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

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206 Battle for the Castle

The domestic resistance agreed with the government in exile about the

structure of a postwar Czechoslovak state. The largest Czech resistance

group, the ÚVOD (Úst

rední výbor odboje domácího, or Central Com-

mittee of the Domestic Resistance; it was later known as the Rada t

ri,

or Council of Three) was “convinced that the prewar party structure had

failed badly,” and called for a democratic socialist state structure as well

as true “economic democracy.” This group also demanded that the coun-

try’s Sudeten Germans be removed, like Beneš rejecting the Castle’s earlier

nominal Czechoslovakism.

152

By 1941, almost all domestic resistance groups

agreed on this agenda.

153

The Czechoslovak Communist Party, after various

shifts, also supported an independent Czechoslovak state, and over the

course of the war supported the trend toward anti-German chauvinism.

154

Only Vlajka, a hard-Right Czech nationalist group collaborating with

the Nazis, continued to promote its own version of the Czech national

future.

155

After 1942, wartime exigencies rendered meaningless prewar arguments

over the Castle and the content of Czech nationalism. Nazi persecution of

any potential social leaders, from intellectuals and academics to businessmen

and politicians, eﬀectively silenced most of Czech society. So did the annihi-

lation of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky in retaliation for the government

in exile’s May 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, military governor of

the Protectorate and one of the architects of the Holocaust. Beyond Nazi

oppression, denunciations internally divided Czech society. Czechs in the

Protectorate understood their daily existence as a battle against Nazi Ger-

manization and oppression, to preserve Czech culture and the Czech soul.

156

That battle was mainly fought passively. Czech workers obediently produced

roughly 10 percent of the Nazi Reich’s industrial output in exchange for

handsome salaries, and a skeleton crew of 2,000 Nazis oversaw an eﬃcient

Protectorate bureaucracy of 350,000.By1945, only thirty partisan groups—

most of these tiny and internally fragmented—were operating in the Czech

lands. In short, resistance was very limited. Czech Communist partisans

worried that this would stain the national honor.

157

The same issue vexed

Edvard Beneš, for ﬁrst the British and later the Soviets wanted evidence

that the Czechs were ﬁghting with them against the Nazis—hence Beneš’s

1942 decision to assassinate Heydrich, despite the pleas from resistance

groups to target a Czech collaborator instead. The government in exile’s

radio broadcasts throughout the war called for acts of material sabotage,

to no avail.

158

Meanwhile, Karl Hermann Frank met every call for resis-

tance with arrests and murders, publicly announced, and Czech informers

from home demanded of Beneš that his broadcasts contain only facts, not

incitements.

159

ATimeofIronandFire 207

The First Republic and the Third

In autumn 1944, the war in Europe was drawing to a weary, bloody close.

The Allies were pushing east from the Atlantic coast, the Soviets moving

steadily westward. By February 1945 Allied and Red Army troops were in

Paris and Budapest. In the Protectorate, the impending Nazi loss made

itself felt: Czechs worked twelve to fourteen hours a day, six days a week,

and clothes, food, and medicine were diﬃcult to obtain. Chaos and public

violence increased daily. Thousands of former concentration camp inmates

and ethnic Germans ﬂed into the Protectorate from the northeast. Forced

laborers returned home. A retreating Wehrmacht division moving through

Moravia brought with it “tens of thousands of prisoners of war, slave labor-

ers, and East European SS divisions.” The SS troops still in the Czech

lands burned down entire villages, killing their populations.

160

The Slovak

National Uprising shook Nazi control over the Protectorate as well, and gave

courage to the splintered Czech resistance movement. Despite Nazi reprisals,

the Czechs were ready in April 1945 when the Soviets entered Czech territory

and liberation was imminent. The Prague uprising began on May 5; bitter

street and house-to-house ﬁghting killed roughly 3,700 Czechs, wounding

some 3,000 more.

