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

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166 Battle for the Castle

In the spring of 1930, Radó Antal, member and later president of the

Budapest P.E.N. chapter, wrote Prague lamenting Czechoslovak censorship:

[T]he pettifoggery with which [Czechoslovakia] has sought to

suppress Hungarian books has become more serious than in the past,

given that [Czechoslovakia] has organized veritable “razzias” [raids] in

some bookstores, ...[thestate]hasconﬁscated books which do not

contain a single word of politics, nor any kind of allusion to your

state.

Antal asked the Czechs to look into the problem.

170

Other, less conservative

Hungarian writers also took up the cause. Jenö Mohacsi, writer for the

important Budapest cultural journal Nyugat, visited Prague later that year.

Upon his return home, he wrote a cordial letter to Prague P.E.N. in which

he reported that he had given a communiqué on censorship in Slovakia,

drafted by himself and

Capek, promptly to the Budapest newspapers Az

Est and Pester Lloyd,aswellasthePraguePrágai Magyar Hirlap,asPrague

P.E.N. had requested him to do. He then asked pointedly whether the

Prague chapter had received word from its government with regard to anti-

Hungarian censorship in Slovakia.

171

Prague P.E.N., led by Karel

Capek and historian and former cabinet

minister Josef Šusta, had written immediately upon receiving Antal’s let-

ter to Minister of the Interior Juraj Slávik, who coordinated censorship

policy.

Capek and Šusta distrusted the Hungarian charges, but worried

that Budapest might use these complaints to public relations advantage,

especially in front of Great Power colleagues in P.E.N.:

We...askyoutokindlyturn your attention to this issue and help us

make possible its resolution, which would thoroughly protect the

interests of our republic against Hungarian irredenta. We have no

doubt of [the irredentists’] seriousness and treacherousness, concealed

behind various products of belles lettres and academic literature;

[a solution] would deprive our enemies of a welcomed opportunity to

attack these assumed obstructions, [and] grant our republic a

desirable freedom of international intellectual relations.

172

Slávik ignored P.E.N. for a year. When they wrote a third time in May

1931, they sent a similar letter to their patron Beneš, asking for help with

two “delicate and urgent” matters: the inﬁltration of Hungarian propaganda

onto Czechoslovak soil, and what increasingly seemed like an overly dra-

conian censorship policy in Slovakia. P.E.N. asked Beneš to inform them

Difficulties Abroad 167

conﬁdentially whether the state’s policy could be changed, and whether

P.E.N. might initiate discussion on this topic.

Capek and Šusta assured Beneš

that they knew just how deviously Hungarian irredentists exploited belles

lettres and academic work; in fact, P.E.N. had learned that the Ministry

of the Interior had collected some astounding exemplars, which P.E.N.

wanted very much to see, and which it planned to show Budapest and

the rest of P.E.N. International, thereby gaining the moral high ground for

Czechoslovakia. Prague P.E.N. ended the letter by asking Beneš to intervene

with Interior Ministry oﬃcials, so that P.E.N. could get the evidence and

information it needed.

173

In the spring of 1932, Prague P.E.N.’s luck turned. First, Ji

rí Ježek, an

employee of the university library in Bratislava, helped establish a Slovak

section of the Prague club in February 1932.

174

Thus Slovak members of

Czechoslovak P.E.N., along with Czechs and Germans, would represent

Czechoslovakia at that year’s international P.E.N. congress in Budapest.

P.E.N. Slovaks could serve as a useful source of information and supportive

testimony about censorship policy in Slovakia; they would also demonstrate

the inclusive, tolerant nature of the Czechoslovak state as opposed to Hun-

gary. Second, P.E.N. ﬁnally received the information it needed—not from

the Interior Ministry but from Zamini. From April 1932 through 1935,the

Third Section sent Prague P.E.N. the Hungarian sections of its internal

intelligence reports, the Daily International Media Summary, which reviewed

Hungarian newspaper commentary on Czechoslovakia.

175

Third, an April

communiqué from the Czechoslovak diplomatic legation in Budapest sug-

gested that Zamini could support the pro-Czechoslovak faction within

Budapest P.E.N. by ensuring that before the Budapest congress, distribution

of Hungarian printed material would be loosened in Slovakia and Sub-

carpathian Ruthenia—the very change in policy Prague P.E.N. advocated

to Ministers Slávik and Beneš.

