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

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216 Battle for the Castle

Communists appeared an unstoppable, vibrant force, and Beneš feared that

internal Czechoslovak conﬂict might tempt the Soviets to intervene. Five

days later, Beneš accepted the resignations, allowing Communist leader

Klement Gottwald to form a new government. A defeated Beneš resigned

after the “February coup,” which destroyed even nominal political pluralism

in Czechoslovakia; he died soon thereafter.

Gottwald and the Communist Party transformed Czechoslovakia into a

Soviet satellite akin to the rest of Eastern Europe, where economies had

already been fully nationalized, non-Communist parties made illegal and

non-Communist politicians harassed, society reengineered to suppress the

bourgeoisie and laud the working class, agriculture collectivized, and Stal-

inist intellectual and political conformity imposed. Nostalgic reminiscences

about Masaryk, Beneš, and the bourgeois First Republic had no place in

the minds of the dedicated heroes of labor now devoted to following in

Soviet footsteps, creating a worker’s state, and ﬁlling and overﬁlling pre-

scribed quotas. But discussion or commemoration of the First Republic

and its leaders took on new signiﬁcance as symbols of political protest. On

Masaryk’s birthday each year, ﬂowers appeared on his grave; in 1953, more

than one hundred policemen were assigned to surround it.

When controls

on information and public speech were brieﬂy lifted in the spring and

summer of 1968, scholars quickly began publishing on previously banned

subjects, including Masaryk and Beneš; portraits of Masaryk were sold in

newspaper kiosks throughout Prague, brieﬂy reinvigorating the leader cult

for a new purpose.

As memories of the First Republic were disparaged or silenced at home,

Castle myth was transmuted into fact abroad, particularly in the United

States. American professors and diplomats who fondly remembered time

spent in interwar Czechoslovakia reacted with horror, ﬁrst to the Second

World War and then to the 1948 Communist coup and its aftermath.

Émigrés also helped enshrine Castle myth in Anglo-American historiogra-

phy. Between 1947 and 1950, roughly 236,000 Czechs and Slovaks left for

the West for political reasons.

Of those who United States, some found

government support or employment, such as Ferdinand Peroutka in the

New York oﬃce of Radio Free Europe.

Many former Castle adherents

entered academe, a natural decision given that so many Castle staﬀers and

supporters, especially from Zamini, had come originally from academic life.

The result was an American rewriting of the Castle mythology for the Cold

War, in a new scholarly guise.

One of the most important American academic practitioners of the Castle

myth began writing well before the Cold War. Robert J. Kerner, professor of

history at the universities of Missouri and of California at Berkeley, studied

with Tomáš Masaryk in Prague in 1912–1913. He later recalled, “I consider

Epilogue 217

as the greatest fortune of my life the spiritual development I received in

my youth under the guidance of the great masters of Prague University,

among whom President Masaryk occupies a place apart. ...[T]o him I am

indebted . .. for my ﬁrm orientation in domestic and foreign policy.”

1917, Kerner was appointed to the American oﬃcial inquiry into setting

peace terms in the First World War, and served on the American commission

at the Paris peace talks.

After Munich, Kerner commissioned an inter-

national conference on Czechoslovakia. The result, Czechoslovakia: Twenty

Years of Independence, was one of relatively few English-language scholarly

works on the First Republic available during and after the Second World

War. The Castle’s myth, now elegiac in tone, dominated the contributions

to the landmark volume.

Also signiﬁcant was the work of S. Harrison Thomson, professor of

medieval history at the University of Colorado, founding editor of the

Journal of Central European Aﬀairs and author of the ﬁrst synthetic overview

of Czechoslovak history written by an American. Thomson had visited

Prague between 1924 and 1927, where among other Czech academics he had

befriended Karel

Capek’s friend and Castle adherent Josef Šusta.

Thom-

son’s early work was on Jan Hus and the early modern period. But his 1943

book Czechoslovakia in European History, one of the ﬁrst synthetic overviews

of Czechoslovakia in English, took Czech history up to the present day. For

centuries, Thomson explained, the Czechs (and Slovaks, who shared with

the Czechs “a common destiny”) had struggled for freedom and realization of

their national aspirations. Masaryk, Beneš, and the interwar republic repre-

sented the pinnacle of their “brilliant success”: the Nazis, the dream deferred,

perhaps destroyed. Thomson’s book, he argued, would “lead ...to more

reliable conclusions than a journalistic essay, written in the heat of battle”:

in other words, it was clearly written to contradict public voices who warned

against intervention on the Continent. Roughly half the sources Thomson

cited in the book’s bibliography were Orbis texts or Castle memoirs.

