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

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126 Battle for the Castle

Figure 3.2. Taken in the Museum of Gifts in 1930, this picture shows various busts of

Masaryk, as well as busts of others given to the president. Several violins hang in the

cabinet at the back. Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*411/10, 4823.

Prague.

134

Schoolchildren could also read juvenile ﬁction about Masaryk—

lightly “improved” historical depictions of his boyhood—as well as accounts

of Masaryk’s growth from boy to man, emphasizing his morally superior

qualities and his devotion to family and country.

135

Schoolbooks often presented Castle ideology as history. The most popular

text used to teach high school history was written by Josef Peka

r, known for

publicly challenging Masaryk’s romantic-nationalist interpretation of Czech

history. Yet Peka

r’s book could have been written by Castle publicists. Its

1921 edition described the medieval German colonization of Bohemia as an

“especially great danger for the Czech future.”

136

Peka

r’s depiction of the

Great War emphasized the importance of Masaryk and Beneš for Czechoslo-

vak independence; they and their allies and colleagues abroad are almost

the only independent actors discussed in Peka

r’s text until the fall of 1917.

The Czech politicians who remained home hardly appear in the book. Peka

disingenuously described all Czechs of the time as “almost without exception

[being] aware that a German-Hungarian victory would without question

make their lives more diﬃcult and extinguish all hopes for achieving their

national goals,” an obvious recasting of the Castle’s present back into the

nation’s past.

137

Battles of the Legend Makers 127

The president energetically helped create the visual imagery presented

to the public. Masaryk never refused artists’ requests and posed for least

sixty-four diﬀerent artists; the president sat for the artist V. Hynais ninety-

four times. He did not object to ﬁlm, or to “acting” in repeated takes; “in

the archives of the Plze

n ﬁrm Škoda, there are clips of Masaryk posing

in a Škoda-Hispano-Suiza car the ﬁrm had given him. ...The president

was aware...of the eﬀect of his person, and he had no inhibitions about

using it.”

138

Among the books Masaryk crafted with Karel

Capek was a

souvenir book of presidential photographs, Masaryk ve fotograﬁi (Masaryk

in Photographs, 1931). The book presents Masaryk in various mythologized

guises: as a man of the people, marching through ﬁelds of wheat in his

customary black suit and speaking with a kind smile to the usual Slovak

and Moravian peasants; deep in thought in his libraries at Lány and in the

Castle; the great statesman, meeting with foreign leaders and diplomats; the

family man, hoisting laughing, naked grandchildren on his shoulders. In

every setting Masaryk is uniformly dapper, digniﬁed, kind, and reserved

(ﬁgures 3.3–3.6). One theme is strikingly absent from the book, and from

most of the visual depictions of Masaryk as president: there are few pictures

of Masaryk on the ﬂoor of Parliament or voting.

139

Figure 3.3. Masaryk on the country’s tenth anniversary (October 28, 1928), on a white

horse at the charged site of Bílá hora, the hillside outside Prague where Czech forces lost

to the Habsburgs in 1620. Masaryk took other publicity shots at this same site on a black

horse. Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*396/8, 4087.

Figure 3.4. Masaryk photographed from below, at Židlochovice in Slovakia, July 15, 1931.

Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*145/19–20, 1203.

Figure 3.5. Masaryk’s body was part of the cult: here, the beloved president’s hands.

Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*105/14, 801.

Battles of the Legend Makers 129

Figure 3.6. Three-quarter proﬁle of Masaryk, in his dark winter suit, taken in September

1931. Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*1081/17, 839.

Masaryk’s visual iconography was often deliberately militarized, thus visu-

ally linking him to the Legionnaires. In fact, the Masaryk cult rested at least

in part on the correlated cult of the Legionnaires and their brave national

service during the Great War. Masaryk and the Castle drew on Legionnaire

support to buttress the presentation of Masaryk as military hero, adored

by all soldiers who served him. Meanwhile, the Legionnaires energetically

crafted and promoted their own cult, abetted by the president in his writings,

in public rituals, and in novels, ﬁlms, and memorials written, designed, and

planned by Legionnaires, to which the Castle lent support.

140

The two cults

used similar language and imagery, for example comparing Legionnaires

to the ﬁfteenth-century Taborites; but much Legionnaire writing was anti-

semitic, unlike the Masaryk myth.

141

Legionnaires published popularizing

pamphlets and photograph books about their wartime exploits.