161

On May 11, the last military operation in Europe

took place east of Prague, as the Red Army cut oﬀ the last German Army

Group and took its 800,000 troops as prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Czech

hostilities against Czechoslovak Germans, encouraged by Moscow, by Beneš,

and indirectly by the western Allies, led to the “wild transfer”—months

of violence against Germans and Czech collaborators, sometimes aided by

Soviet soldiers. Estimates range from tens to hundreds of thousands of

Germans killed, and from 600,000 to more than a million forcibly expelled

from Czechoslovakia.

162

Beneš arrived in Prague on May 16, 1945, with the

country well on its way to becoming, as he had stated during the war, a

“Czechoslovak nation-state.”

Negotiations through the spring of 1945 had laid the ground for the

Košice program, the basis of postwar Czechoslovak politics and society,

announced in the easternmost city of Slovakia on April 4, 1945. The program

called for thorough political reorganization. It limited the number of parties

to four, and banned from public life those parties that had collaborated

with the Nazis, including the Agrarians, the largest party in Bohemia and

Moravia for a half-century. Banks and insurance companies, energy utilities,

and major industries were to be nationalized. The new government parties

pledged to control wages and prices on basic goods. Local government was

decentralized into committees and granted wide-ranging power. On April

5, 1945, in Košice, in a public address, Beneš drew a direct, if dubious,

208 Battle for the Castle

connection between the interwar Castle’s political vision and his postwar

plans for change: “To this program—as I already promised in Prague Cas-

tle on the day of Masaryk’s funeral—I myself remained faithful under all

circumstances, and faithful I shall remain.”

163

But the most powerful organization in postwar Czechoslovakia had no

intention of remaining faithful to the First Republic or Masarykian ideals.

The Czechoslovak Communist Party (KS

C) had been substantially strength-

ened by the Soviet Union’s alliance with Czechoslovakia in 1943 and the Red

Army’s liberation of East-Central Europe. The KS

C had failed to organize a

successful wartime resistance, but it had made the strongest attempt and paid

in blood for its eﬀorts. Unlike Beneš, the Communists bore no responsibility

for Munich or the other errors of the First Republic. Unsullied by the past,

the KS

C was widely viewed as the country’s future and attracted members in

droves: “the Communist Party of the early postwar years was, and remains,

the largest party in Czech history.”

164

Beneš, while very popular, was seri-

ously ill when he returned from London. The advantage of strength and

dynamism seemed to lie with the Communists, who won 38 percent of

the vote in the elections of 1946.

165

In the ﬁrst postwar cabinet, the KS

controlled the ministries of agriculture, interior, and information, and both

the ministers of education and defense openly sympathized with the Com-

munists. Although historians have argued persuasively that the inevitable

rise of the KS

C has been exaggerated, nonetheless the momentum was on

its side.

The war had transformed Czech society; the immediate postwar years

saw still more radical changes. Fully 25 percent of postwar Czechoslovakia’s

population was between the ages of ﬁfteen and thirty years old. The Jews and

Germans who had once peopled Czechoslovakia’s middle class were gone, the

former virtually annihilated by the Nazis, the latter forced out by the Czechs.

The middle and upper classes remaining in the country were hard hit by

postwar anti-inﬂationary measures that withdrew 85 percent of circulating

currency and froze bank accounts, government bonds, and life insurance

policies. A 1947 property tax further reduced their standing. Workers, already

privileged under Nazism, continued their relative rise; women now joined

their ranks.

166

Continued expulsion of Czechoslovakia’s German population,

as well as postwar trials of Nazis and collaborators, meant that the war’s rad-

icalized, reduced notions of identity (Czech or German, guilty or innocent,

progressive or reactionary) continued to dominate postwar discourse. The

allure of the Soviet Union, and bitterness toward the West for Munich and

the war, were unmistakeable.