Of the Czech émigrés helping to transform the Castle myth, among

the most signiﬁcant were Otakar Odložilík, also a medievalist, who held

the Masaryk chair of history at Columbia University and later taught at the

University of Pennsylvania; Edvard Taborský, who taught political science

at the University of Texas at Austin; and Josef Korbel, a political scientist

at the University of Denver. Odložilík was the youngest member of the

“Goll school” in Charles University’s history department from 1926 to 1938;

between 1928 and 1930, he had lectured at the School of Slavonic and East

European Studies at the University of London, and Zamini had subsidized

the British publication of his research on John Wycliﬀe and Bohemia.

During the Second World War, Odložilík worked with Beneš in London

from 1943 to 1945.

After the war, he brieﬂy returned to Prague; from 1948

218 Battle for the Castle

on, he taught at Columbia and at the University of Pennsylvania, mentoring

students in East European history and writing on the Czech Reformation

and its aftermath, on Prague’s Charles University, on František Palacký, and

on Masaryk.

Taborský, who had received law government degrees from

Charles University and done a stint in provincial administration, joined the

foreign ministry in 1937 as Beneš’s personal secretary. During the Second

World War, he served as Beneš’s secretary and legal advisor in London,

accompanying him on visits to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Kremlin. In

1945, Taborský was appointed ambassador to Sweden. He resigned from that

post in 1948, and after teaching at various universities, accepted an oﬀer from

the University of Texas at Austin, where he remained until his retirement

in 1990. Taborský wrote roughly 300 articles and 15 books in Czech and

English on Eastern Europe, Communism, Czechoslovakia, Beneš and the

World War.

The work of Josef Korbel oﬀers an intriguing twist to the Western afterlife

of the Castle myth. Korbel was educated at the Sorbonne and at Charles

University. In 1934, at the age of twenty-ﬁve, he went to work for Zamini,

serving as press and cultural attaché in Belgrade from 1937 to 1939.The

Nazi invasion directly threatened his family, as Korbel had converted to

Catholicism from Judaism. The Korbels ﬂed to London, where Josef served

within Beneš’s government in exile as Jan Masaryk’s personal secretary and

as head of broadcasting. After the war, he worked with Masaryk to rebuild

Zamini, and was then appointed ambassador to Yugoslavia, the youngest

ambassador in the country’s history. Korbel ﬂed Czechoslovakia after the

February 1948 coup and came to the United States, where the University of

Denver hired him to teach international relations.

Korbel wrote on Cold

War conﬂicts, including those in East-Central Europe.

Korbel’s Twentieth-Century Czechoslovakia, published a few months after

his death in 1977, presents another form of the Castle myth. Overall, the First

Republic is portrayed as Masaryk and Beneš’s noble idyll, the embodiment

of Hus’s, Palacký’s, and Havlí

cek’s ideals. Yet he links those achievements

with “an equally unique record of defeat and failure.”

The later part

of the book identiﬁes these characteristics particularly with Edvard Beneš,

whose capitulation at Munich, Korbel implied, was unforgivably wrong.

The Czechs were capable of greatness, as the First Republic demonstrated;

they were also capable of cowardice and accommodation. Overall, despite

Korbel’s frustration with Beneš and the widespread support for Czechoslovak

Communism, the book’s tone retains the essence of the Castle legacy; it

portrays the Czechs romantically, with an idealized Masaryk personifying

the Czechoslovak nation. Of all these historians, Korbel’s legacy is probably

the widest-reaching. Korbel’s daughter, Madeleine Albright, was the ﬁrst

female U.S. secretary of state; one of Korbel’s doctoral students, Condoleezza

Epilogue 219

Rice, became the second. Both have said publicly that Korbel inspired them

to enter public service and recall his belief in the signiﬁcance and power

of bestowing freedom on the victims of tyranny as deeply inﬂuential.

secretaries of state, both portrayed the United States’ role in the world as

parallel to the depiction of Czechoslovakia in the Castle myth, as a paradigm

of democracy and freedom, a model for the rest of the world.