142

But non-

Legionnaires also contributed to the Legionnaire cult, as in composer Leoš

Janá

cek’s composition Osvoboditel˚um (To the Liberators, 1918), which set

to music a poem by Antonín Horák.

143

Many souvenir picture books of

130 Battle for the Castle

the president, including Masaryk in Photographs, include photographs of

Masaryk’s participation in military parades or smilingly shaking soldiers’

hands.

144

Castle promotion of the Legionnaire cult and the Masaryk cult

went hand in hand, reminding citizens at regular and public intervals of the

basis of Castle power and the importance of continued Castle predominance

within Czechoslovak politics (ﬁgure 3.7).

The cult also relied on words, not just images: its basis in the 1930swas

various longer works of political prose. Masaryk himself was one of the most

important propagators of his cult, particularly through text. His wartime

pamphlet The New Europe,his1925 war memoir World Revolution, and the

1933–1936 The Path of Democracy series, a collection of his writings and

speeches, all communicated the cult’s (i.e., the Castle’s) main ideological

tenets and availed themselves of any opportunity to bolster Masaryk’s and

Beneš’s reputations. Masaryk’s considerable body of anonymous journalism

did the same. Also important to the cult were the many Masaryk biographies,

often published by Orbis,

Cin, and other Castle-friendly publishing houses,

which tended to bathe the Czechoslovak state and its leaders in a rosy light.

These biographies were written by Czechs as well as foreigners; the foreign

writers were often hosted by the Castle-sponsored Social Club and given

translated copies of Czech-language Masaryk biographies. Hence a certain

Figure 3.7. Masaryk riding out of the Castle gates to participate in the July 1926 Sokol

slet. Riding with him are three Legionnaires. Note the diﬀerent uniforms, each represent-

ing a diﬀerent ﬁghting front. Source: AÚTGM fotograﬁcké odd

elení, VIII/47/2*396/6,

4074.

Battles of the Legend Makers 131

uniformity of presentation and information prevails in these texts, from

Jan Herben’s 1926 three-volume T.G. Masaryk to British propagandist Cecil

J. C. Street’s 1930 Thomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia to German journalist

Emil Ludwig’s slightly more critical 1936 Defender of Democracy: Masaryk of

Czechoslovakia.

The Masaryk cult’s evidentiary remains are ubiquitous; this discussion has

treated only a fraction of the available materials, translated into at least eight

languages. But while we know much about the cult’s production, historians

can only generalize about its reception or public function. Since cults,

like political myths, “oﬀer charters, warrants, validations, legitimations, and

authoritative precedents for beliefs, attitudes, and practices,” the Masaryk

cult can be understood as an attempt to legitimate the Castle and its inter-

pretation of the country’s history.

145

Akin to leader cults in the rest of Eastern

Europe, Masaryk’s cult was “intended as cement, to cover over ...divisions,

to reinforce a sense of purpose and unity.” The cult positioned Masaryk to

represent various transcendent ideas: he embodied the Czechoslovak state,

the very notion of democracy, and a tolerant, cosmopolitan Czechness.

146

This last element helps emphasize the extent to which the cult was Czech ﬁrst

and foremost, implicitly equating the Czech national legacy with Czechoslo-

vak citizenship. Through Masaryk’s cult, Czech leadership of the Czechoslo-

vak state and a supposedly ideal democracy were symbolically joined.

The Masaryk myth in fact was both a signiﬁer of Czechoslovak democ-

racy and somewhat distant from it. The myth was vigorously rejected or

contested by Czechoslovakia’s national minorities and some Czechs as well,

particularly Catholics, National Democrats, and Communists. While inﬂu-

ential, Masaryk’s cult was never equivalent to leader cults in totalitarian

states, buttressed by censorship and an obedient mass media.

147

Yet mythic

politics and leader cults are to be found in all states, whether dictatorial or

democratic. The existence of a Masaryk cult in the interwar republic did

not make the state less democratic; the cult’s insistence on the primacy of

democracy did not make the state more so. However, the kingly emphases

in the cult might have legitimated the speedy dismantling not just of

Masaryk’s republic but of its democratic structure in 1938–1939, under the

Nazi-collaborationist Second Republic.