167

Thoroughgoing critiques of the First Republic continued, with increased

ferocity, in the immediate postwar era; but they now came largely from

the Left. In 1938 critics had argued that the First Republic’s proliferation of

ATimeofIronandFire 209

political parties made it unable to act decisively in an authoritarian era. Now,

most writers argued that the First Republic’s promise had been destroyed by

the Czech and German ﬁnanciers who in fact controlled it, as well as by a

problematic Parliament. Daily political life in the First Republic had never

realized Masaryk’s ideal of de-Austrianization, now redeﬁned as “broad seg-

ments of the people . . . [participating] in the administration, the economy,

and the creation of national history.” Instead, democracy had turned to de

facto oligarchy. The republic had defended the right of capitalists to exploit

workers; “bankers, large-scale capitalists and agrarian magnates” had then

sold the country at Munich. Even Castle intellectuals who had survived

the war joined in castigating the First Republic for its deﬁciencies. So loud

was the outcry against the past that some writers wondered whether there

was a public conspiracy to silence or shame any voices defending the First

Republic.

168

Nevertheless, many postwar Czech writers also lauded the First Republic

as a bygone era, a “lost paradise.” In this discursive vein, all that was

positive about the First Republic was personally identiﬁed with Tomáš

Masaryk. Even as Karel Hrbas acknowledged that the First Republic was

fundamentally ﬂawed, he also noted that “Masarykian democracy was the

faith of our lives.” Similarly, philosopher J. B. Kozák noted that the First

Republic reﬂected Masaryk’s greatness “only sometimes and partially.”

169

Every political faction tried to claim Masaryk, however close or distant his

ideas might have actually been to their own. Even the Communists tried to

bring him into their national pantheon, despite his outspoken opposition

to revolutionary socialism and his antipathy to the Bolsheviks, the Soviet

Union, and the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Communist Minister of

Education and National Enlightenment Zden

ek Nejedlý had written an

admiring four-volume biography of Masaryk in the First Republic’s last years

(1930–1937, published in full in 1938). In 1945, in the government magazine

Ceskoslovensko, Nejedlý continued praising Masaryk, now from an openly

Marxist perspective, arguing that Masaryk was an exemplar of dedication

to the people.

170

Party ideologue Václav Kopecký wrote that it would be

impossible to construct “the new Czechoslovakia without the foundation

of Masaryk.” Since Masaryk had himself frequently opposed the P

etka,

Kopecký wrote, the bourgeois parties from the First Republic had no right

to claim him: rather, Masaryk was socially and intellectually closest to the

Communists. He had “heroically struggled for a better tomorrow ...hehada

beautiful relationship with the workers.”

171

Whether this was a ploy to widen

the KS

C’s appeal to nationalists or a genuine eﬀort to render Masaryk’s life

meaningful to the postwar scenario, it succeeded at least partially in linking

the KS

C’s plans for socioeconomic renewal of Czechoslovak society to those

of Masaryk.

172

210 Battle for the Castle

Castle intellectuals from the interwar era also sought to claim Masaryk’s

legacy. Some, in wartime exile, had tried to keep the Masaryk cult alive as

part of the Czechoslovak propaganda eﬀort.

173

They continued their eﬀorts

between 1945 and 1948. One example is the 1947 volume edited by Josef

Hoﬀman and Oskar Odstr

cil, titled T.G.M. as We Saw Him. This book

represented an obvious attempt to adapt Castle tenets and the Masaryk cult

to the postwar era: its essays and selections emphasized “Slavonic” politics,

the importance of Slovak culture and values within Czechoslovakia, and

Masaryk’s dedication to true, “social” democracy rather than nineteenth-

century-style oligarchic liberalism. The book’s ﬂyleaf holds a pen-and-ink

drawing of Masaryk by Communist Adolf Hoﬀmeister. The next item in the

book is a reprint of Masaryk’s handwritten thoughts on the term ˇclovˇek,or

person. The short piece concludes, “the term ‘

clov

ek’ [encompasses] various

races, nations, and social classes = nationality + social-ness [sociálnost] all in

one.” The book’s ﬁrst long prose piece is a speech excerpt by Milan Štefánik,

Masaryk’s Slovak colleague abroad during the Great War; its ﬁrst sentence

reads, “I proclaim that Masaryk always was and is a good Slav.”

174

Many of

the recollections of Masaryk are by Slovaks, in Slovak. Many are by generals.

Also, Masaryk as the hero of the prewar myth was now presented as more

human, even ﬂawed. In his contribution, painter Max Švabinský recalled

asking the president about the worsening international situation in 1933.