Contemporary historiography of the First Republic and the Castle has

moved far from the mythology, both in the United States and in the Czech

Republic. But myths, rather than disappearing, evolve. Czechoslovakia’s ﬁrst

post-Communist president, Václav Havel, repeatedly invoked Masaryk and

the supposedly self-evidently democratic Czech/oslovak past. (The “velvet

divorce” of the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993 caused Havel for

the most part to drop the Slovaks from his reiteration of the myth.) Ele-

ments of the Castle’s myth still appear in Czech national self-understanding;

depictions of Czechs as natural democrats remain part of international

discourse. Masaryk and Beneš’s national narrative of a martyred nation of

democrats remains compelling. Masaryk has transcended the First Republic

and become a full-ﬂedged national hero, as the terms of his interwar cult

suggested.

At no point has the Castle myth gone unchallenged, from its

inception in 1915 to the present day. Yet its outlines and inﬂuence remain.

The creation, manipulation, and propagation of this set of ideas present a

novel way of considering the history of the First Czechoslovak Republic and

of interwar Europe. Analysis of myth and propaganda—emphasizing politics

as idea and text as well as votes and deeds—oﬀers a necessary complement

to more traditional depictions of internal Czechoslovak politics. It allows for

the First Republic’s political press and personal intervention to be situated

at the center of political life rather than ephemeral to it. It also requires the

First Republic to be understood within a competitive, tense, text-dependent

European political milieu, in which the London Times was wooed along

with the Foreign Oﬃce. This cold war of propaganda helped create a sense

of an Eastern Europe as distinct from, dependent on, and culturally and

economically behind the prosperous, victorious West. Finally, tracing the

shifting myth from the Great War through the Second World War and

beyond emphasizes the ﬂexible contours of nationalist narratives and the

ways intellectuals wield them at home and abroad in the nation’s support

and defense. The Castle myth provides an example of simultaneous nation

building, aimed both at Czechoslovaks and the European Great Powers,

establishing the nation simultaneously at home and abroad.

Twentieth-century Czech political discourse also provides a reminder

that the term democracy embraces many disparate interpretations. Many

historians have castigated the First Republic for its democratic inadequacies,

but newer research emphasizes that the insistence on “democracy” in the

220 Battle for the Castle

Castle myth was usefully ambiguous, a seemingly simplistic moral and

political virtue that in fact referred to any number of possible adaptations

or developments.

European democracies have been populist, technocratic,

oligarchic, and authoritarian. Masaryk’s and Beneš’s written work and polit-

ical activity invoke, at diﬀerent points, all of these forms. Both the Castle

and the P

etka could safely tout themselves as democratic: both were right,

and wrong. Democratic rhetoric and the invocation of a democratic ideal

were frequently used to respond to public criticism of the republic’s, and

the Castle’s, democratic deﬁciencies. “Democracy” was employed both as

a transcendent moral claim to virtue and a synonym for the status quo.

The relationship between democracy and myth, as well as democracy and

propaganda, was closer than observers might assume.

At the same time, the Czechoslovaks are best understood against a

European backdrop. During the tumultuous years between 1914 and 1948,

national myths were one of the many means by which Europe reinterpreted

its past and posited its future. The Czechs participated in this wider trend;

the unique element in the Czech myth was its insistence on (vaguely deﬁned)

democracy, and to a lesser extent tolerance and nonviolence. In some senses

the Czech national narrative as formulated by Masaryk and Beneš resembles

civic nationalism, which calls for deriving one’s identity from participation

in a state, and the virtues that state supposedly embodies.

While this book

has noted the Castle myth’s propagation, limitations, and defects, it might

also be argued that Castle myth aided the development of a twentieth-

century Czech national consensus—or at least a discourse—about the value

of democracy, the legitimate use of power, cultural tolerance, and many other

values said to be represented by the West. If this admittedly uneven and

contested consensus, bolstered by the international community, dominates

Czech or East European politics in the twenty-ﬁrst century, then it would

mark the Castle myth’s most important and durable victory.