148

Masaryk’s cult was part of the Castle’s engagement in mythic politics,

linking the Castle, its leaders, and its ideas to the best in the Czech and

European traditions. Despite being constructed as a set of symbols, the

Masaryk cult, and Castle mythic politics more generally, was always related

to the direct exercise of real political power. Masaryk himself understood his

cult this way. In a May 1927 letter to Edvard Beneš, he wrote, “Švehla is

correct in telling the parties that I [personify the state]; this is how I have

regarded my election [to the presidency] since the beginning. . . . Any party

132 Battle for the Castle

against my [re]election cannot be in the government. In other words: either

I am the representative of the state, or the parties are.”

149

The Masaryk cult shifted over time, reaching out to diﬀerent groups

within Czechoslovak society (including émigrés) during and after the inter-

war period. This ability to appeal to all onlookers is a characteristic of the

most successful leader cults, which embody elements of diﬀerent national or

popular traditions, the better to speak to disparate groups. E. A. Rees notes

that the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union

drew on Russian traditions, the tradition of authoritarian leadership,

a deep étatist tradition with its own bureaucratic culture, and even a

tradition of popular monarchism. . . . [I]t may also have drawn on the

strong patriarchal peasant culture with its respect for the elder

[starosta]....[Thecult also] sought to link itself with the popular

classes....Fortheeliteitcould be seen as a guarantee of their power.

For the disadvantaged the Stalin cult oﬀered the hope of redress. .. .

[T]he cult came to symbolize the new social order that had been

created.

150

The parallels with the Masaryk cult are by now clear. The husbandman,

the father of the nation and state; the humble man of the people; the man

of ideas, or philosopher-king; the great democratic statesman; the family

man; the military leader: within the cult, Masaryk was all these things and

more. Particularly, he was Czech—Czechness itself—embodying Czechoslo-

vak virtue, truth, and national identity, not just within a particular historical

moment but for the ages.

Conclusion

Castle conﬂicts tended to focus on three themes: the consolidation of con-

crete power; eﬀorts at integrating the state, primarily by promoting the

Masaryk cult and hoping to use him to draw each citizen into a greater

personal commitment to the republic; and ﬁnally, more abstractly, the nature

of legitimate political authority in the postwar era. Those conﬂicts played out

in part within the expected arenas of Parliament, personal relationships, and

the press. But they also operated symbolically as competing interpretations

of Czech history, from the ﬁfteenth century to the First World War. Taken

cumulatively, these conﬂicts can represent the Castle’s agenda at home:

defang the political Right, claim the mantle of liberator, and associate itself

inextricably with the Czechoslovak state as well as the Czech nation. The

Castle lauded Masaryk, Beneš, and the Legionnaires as Czechoslovakia’s

Battles of the Legend Makers 133

founding fathers and symbolic representatives. Parliamentary leaders (some

of them, at any rate) strove for similar status, but never acquired it.

The Battle of the Legend Makers exempliﬁed the basic arguments

between the Castle and the Czech Right, its most signiﬁcant opponent

mythologically, if not quite politically (the anti-Castle right wing of the

Agrarian party was a more direct threat). The Dyk-Masaryk and Kramá

Beneš polemics crystallized the conﬂicts growing between the Castle and the

Right for the republic’s ﬁrst decade: the direction of the country’s foreign

policy, Beneš’s closeness to Masaryk and his position as anointed successor,

the creation of the Castle and Masaryk’s politically active presidency, the

Castle’s attempt to claim the mantle of liberator and limit the historical

credit granted to the domestic resistance, and the Castle’s open eﬀorts to

counter the P

etka and silence the political Right. These same issues played

out in the creation of the National Labor Party, the Gajda and St

ríbrný trials,

and the creation of leader or hero cults for Masaryk and the Legionnaires.

Particularly in the last, the Castle attempted to present its own form of civic

patriotism, diﬀerent from the Right’s integral nationalism. In every case,

the Castle worked to disseminate its own values and narrative, the basic

postulates of Castle ideology.

The Boj legendist˚u debates and correspondence also helped articulate the

ﬁercely loyal relationship between Masaryk and Beneš. As in his letters to

Dyk, Masaryk’s letters to Beneš bluntly rejected criticism of his protégé:

“The main thing: You will remain as [foreign] minister; not just the interna-

tional, but also the domestic, situation demand[s] that. It is pure nonsense

[to generalize] from the internal [political] crisis to a crisis in the foreign

ministry.”