Masaryk insisted uncategorically that there would be no war: “Who would

want a war? Only the Germans, and they are encircled and held in by all of

Europe. Not even in twenty years will there be a war. And also, for war there

needs to be money, and there isn’t any.” Švabinský concluded, “This time

the great president was wrong.”

175

Among the Castle writers, Ferdinand Peroutka remained one of

Czechoslovakia’s most important voices in the postwar era. Peroutka had

been arrested in the fall of 1939 and sent to Dachau and Buchenwald. He

spent twenty-seven months in solitary conﬁnement during his six years in

concentration camps. Twice, the Nazis were said to have brought Peroutka

back to Prague; they oﬀered him freedom and a lavish lifestyle if he would

agree to edit Pˇrítomnost in collaboration with the Protectorate authorities.

Twice Peroutka refused and was returned to the camps.

176

Following the

war, he founded a new magazine, Dnešek (Today).

Like Beneš, Peroutka represented a connection to the First Republic and

the Castle; like Beneš, the experiences of Munich, the Second Republic, and

the war had caused Peroutka to reject many of his earlier ideas. Unlike Beneš,

Peroutka’s postwar work sought a First Republic past worth keeping, a past

that might temper the excesses of the present. His skepticism toward power

now turned toward the Czechoslovak Communist Party and the Soviet

Union. He agreed, for instance, that Masaryk would in principle approve

ATimeofIronandFire 211

of the radical social and economic changes that accompanied the end of

the war. But, Peroutka cautioned, Masaryk would warn the country about

the “moral question”: “the nation stands at a crossroads and must decide:

humanityorsomethingelse...freedomorbondage? Our own national face

or a borrowed mask?” That mask would be borrowed, of course, from the

Soviet Union, potentially neglecting Masaryk’s humanist legacy. “[M]uch of

our fate depends on how much [Communism] is willing to accept from

Masaryk’s heritage and how much the rest [i.e., non-Communists] succeed

in defending it.”

177

The First and Third Republics shared many character-

istics, Peroutka reminded his readers. For instance, the KS

C’s power was

not entirely unfamiliar: “compared with it, the Agrarian Party’s hegemony

during the First Republic was almost imperceptible.”

178

This was a deeply

provocative statement given Agrarian collaboration with the Nazis. Com-

munist claims that life under the First Republic was more politicized than

in the current day were simply untrue, wrote Peroutka bluntly in September

1946. In fact, the Third Republic was palpably more politicized, and public

life had suﬀered as a consequence. “All the great national questions—aside

from industrial and social questions—are neglected: population, health,

alcoholism, morality in public life, the nature of the national character. In

past eras the nation conducted a richer and more subtle dialogue with its

fate.”

179

In fact, Peroutka argued, the country now faced a situation similar to

the one Masaryk confronted when founding his Realist movement: only

politics mattered, and it was politically dangerous to call attention to Czech

missteps or errors (domácí chyby). A small, but active, movement akin to

Masaryk’s would be useful, and it ought to adopt at least two of the principles

Masaryk cited when he founded the magazine

Cas. Those were, ﬁrst, to avoid

putting forward a political program in the narrow partisan sense, the better

to be able to combat frivolousness in Czech public life and to seek out the

bad in the fundamental errors of Czech national conduct; second, to be a

constant scourge of public lies.

180

Increasing Communist control over the

media made this suggestion highly unrealistic and undeniably courageous,

particularly his call to his readers to use Masaryk (even the prewar Masaryk)

as a model for contemporary behavior, and his comparison of Communist

political dominance to the oppressive rule of Austria-Hungary.

The ironies dominating Peroutka’s life were coming full circle. During

the interwar era, although the values animating Pˇrítomnost seemed similar to

the Castle’s, his refusal to parrot the Castle’s mythic line made him suspect.

Throughout the First Republic, Peroutka had entered, left, and reentered

Castle circles. Building the State was faithful to Castle spirit and ideology,

though again not as obedient as the Castle might wish. Munich and the

Second Republic had shaken Peroutka’s faith in parliamentary democracy

212 Battle for the Castle

and liberalism. Despite all this, between 1945 and 1948, Peroutka became a

self-appointed protector of Masaryk’s legacy, adapting the best of the Castle

vision for a new age. He would not have long to do it.