Abbreviations and Deﬁnitions

AHY Austrian History Yearbook

AKPR Archiv kancelá

re presidenta republiky (Archive of the Chan-

cellery of the President of the Republic), Prague, Czech

Republic

AMZV Archiv Ministerstva zahrani

cních v

eci (Archive of the Ministry

of Foreign Aﬀairs), Prague, Czech Republic

APNP Archiv pámatník národního písemnictví (National Literary

Memorial Archive), Staré Hrady, Czech Republic

AÚTGM Archiv Ústavu TG Masaryka, Prague, Czech Republic. I used

this archive in 1997, before it reorganized its documentary

collection.

Boh Bohemia: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen

Länder. Jahrbuch des Collegium Carolinum.

CSP Libuše Otáhalová and Milada

Cervinková, Acta Occupationis

Bohemiae et Moraviae: Dokumenty z historie ˇceskoslovenské poli-

tiky 1939–1943, 2 vols. (Prague: Academia, 1966)

EEPS East European Politics and Societies

221

222 Battle for the Castle

fond collection

HRC/PEN P.E.N. International Archives, Harry Ransom Center, Uni-

versity of Texas, Austin

kar. karton (box)

MZA Moravský zemský archiv (Moravian Regional Archive), Brno

NARA National Archives and Records Administration, College Park,

PMV Presidium ministerstva vnitra

PNP Památník národního písemnictví (National Literary Memor-

ial), Prague, Czech Republic

sign. signatura (collection)

sl. složka (folder)

SÚA Státní Úst

rední Archiv (State Central Archives, now Národní

archiv, National Archives), Prague, Czech Republic

Throughout, translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

Notes

Introduction

1. Robert Jackall, ed., Propaganda (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 1, 13;

Ute Daniel and Wolfram Siemann, “Historische Dimensionen der Propaganda,” in

Daniel and Siemann, eds., Propaganda: Meinungskampf, Verführung und politische

Sinnstiftung (1789–1989) (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbusch Verlag, 1994), 10.

2. Robert Holtman, Napoleonic Propaganda (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univer-

sity Press, 1950); Wayne Hanley, The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda 1796–1799

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), Gutenberg e-book available at

http://www.gutenberg-e.org; Jean Tulard, Napoleon: The Myth of the Saviour, trans.

T. Waugh (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984).

3. Ruth Emily McMurry and Muna Lee, The Cultural Approach: Another Way in

International Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 19.

4. This literature is vast. I have drawn on: Mark Cornwall, “News, Rumour and

the Control of Information in Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918,” History 77,no.249

(1992); Mark Cornwall, The Undermining of Austria-Hungary: The Battle for Hearts

and Minds (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals:

Propaganda Anxieties from WWI to the Cold War (New York: Columbia Univer-

sity Press, 2000); Victor S. Mamatey, The United States and East-Central Europe

223

224 Notes to Pages 5–8

1914–1918: A Study in Wilsonian Diplomacy and Propaganda (Princeton, NJ: Prince-

ton University Press, 1957); Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European

Culture in the Great War: The Arts, Entertainment, and Propaganda, 1914–1918 (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); David Welch, Germany, Propaganda,

and Total War, 1914–1918: The Sins of Omission (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers

University Press, 2000).

5. John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public

Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and

St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

6. Philip Taylor, Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World

to the Present Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 177–178.

7. East-Central Europe here indicates the states created between Germany and Russia

after 1918. Eastern Europe, in chapter 5, denotes the European states between the

Iron Curtain and the Soviet border.

8. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York:

Random House, 2002), 114.

9. Ibid., 213.

10. Mamatey, The United States and East Central Europe 1914–1918, 316–317. Also see

rí Kovtun, Masaryk˚uv triumf: pˇríbˇeh konce velké války (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publi-

shers, 1987).

11. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 134,

148.

12.

Mamatey

, The United States and East Central Europe 1914–1918, 299–300.

13.Zbyn

ek Zeman and Antonín Klímek, The Life of Edvard Beneš 1884–1948: Czechoslo-

vakia in Peace and War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 21–23.

14. McMurry and Lee, The Cultural Approach, 19.

15. Otto Dann, Nation und Nationalismus in Deutschland, 1770–1990 (Munich: C.H.

Beck, 1993); Martin Broszat, “Die völkische Ideologie und der Nationalsozialis-

mus,” Deutsche Rundschau 84,no.1 (1958): 59–63; Max Hildebert Boehm, “Die

Reorganisation der Deutschtumsarbeit nach dem ersten Weltkrieg,” Ostdeutsche

Wissenschaft: Jahrbuch des ostdeutschen Kulturrates 5 (1959): 12–13, 19.