176

In the end, Prague P.E.N. got the policy change it wanted: the Ministry

of the Interior ﬁnally approved increased circulation of apolitical Hungarian

printed materials in Slovakia. The new policy would go into eﬀect June 1,

a week after the Budapest P.E.N. congress, thereby giving the Czechs the

opportunity to trumpet their success before all of P.E.N. Edmond Konrád,

head of the Prague delegation, brought information from Zamini and the

Ministry of the Interior, including the long-sought exemplars of censored

harmful material, translated into English and German for the beneﬁt of

the Budapest and London P.E.N. clubs.

177

Intellectual freedom was much

discussed at the Budapest congress, but little direct pressure seems to have

been applied to the Czechs or other Little Entente nationalities, judging

from Zamini and other Czechoslovak intelligence reports, as well as the

168 Battle for the Castle

accounts by Prague P.E.N. members. In this sense, the congress was a

success.

But not completely. Those mixed results, and their possible consequences

not just for Prague P.E.N. but for Czechoslovakia, are apparent in sev-

eral postconference articles that ran in Prague newspapers. Some delegates

struck an optimistic tone about the congress, emphasizing the Czech public

relations success and excellent relations among the East-Central European

delegates: the pro-Czechoslovak Hungarian P.E.N. members, such as Jenö

Mohacsi and Deszö Kosztolanyi, and the Czechs, the Yugoslavs, and Poles

evidently got on famously.

178

But Prague delegate Adolf Hoﬀmeister in

Literární noviny, writing just a few months before “Magyar racial chauvinist”

and radical rightist Gyula Gömbös took oﬃce as Hungary’s prime minister,

bluntly described Hungary as a haven of reaction and a state relying on terror

to control its people.

179

Yet the writers of the West seemed ignorant of or

deceived about real conditions in Hungary. In fact, French novelist Jules

Romains, who became P.E.N. International’s president in 1935, proclaimed

support for Hungarian irredentism. Hoﬀmeister made Romains out as an

embarrassed naïf, perhaps trying to turn the speech into a victory for the

Czechs:

After Marinetti’s speech, ...Jules Romains spoke, [his] speech, quite

tainted with revisionism, which all the Hungarian pro-government

newspapers reprinted with joy: but, oh, poor Jules Romains! The

moment he had ﬁnished, Slovaks, Romanians, and Croats pounced

upon him, began scolding him, and emphatically presented a very

diﬀerentportraitofreality....Mr.Romainsapologized and

disavowed [his earlier speech] until even his “good evening” stuck in

histhroat....Jules Romains recognized very well that he had

overstated his gratitude.

180

But Hoﬀmeister probably recognized quite well that Romains’s praise of

Hungary might bode poorly for the Czechs.

Budapest was not ﬁnished with Prague. Only a month after the congress,

Radó Antal sent another letter of complaint to Prague P.E.N.; reports ques-

tioning Czechoslovak goodwill appeared in many major Budapest newspa-

pers during the late summer and early fall.

181

One Zamini report quotes the

Budapest daily Magyarság from September 24, 1932, reminding its readers

that Prague delegate Edmond Konrád and the Czechoslovak interior min-

ister had announced a change in Czechoslovak censorship policy, which

the paper characterized as a “general ban on the import of Hungarian

printed material into Slovakia.” But the Prague Hungarian daily Prágai

Magyar Hirlap had recently declared that the ban on Hungarian material

Difficulties Abroad 169

continued in full force. Hungarians were not surprised, reported Magyarság:

on the contrary, they would have been surprised had the minister kept his

word.

182

Adding insult to injury, Prague newspapers also roundly criticized Prague

P.E.N., blaming it for potentially dangerous Hungarian propaganda now

inﬁltrating Slovakia. Even the centrist Lidové noviny,

Capek’s own paper,

advised caution. In November 1932, it admonished that of the books Hun-

garians wished to export to Slovakia, “many, even those of artistically very

high quality,...are written with tendencies which ignore post-1918 condi-

tions....Popular scientiﬁc works and academic dictionaries are imbued with

the same spirit.” The article mentioned the example of one historical dictio-

nary, recently sent en masse into Slovakia, that excluded most Czechoslovak

politicians, including Masaryk, and all postwar peace treaties—in partic-

ular Trianon, which had given Slovakia to Czechoslovakia and truncated

Hungary.

183

From 1932 to 1934, the Hungarians hurled charge after charge at the

Czechoslovak P.E.N. chapter and government. As soon as the Czechoslovaks

responded to one accusation, generally by providing statistics or documen-

tation absolving their government of wrongdoing, Radó Antal would ﬁre oﬀ

yet another letter citing a new complaint. His allegations were impressively

varied. One letter charged the Czechoslovak government with targeting

ﬁnancial legislation against the Hungarians; another letter complained that

all Hungarian literature entering Slovakia was forced to go through a single

Bratislava customs oﬃce.