Conclusion

In 1935, Karel

Capek oﬀered advice to the reader who found the abstract

ﬁnal section of the Conversations with Masaryk to be hard going. Those

who found “no resonance in Platonic antiquity and Jesus’ preaching of love”

should contemplate the searching quality of Masaryk’s ideas and life, and

there ﬁnd “harmony.”

181

Masaryk’s thought and life, however harmonious,

seemed between 1938 and 1948 to belong to another century. Czechs living

through that horrible decade could have found relatively little in Masaryk’s

life to guide them, aside from moral bromides. Increasingly, they questioned

the political and social system Masaryk had helped to build and the postu-

lates on which it was based.

Those ideas and that system were described by the works of prose that

cemented the Castle’s standing in the eyes of Czechoslovak citizens and

the world—the Conversations and Building the State.

Capek’s and Peroutka’s

books returned their readers to the early days of the republic, an oasis of

clarity and hope in contrast to the despair of the late 1930s. The Masaryk

and Beneš they portrayed were philosopher-kings and more, men of action

as well as thought, leaders within a Europe that supported their ideas,

their values, and the state they led. Outside the pages of these texts, the

Castle myth had long fallen on deaf ears. Munich and the Second Republic

seemingly proved the Castle’s fundamental error: democracy and reliance on

the West had failed to guarantee Czechoslovakia. Still and all, as Gale Stokes

has observed, “Czech democracy failed because Europe failed.”

182

Wartime reinvigorated aspects of the myth in a more complicated form.

The interwar Castle myth had talked of liberal parliamentarianism com-

bined with enlightened technocratic rule; a democratized, de-Austrianized

society imbued with appropriately egalitarian civic values; reliance on and

closeness to the democratic West and the League of Nations; and an incon-

sistent ethnic tolerance accompanied by Czech dominance. Beneš’s wartime

myth presented a less sanguine, more conﬂict-ridden Czech nationalism,

with enemies and self-sacriﬁcial heroes similar to the “dark ages” before

the First Republic. The Nazis, Czechoslovakia’s own German population,

and the blind, perﬁdious West had caused the republic’s downfall. Palacký’s

hopeful assertion that the Czechs constituted a crossroads between German

and Slav now seemed impossibly idealistic. Germans had become alien

usurpers in the Czech lands, and needed to be expelled from them. The

ATimeofIronandFire 213

new myth returned the previously European Czechs to Slavdom, proudly

allied with their larger Slav brother the Soviets. The great Red Army was

Czechoslovakia’s heroic ally and liberator, along with (to a lesser extent)

the United States, beacon of hope and democracy. Europe would have to

work to understand the Soviets rather than fear them; Czechoslovakia would

serve as bridge and interpreter. One element of the interwar myth remained

unchanged: echoing Masaryk’s use of the term democracy, Beneš’s promises

to bring Czechoslovakia “new, fresh” democracy were less than clear about

the actual form that democracy would take.

Are Munich and its aftermath proof that Castle propaganda and the

Castle myth failed where German propaganda succeeded? Propagandistic

failure or success is notoriously diﬃcult to assess. A more relevant question

might be how much, or whether, East-Central European propaganda even

mattered, when so many other factors mitigated against the West’s support-

ing the Czechs. For example, European international relations were far more

important. The Treaty of Versailles aroused traditional British sympathies

with Germany, evoking the sense that the French had dishonorably abused

a valiant foe. It also created concern that short-sighted French revenge

against Germany would hamstring not just the Germans but the postwar

recovery of all of Europe, as expressed by British economist John Maynard

Keynes in his 1923 The Economic Consequences of the Peace. France, and

France’s allies, were therefore problematic. Moreover, the Foreign Oﬃce

was tiring of the incestuous disputes among the Habsburg successor states

by the mid-1920s, and wistfully recalling the empire, which had contained

the nationalities before the war. There was general admiration for the new

rightist leaders who “made the trains run on time” and claimed to protect

the continent against the Bolsheviks. The cliché about interwar America is

that it lapsed into isolationism. In fact, Britain also retreated into concern for

its empire, focus on rearmament, and willingness to leave the Continent to

the Germans.