151

Masaryk helped corral leading politicians on Beneš’s behalf; in

1933 he wrote that he had spoken to allies of ambassador to Paris Štefan

Osuský, and that Osuský was now “100 percent for you, that you become

the second president.”

152

In addition to political strategizing, the letters

reveal more personal concerns: Masaryk worried often about Beneš’s health,

repeatedly suggesting that he consult doctors and take vacations.

153

The Castle’s conﬂicts with the right emerged during a period in which

political consensus seemed to have broken down. From 1919 to 1925,the

established parties had done their share of squabbling, and occasionally

aimed sallies at Minister Beneš. But after 1925, these arguments became

more direct, more public, and far more shrill. Prime Minister Antonín Švehla

had been the only politician who could convince the Prague partisan press

to keep its gloves on. Even his brief return to politics from 1926 through

1928 did not change matters; Masaryk, by nature a ﬁghter rather than a

conciliator like Švehla, did not calm the situation. An increasingly sharp

polarization and fractiousness came to characterize Czechoslovak political

life, even as the Castle became increasingly powerful and active behind

134 Battle for the Castle

the political scenes, where Masaryk and his chancellery frequently brokered

conﬂict.

154

Both inside and beyond the political elites, there was a shared

sense of crisis in 1925–1927, arising again in 1928 and 1929. Yet the basically

conservative nature of interwar Czech politics meant that the established

parties and leaders were able to ﬁght oﬀ challenges to the status quo, such as

the National Labor Party and the fascists. And F. Gregory Campbell notes

that no domestic politician could truly confront the Castle.

[I]t soon became apparent that Masaryk’s personal prestige and

popularity—and hence his political power—was so great that no

group could openly and eﬀectively oppose him and his

supporters. ...[T]heoppositionwasnotunitedbehindanymanor

program that oﬀered a viable alternative to the logically conceived

and executed policies of “the Castle.” ...Tobesure,therewere

alienated elements among Kramá

r’s National Democrats, Hlinka’s

Slovak populists, the Communists, or the extreme nationalists from

the national minorities, but ...Masaryk’spowerlayinthefactthat

the majority of citizens of diverse social stations revered him as the

liberator of the country.

155

Thus the Castle’s contestation over historical legacy had direct political

ramiﬁcations.

These internal Czech political disputes echoed beyond Czechoslovak

borders. The Western powers’ warm wartime reception of the Czechs had

stemmed from their seeming Westernness—their rationalism, their high-

mindedness, their dedication to the values animating the postwar era—

and the unity of the resistance abroad with Prague political leaders, at least

for the war’s ﬁnal year. If Czechoslovakia were seen abroad as a hotbed of

fascism or an ineﬃcient government dedicated to maintaining sinecures,

rather than as a hardworking democracy; if internecine squabbling prevented

sane policy from being enacted; if Castle opponents won the upper hand

at home, and then succeeded in redirecting Czechoslovak foreign policy;

Czechoslovakia’s enemies would be heartened, and its Western guarantors

alienated. The Castle feared, and worked to prevent, these scenarios from

coming to fruition.

At the heart of Castle conﬂicts lay propaganda and the media. Elec-

tion sloganeering, managing of newspapers and message, the creation of a

personality cult, and mudslinging via pamphlet and anonymous editorials

were all crucial elements of Castle strategy. Moreover, Castle allies in the

media were central in battling the chaos of the late 1920s.

Capek helped

strategize and mediate diﬀerences among high-ranking oﬃcials and tried to

form a Castle-friendly press bloc. Masaryk published freelance editorials in

Battles of the Legend Makers 135

Castle-friendly journals. Stránský and Bou

cek tried, through the NLP, to

create another Castle-friendly parliamentary grouping and to oppose the

growth of the Right. Stránský’s journals became a crucial arena for Castle

propaganda, mythmaking, and defense during the political trials of Gajda,

ríbrný, and the other far-Right leaders, not to mention the Battle of the

Legend Makers. These were only the most prominent; other journalists and

newspapers allied with the Castle were no less active during these years.

The domestic Battles of the Legend Makers had their parallels abroad.

Just as the Castle struggled for moral legitimacy at home, so in the eyes

of Europe the Castle and its allies also conducted an argument about his-

tory, moral worthiness, and contemporary political power. This time its

enemies were other post-Habsburg states and Nazi Germany. Once again,

the weapons were propaganda and cultural diplomacy, testing the Castle’s

contacts and resources. It is to that parallel set of battles that we now turn.