184

Prague P.E.N. duly requested assistance and

documentation regarding each issue from various government oﬃcials and

institutions.

185

They also attempted to use as intermediaries their allies in

Budapest P.E.N.

186

Meanwhile, the Prague chapter prepared an appeal to

Paris and London, summarizing all the events and policies mentioned in

and leading up to the complaints made by the Hungarians, all the steps

taken by the Czechoslovak government to improve the situation, and—

adding a charge of their own—the censorship experienced by Slovaks in

Hungary.

187

In an anticlimactic ﬁnal confrontation at the 1935 P.E.N. congress in

Barcelona, Antal and the Hungarians ﬁnally insisted on publicizing their

complaints. Czechoslovak delegate Edmond Konrád arrived at the congress

ready to plead Czechoslovakia’s case in front of P.E.N.’s International Steer-

ing Committee. He was armed with a speech rebutting the latest Hungarian

complaints and the dossier of materials prepared by P.E.N. and the Third

Section.

Zamini’s dossier rooted the P.E.N. conﬂict in the aftermath of the First

World War, when Hungary used both military and propaganda eﬀorts to

try to regain Slovakia. “In general, the whole of the post-War Hungarian

170 Battle for the Castle

literature, both belletristic and academic, was permeated with the spirit

of irredentism,” the dossier concluded, “and all of it had to be placed at

the service of propaganda in favor of treaty revision.”

188

As time went on,

considerable numbers of Hungarian books were imported into both Slovakia

and Subcarpathian Ruthenia. In June 1932, after the Prague P.E.N. club

petitioned the government to relax conditions still further, only political

periodicals were censored. However, all publications were still required to

enter the region through the Bratislava customs oﬃce, which ascertained

whether they were harmful, with the help of the P.E.N.-aﬃliated Hungarian

Society for Science, Literature and Art in Czechoslovakia.

189

The report men-

tions that in the second half of 1932, fourteen publications were censored; in

all of 1933, only seventeen were censored.

Then Konrád moved from defense to oﬀense, castigating the Hungarians

and their government. Konrád claimed that Czechoslovak censorship law

in Slovakia derived from the laws of the antebellum Hungarian kingdom:

that is, these censorship policies were in essence Hungarian policies, which

the members of the Budapest chapter ought to recognize. In fact, those

very policies and others like them were applied to the Slovak population

in Hungary. The Hungarian government canceled Slovak cultural evenings

and barred Slovak artists from visiting Hungary.

190

Finally, Konrád stated,

Hungarian revisionism had long posed a real threat to Czechoslovakia; the

Czechs needed to be able to address it eﬀectively. Konrád’s case stuck. When

the Hungarian demand that Little Entente countries not censor imported

Hungarian materials came to the ﬂoor, no delegate seconded it.

191

Capek, the

Prague P.E.N. leadership, and Zamini had won this battle for their nation’s

honor. In the eyes of P.E.N., they had successfully defended their country’s

good name.

In the end, Prague P.E.N.’s long argument with the Budapest P.E.N.

chapter says more about the Castle’s use of Prague intellectuals for European

cultural diplomacy than about Czech-Hungarian relations. P.E.N. was a

stage on which Karel

Capek and other P.E.N. members defended the Castle

and its vision of Central European minority relations, and communicated

relevant elements of the Castle myth abroad. For P.E.N. and the Castle,

Czech actions against Hungarian propaganda in Slovakia were purely defen-

sive and always had been. Moreover, Czechoslovakia’s Hungarians aided

the censorship endeavor, changing it from Czech repression of Hungar-

ian intellectual life to a Czechoslovak eﬀort. Thus, as usual, the tolerant,

inclusive Czechoslovaks were in the right, while the Hungarians were rabid

nationalists, as were the Czechoslovak Germans who had earlier tried to

interleave nationalist politics into P.E.N.

Capek’s last newspaper column,

in fact, bemoaned European nationalism, from which he evidently excepted

the Czechs:

Difficulties Abroad 171

What can one do, it is terribly far from nation to nation; all of us are

increasingly alone. Might be better now to never step a foot out of

one’s house; better to lock the door and close the shutters, and let all

do as they please. I no longer care. And now . . .close your eyes and

say very, very quietly: How do you do, old gentleman from Kent?

Grüss Gott, meine Herren! Grazia, signor! A vôtre santé!

192

Conclusion

The Castle’s propaganda apparatus, including the Spole

censký klub, did have

its intended eﬀect, at least on some foreign journalists. British writer John

Gunther’s 1938 Inside Europe, for example, contains a map of Europe as an

overleaf, with brief depictions of each country. The thumbnail sketch of

Czechoslovakia reads, “‘The master of Bohemia is the master of Europe.’