16. McMurry and Lee, The Cultural Approach, 53–54.

17. Ibid., 110–113; Michael David-Fox, “The Fellow Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured

West’ Through Soviet Eyes,” Journal of Modern History 75,no.2 (2003): 300–336;

Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization,

1917–

1922 (Cambridge:

Cambridge U

niversity Press, 1985); Nina Tumarkin, Lenin

Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

enlarged edition, 1997); Benno Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetu-

nion (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997).

18. Philip Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda

1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 137; McMurry and Lee,

The Cultural Approach, 138–144.

19. Taylor, Munitions of the Mind, 196–197;Gary,Nervous Liberals, 2–3. Ponsonby’s

inquiry into wartime atrocity propaganda found little or no substantiation, con-

tributing to later Great Power reluctance to believe atrocity stories from Germany

and Nazi-occupied Europe. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914:

A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

Notes to Pages 9–11 225

20. MacMillan, Paris 1919, 229–230.

21. Gabor Batonyi, Britain and Central Europe 1918–1933 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1999); Alena Gajanová,

CSR a stˇredoevropská politika velmocí (1918–1938) (Prague,

Academia, 1967); Jörg Hoensch, Der ungarische Revisionismus und die Zerschla-

gung der Tschechoslowakei (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1976); Aniko

Kovacs-Bertrand, Der ungarische Revisionismus nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Der

publizistische Kampf gegen den Friedensvertrag von Trianon (1918–1931) (Munich:

R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1997); Ignác Romsics, ed., 20th Century Hungary and

the Great Powers (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by

Columbia University Press, 1995); András D. Bán, “Friends of England: Cul-

tural and Political Sympathies on the Eve of the War,” Hungarian Quarterly 40,

no. 153 (1999).

22. Mamatey, The United States and East-Central Europe 1914–1918, xiii; Batonyi, Britain

and Central Europe, 223.

23. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997),

119; Milica Baki

c-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,”

Slavic Review 54,no.4 (1995): 917–931.

24. Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 122.

. Batonyi, B

ritain and Central Europe; M

acMillan, Paris 1919, 211–212, 229.

26.Gary,Nervous Liberals, passim. Elizabeth A. Murphy, “Propaganda jako nástroj

ceskoslovenské diplomacie za války a po ni,” Dˇejiny a souˇcasnost 17,no.5 (1995):

16–20.

27. On the Little Entente, see, inter alia, Piotr Wandycz, “Foreign Policy of Eduard

Beneš, 1918–1938,” in Victor Mamatey and Radomir Luža, eds., A History of

the Czechoslovak Republic 1918–1948 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1973), esp. 220–223, 226–231; on its demise, see Piotr Wandycz, The Twilight of

the French Eastern Alliances, 1926–1936: French-Czechoslovak-Polish Relations from

Locarno to the Remilitarization of the Rhineland (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 1988).

28. T. Mills Kelly has referred to the myth as “Whig history” in “A Repu-

tation Tarnished: New Perspectives on Interwar Czechoslovakia,” Woodrow

Wilson International Center, March 26, 2003 (http://www.wilsoncenter.org/

topics/pubs/278Kelly.doc, accessed December 15, 2007). Also Vladimír Macura,

Ceský sen (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 1998); Vladimír Macura,

Masarykovy boty a jiné semi (o) fejetony (Prague: Pražská imaginace, 1993);

Vladimír Macura, Znamení zrodu: ˇceské národní obrození jako kulturní typ

(Prague: H&H, 1995); Robert Pynsent, Questions of Identity: Czech and Slovak

Ideas of Nationality and Personality (London: Central European University Press,

1994

29.

Kieran

Williams, “National Myths in the New Czech Liberalism,” in Geoﬀrey

Hosking and George Schöpﬂin, eds., Myths and Nationhood (New York: Routledge,

1997), 135. The myth could also encompass warlike toughness, embodied by the

Hussite leader Jan Žižka. The Right tended to emphasize this element; the Castle

occasionally embraced it. On values within myths: Carolyn Humphrey, “Myth-

Making, Narratives, and the Dispossessed in Russia,” Cambridge Anthropology 19,

no. 2 (1996–97): 70–93.