderate socialism. Yet the Castle leaders were able to

look farther aﬁeld than most other Czechoslovak political groupings, never

losing sight of Czechoslovakia’s place in the new European order and how

incidents at home might appear from abroad. The Castle’s legitimacy rested

on several diﬀerent foundations: their standing and success abroad, their

links to groups at home capable of supporting them symbolically (especially

the Legionnaires and the press), and their ability to exercise real power

through institutions and ﬁnancial or personal relationships. The Castle’s for-

eign policy depended on its strength at home; its strength at home depended

at least in part on the success of its foreign policy. In this sense it was far

94 Battle for the Castle

more than a Czechoslovak political institution: we might view the Castle as

a European political and propaganda organization with a Czechoslovak arm.

For these reasons, the Castle remained preoccupied with control of and

representation in the Czechoslovak and European press. For Czechoslovakia

to remain the heart of the postwar European order and Europe’s new

Switzerland, with Masaryk and Beneš as ideal democrats, Czechoslovakia’s

reputation in the West had to be spotless. The entire country had to be

viewed as solidly behind the Castle; its ﬂaws had to be made to disappear, or

at least to be overshadowed by those of Czechoslovakia’s enemies. Domestic

Czech political squabbles—especially what seemed to be the rising power

of the Czech far right—might echo across the continent. The Castle would

have to ﬁnd a way to contain them and to gain symbolic legitimacy as well

as actual political power. The next chapter details various eﬀorts at gaining

actual and mythic power at home by the Castle.

Battles of the Legend Makers

Taking over the stage requires keeping other people oﬀ it.

—Milan Kundera

he American diplomat George Kennan once famously com-

pared interwar Czech politicians to “small boys dividing a

stolen melon,” obsessed only with the size of their share.

In fact, Prague

could never turn its back entirely on the rest of Europe, or the world. After

all, the First Republic owed its existence to international political upheaval;

its continued security depended on the West’s commitment to Central

Europe. For that reason, Czech newspapers avidly, if solipsistically, followed

any mention of Czechoslovakia in the international press. The shadows of

the Great Powers and the Soviet Union, of Italy and Japan, played across the

surface of Czechoslovak politics throughout the interwar decades.

The Castle leaders understood this perhaps more clearly than any other

Czech political faction. International approval had always been Masaryk and

Beneš’s greatest trump card, although they had to play it carefully. Neither

at home nor abroad could they aﬀord to appear a Great Power pawn. In the

eyes of the world, no other Czech politician could compete with Masaryk

or Beneš for authority. Their political legitimacy depended on their Great

War legacy, on the success of their foreign policy, and on Masaryk’s popular

status as a kingly president and beloved father ﬁgure. These factors meant