Here a great man, Thomas Masaryk, set up a free republic; here a great

man, Eduard Beneš, rules it wisely.” The chapter on Czechoslovakia is titled

“Masaryk and Beneš,” and begins with these words:

Masaryk—what grandeur the name inspires! The son of a serf who

created a nation; the blacksmith boy who grew to have “the ﬁnest

intellect of the century”; the paciﬁst who organized an army that

performed a feat unparalleled in military annals—the Czechoslovak

legions who marched across Siberia to the Paciﬁc; the philosopher

who became a statesman in spite of himself; the living father of a

state who is also its simplest citizen; an unchallengeably ﬁrm

democrat who, in the débâcle of the modern world, still believes in

rule by tolerance; the man who more than any other smashed the old

Austro-Hungarian empire, so that Czechoslovakia, a free republic,

rose from its ruins—the stablest, strongest, and most prosperous of

the succession states.

193

A more perfect summation of the Castle message was not to be wished.

Moreover, Gunther complimented not just Masaryk but Castle propaganda:

“The press bureau in Prague is so well run that it is often accused of

‘propaganda.’ Of course, propaganda is what it exists for. What enemies

of Czechoslovakia object to is that Czechoslovak propaganda is so friendly,

eﬃcient, and, in general, honest and accurate that rival countries are

outrun.”

194

But Gunther was an optimist. Czechoslovakia’s rivals outpaced it in the

race for Great Power approval. In the end, the Castle message could not

outweigh Britain’s distaste for engagement on the Continent (or for Beneš),

172 Battle for the Castle

French dependence on Britain, or American reluctance to involve itself in

European aﬀairs. The Castle’s myth had its main victory in the realm of

discourse, not realpolitik. Still, Czechoslovak and East-Central European

cultural diplomacy and propaganda highlight previously neglected aspects

of interwar political culture. Like their neighbors, the Czechs reiterated and

adapted nineteenth-century romantic nationalist tropes. Like their neigh-

bors, they insisted that they were the most quintessentially European of the

Habsburg successor states, devoted to the postwar order’s values and stability,

while their revisionist neighbors and national minorities were at best chaotic

and unsophisticated, at worst autocratic and violent.

Edvard Beneš wrote that the struggle for Czechoslovak national existence

meant trying to Europeanize Czechoslovakia.

195

Beneš meant persuading

Czechs to see themselves as Europeans; Castle propaganda demonstrates that

he also needed to persuade Europeans to see Czechs as Europeans. The Cas-

tle myth worked at persuading Europeans that Czechoslovaks were identical

to themselves, using familiar terms: the Czechs were practical, hardworking,

attached to the land, tolerant, and humane. Some West Europeans—mainly

cultural elites in Paris and London—responded. In 1925, George Bernard

Shaw called Masaryk the natural choice to serve as president of a United

States of Europe, should the European states overcome their historical dif-

ferences. French public opinion was willing occasionally to “exalt” Masaryk

as “a great humanitarian; Beneš as the unﬂinching ally and collaborator.”

But for the most part Castle rhetoric met with West European suspicion or

indiﬀerence. Articles in the important France Militaire, a specialized journal

directed at members of the armed forces, contained “‘childish errors’ and

fantastic stories.” In October 1929, L’Ilustration ran a map of East-Central

Europe on which Yugoslavia was labeled Czechoslovakia.

196

Great Britain

diﬀered little. British ﬁnancial interests trusted the Hungarians more than

they did the Little Entente states, complaining that the Romanians and

Yugoslavs were unreliable debtors.

197

Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald

instructed the smaller nations as early as 1924 that “Pacts or no pacts,

you will be invaded....The certain victim of the military age and military

organization of society is the small nationality that trusts upon its moral

claim to live.”

198

In 1938 John Gunther described British policy as essentially

committed to paciﬁsm and isolationism—and to “playing for time, until

its own tremendous rearmament program is complete.”

199

During the 1938

P.E.N. International Congress in Prague, the British writer H. G. Wells

and French novelist Jules Romains had requested an interview with Edvard

Beneš. Storm Jameson, British P.E.N. member, predicted their comments:

“They are saying that the only people in France and England who admire

you for your reasonableness and honesty are middle class liberals and intel-

lectuals, of no importance and without any inﬂuence.”

200

Difficulties Abroad 173

Throughout the interwar period, the foremost goal of Czechoslovakia’s

leaders, in particular Beneš, was to strengthen the state’s ties to its Western

patrons, the better to ensure Czechoslovakia’s survival.