183

Other factors were personality and ignorance, particularly

the acute, widespread British dislike of and distrust for Edvard Beneš, and

growing interest in the aﬀable, “reasonable” Konrad Henlein. Czechoslovakia

spent far less on propaganda than its competitors, so perhaps its message

reached a more limited audience; but even if disseminated more widely, how

could Czechoslovak propaganda have overcome all these other obstacles?

Against this backdrop, it would be accurate to say that Sudeten German,

Reich German, and Hungarian propaganda received a warmer reception

than the Czechoslovak variant; but it is also true that their listeners were

predisposed to hear them kindly.

184

Another response to the question might be to return to Foreign Minister

Eden’s quotation: good propaganda was ruined by bad policy. Czechoslo-

vakia’s German minority had complained to the League of Nations for many

214 Battle for the Castle

years. But after 1932, the obvious contrast between the Czechoslovak myth’s

insistence on egalitarian tolerance and the disproportionate nationalism and

poverty of the Sudeten Germans could no longer be dismissed by Beneš’s

maneuvering within committees. Meanwhile, the Sudeten German leaders

grew more skilled in presenting their views abroad, and in “luxuriously

lobbying” foreigners visiting Czechoslovakia’s border regions.

185

As more

complaints of discrimination reached British ears, Czechoslovak plausibility

lessened. Nazi sponsorship of the Sudeten German political leadership raised

the stakes. More than loss, Munich simply provided evidence of the limits

of myth and propaganda abroad.

Among Czechs, the myth and leader cult fared somewhat better. Cer-

tainly between 1945 and 1948 Masaryk and his republic underwent search-

ing scrutiny and reevaluation. Diplomat George Kennan, representing the

United States in Prague, wrote in October 1938 that “it is not easy to comfort

people for what they regard as twenty years of misplaced endeavor. . .. [I]t is

impossible to object when they now turn as bitterly on their erstwhile lib-

eralism as they have on the alliances which supported it.”

186

The immediate

postwar period saw a similar impulse. Interwar Czechoslovakia was roundly

condemned for its imperfections, although Masaryk’s reputation and glory

survived. His legacy was bent to seemingly odd purposes; he was invoked to

defend or criticize almost every aspect of the social and economic restructur-

ing that had altered his country. Despite Soviet pressure and Czechoslovak

Communist momentum and popularity, Masaryk continued to symbolize

Czechness itself, its noble past, its heroic future. But other elements of the

Castle myth were in tatters, particularly its insistence on democracy and

tolerance. Edvard Beneš, Ferdinand Peroutka, and other Castle adherents

were the last voices speaking for Masaryk’s republic. All these were gone

soon enough.

Epilogue

The people need a hero, a saint. . . . There must be a “Once

upon a time there lived” about it—something of the

fairy tale.

—Maxim Gorky

nFebruary1948, Edvard Beneš faced a second historical deci-

sion, comparable to his choice not to ﬁght in response to

Munich. Once again, he surrendered to a stronger opponent—this time, the

Czechoslovak Communist Party, backed by Soviet might. Reports had circu-

lated that non-Communist police oﬃcers were being ﬁred, and an unknown

troublemaker had mailed bombs to non-Communist cabinet ministers, yet

the Communist-controlled Ministry of the Interior refused to begin crim-

inal investigations. In protest, the National Socialist, Populist, and Slovak

Democratic ministers resigned from the cabinet, hoping to spur wholesale

political change. But they were not numerous enough to destroy the gov-

erning coalition or force new elections. Unless President Beneš refused to

accept their resignations, their eﬀorts would come to nothing. Beneš, already

seriously ill, hesitated. Meanwhile, the Communists took to the streets,

organizing large-scale public demonstrations and a nationwide general strike.

More ominously, Communist-led police “guarded” the Prague radio station,

train stations, and post oﬃces. Conspicuously, the non-Communist parties

failed to organize counterdemonstrations urging Beneš to stand ﬁrm. The

215