201

The European

press, international organizations, and other forums for cultural diplomacy

were crucial for the Castle eﬀort. East-Central European revisionists under-

stood that if Czechoslovakia fell, the entire system of postwar treaties and

the post-Versailles order in Europe might be called into question; the Czechs

worked from the same assumption. The Czechoslovak cultural relations war

was continuous and hard-fought, but propaganda could not overcome all

the challenges the Czechs faced. Castle arguments for moral worthiness

and European similitude confronted ignorance, disinterest, or suspicion that

idealized Castle claims about relations between Czechs and their subject

minorities might not be entirely accurate. The gap between Czechoslovakia

and Western Europe remained—in fact, it widened—and could not be

closed by myth.

A Time of Iron and Fire

Anyone who understands how to read will ﬁnd me between

the lines of my books.

—Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk

sthe1930s progressed, fewer and fewer Europeans believed

another war could be avoided. The postwar peace and the

era of collective, democratic security it had supposedly ushered in were

under profound threat from the Depression and rightist regimes throughout

the Continent. Liberal parliamentarism, in retreat even before the Great

War ended, seemed to belong to a distant, happier age. Of Europe’s “dirty

torrent” of dictators, Hitler posed Czechoslovakia the most direct threat.

The May 1935 parliamentary election indicated that Czech and Slovak sup-

port for the state and the main political parties remained constant. But the

tallies in the German communities of Czechoslovakia’s highly industrialized

border region indicated a groundswell of support for aggressive German

nationalism, and revived frustration with the Czechoslovak state.

Germans in Czechoslovakia seemed, between 1925 and 1932, to have reluc-

tantly reconciled themselves with the First Republic, despite intermittent

demonstrations and protests. But “German nationalist civil society” had long

distanced itself from Czech or Czechoslovak aﬀairs.

Then the German-

settled border regions, housing most of the country’s light industry, were

174

ATimeofIronandFire 175

hit early and hard by the Depression; Czechoslovak exports never recovered,

even after a devaluation of the crown.

Nazi nationalism worked successfully

on Sudeten German economic misery, reminding Germans of their lingering

resentment at perceived slights like the Czechoslovak land reform, the 1926

language law, and Beneš’s systematic rejection of Czechoslovak German peti-

tions to the League of Nations.

The Sudeten German Fatherland movement

(Sudetendeutsche Heimatsfront), led by former gymnastics teacher Konrad

Henlein and bookstore owner Karl Hermann Frank, transformed itself into

an organized party (the Sudetendeutsche Partei, or SdP) in 1935, to take part

in parliamentary elections. Nazi Germany funded its campaign, although

historians have cautioned that the SdP was “overwhelmingly authoritar-

ian” but “only partially Nazi,” maintaining an ambiguous relationship with

Nazism through 1938 and beyond.

SdP lieutenants Heinrich Rutha, Richard

Goldberg, and Walter Brand worked assiduously and successfully to create a

leader cult around Henlein’s bland personality.

The SdP polled 15.2 percent

of the total vote (a full two-thirds of the German vote), garnering more votes

than any other party, even more than the powerful Czechoslovak Agrarians.

The German activist parties now no longer represented the majority of

Sudeten Germans. Meanwhile, the SdP emulated Masaryk and Beneš in

taking their plaint abroad to Hungary, Italy, Austria, and Sweden before

ﬁxing their gaze on Great Britain. Rutha, Brand, and Henlein traveled to

London at least four times between late 1935 and May 1938, relying on

aristocratic Bohemian Germans to reach members of the British aristocracy,

such as Robert Vansittart, foreign under secretary for Central Europe, and

Winston Churchill.

Even moderate Czech Germans like Wenzel Jaksch

of the German Social Democrats complained in London and Paris: for

example, Jaksch, in November 1937, told an audience at the Institute of

International Aﬀairs at Chatham House that progress aside—more Germans

had entered the civil service—Czechoslovakia’s nationalities conspicuously

lacked mutual trust.

By 1937, thanks to a defense-based public works program, the Czechoslo-

vak economy—including the German-settled border regions—had begun

to extricate itself from the Depression. The government hoped to quell

German unrest by granting greater regional autonomy and waiting for

national economic gains to make themselves felt in the Sudeten areas. At this

same time, Karl Hermann Frank’s radical right-wing faction within the SdP

gained ascendancy, and the party moved closer to Hitler. On Hitler’s advice,

Henlein made progressively greater demands on the Czechoslovak govern-

ment. By 1938 the SdP was increasingly open about its opposition to the

Czechoslovak state and its ties to Hitler; it attracted some 85 percent of Ger-

man voters in Czechoslovakia in that year’s communal elections. Meanwhile,