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

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16 Battle for the Castle

leaders and articulated by intellectuals and writers who lent legitimacy to

their ideas. It is important to note the simultaneous invention of multiple

traditions, and to look at the processes by which some myths are enshrined

while others, at least temporarily, disappear.

Czechoslovakia and the other post-Habsburg states of East-Central

Europe shared the central dilemma presented in this book: their interwar

nation building was dual, simultaneously domestic and international. East-

Central European governments had to knit together new polities, often

fractious and multiethnic, while also eﬀectively presenting abroad the image

of a uniﬁed, successful nation. Most of them, like Czechoslovakia, failed

in this task. The complaints of minority nationalities did not escape the

West’s attention but, more important, as Hitler’s power grew, Great Power

elite opinion increasingly retreated to the kind of cynical realism represented

by appeasement. The West’s overwhelming concern was the maintenance

of empire abroad and the avoidance of war. Battle for the Castle illustrates

both the domestic and international sides of the Czechoslovak attempt to

craft a uniﬁed nation.

East-Central European nation-building eﬀorts abroad rested on futile,

competitive discourses of Europe. But such arguments have rarely worked:

East-Central Europe, including Czechoslovakia, has long been deﬁned as

other than the West.

This book makes clear that after 1918, the successor

states of the nineteenth-century empires continued to constitute an Eastern

Europe. The term connoted a complex admixture of attitudes toward the

Great Power states: a combination of dependence on them, defensiveness

toward them, fear of absorption by them, and attempts to portray their

own states as similar to them. Interwar Western Europe became both the

guarantor of security and the arbiter of cultural and political progressiveness

for the rest of the continent. East-Central European interwar propaganda

and Great Power reception demonstrate that an Eastern Europe of mental-

ités existed decades before a physical Iron Curtain.

But this book joins

a “new diplomatic history” in focusing on the contributions of the mass

media, public opinion, and individual citizen initiative to international

aﬀairs.

My decision to focus on the Castle, the mass media, and popular culture,

rather than on votes and arguments on the ﬂoor of Parliament, stems

from the consensus among political historians of the First Republic that

Parliament’s signiﬁcance was relatively limited. Many scholars have argued

that the heart of political conﬂicts in interwar Czechoslovakia lay in the

battles between the Castle and the P

etka (the Five), the unoﬃcial coalition

of the most important Czech political party leaders.

The P

etka’s control of

parliamentary issues, aimed at ensuring passage of important legislation and

protecting each party’s control over particular ministries or resources, meant

The Golden Republic 17

that real wrangling among parties or nationalities until the late 1930swas

rare, suppressed, or ignored. In other words, any study of First Republic

politics focused on party and parliamentary aﬀairs misses much of the

picture.

Instead, this study highlights the centrality of the press and propaganda—

indeed, the world of middlebrow literary culture more generally—to inter-

war Czech and European politics. The leaders of the P

etka and the Castle

argued vociferously in the pages of their partisan journals, as well as in their

correspondence and via personal intermediaries. Journalists, authors, intel-

lectuals, and editors had direct political impact. They helped craft cults of

personality; they helped to iterate and adapt national myths. This book takes

for granted a close relationship between Czech intellectuals, Czech political

leaders (themselves intellectuals), and the symbols and discursive elements

of Czech nationalism. It posits that of all groups in interwar Czechoslovakia,

the Castle’s intellectuals became the most intimately aﬃliated with the

“propagation of the national idea,” as Max Weber put it.

Any study of intellectuals must deal with deﬁnitions. Like cultural

anthropologist Katherine Verdery and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, I

understand intellectuals functionally: they are professionals dealing with

ideas, who establish their role in society and their relationship to power

mainly through conﬂict, expressed in written form. They gain recognition by

framing the discourses society uses to understand itself and the cultural val-

ues underscoring the national community. But there are always competing

discourses and values. In Czechoslovakia, the nation served as what Verdery

calls a master symbol, a locus of ideological contention that lent added

signiﬁcance to public conﬂict when wielded by intellectuals and political

leaders.

Finally, all historians of Czechoslovakia have to contend with questions

of national nomenclature. The Castle understood its task as defending and

trying to promote an attachment to Czechoslovakia, denoting a Czech-led

state merely tolerant of the state’s other ethnic groups. Hence this book’s con-

scious usage of the term “nation” to refer to the Czech nationality within the

Czechoslovak nation-state. The term “state” refers either to Czechoslovakia

as a political entity or to its government and administration. A last, related

point: I use “Czech” to describe speakers of the Czech language and adher-

ents of or themes within the Czech nationalist movement. “Czechoslovak”

refers to the First Czechoslovak Republic’s government, to the state more

generally, and to the myth Masaryk and Beneš crafted. Less frequently, I use

“Czechoslovak” to refer to citizens of the state; in that sense the term refers

more to rhetoric than to reality, as one of this book’s observations is that the

state, its leaders, and its myth failed to create a truly “Czechoslovak” civic

identity.

18 Battle for the Castle

Battles and the Castle

The chapters of this book treat diﬀerent aspects of the modern Czechoslovak

myth’s creation and use. Chapter 1 describes the highly nationalized Czech

political and intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century, in which

Masaryk, and to a lesser extent Beneš, came of age, and which constituted an

important element in the modern Czechoslovak myth. “Nationally aware”

Czechs celebrated the Czech language and cultural heritage, contrasting

them with the supposedly Habsburg and German vices of aggression, repres-

sion, and dogmatism. They were inspired by the romantic nationalism

of historian Frantíšek Palacký, whose multivolume History of the Czech

Nation in Bohemia and Moravia reinterpreted the Czech medieval past as a

charged interaction between Slavs and Germans, a matrix for modern Czech

nationalism. Palacký’s themes were later simpliﬁed and popularized by other

nationalist historians and authors, who translated them into Czech national

consciousness. Masaryk claimed to reject Palacký’s ideas even while relying

on them, trying to link the ﬁfteenth-century Hussites to early twentieth-

century progressive liberalism, ethnic tolerance, and an ecumenical Chris-

tian spirituality. His attempt to practice a morally inﬂuential “unpolitical”

politics within the Austrian imperial parliament, or Reichsrat, was inspired

by those ideas as well.

Masaryk’s and Beneš’s work abroad during the First World War, also

described in chapter 1, presented their version of the Czech past, present, and

future to a Great Power audience, via propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and

the British, French, and American mass media. Their wartime experiences,

and their steady faith in the truth of Czech (now equated with Czechoslovak)

nationalism, led the two men to develop a vision of postwar politics that

remained remarkably consistent through the interwar era: admiration for

Western values, reliance on the Great Powers of Western Europe, and intent

to shape the First Czechoslovak Republic in their image. Achieving these

goals would require substantial remaking of Czech political life, which

Masaryk and Beneš viewed as provincial, uninformed, and prone to wrong-

headed political notions that might alienate the state from its Great Power

guarantors. Their vision became the Castle’s agenda, at home and abroad.

Chapter 2 details the Castle’s means of gathering and disseminating infor-

mation, raising funds, and exerting inﬂuence, involving many government

institutions as well as personal friendships. One of the most important

elements of the Castle apparatus was the propaganda section of Beneš’s

foreign ministry, which was actively involved with European intellectual and

literary culture. Through propaganda, the Castle funded journalists, writers,

and academics; it published and distributed their books, translating them

into all the major languages, via Orbis, the Foreign Ministry’s semiprivate

The Golden Republic 19

publishing house, or

Cin, the publishing house owned by a Czechoslovak

Legionnaire organization loyal to the Castle. The Castle paid the expenses

of the Czech chapter of the International P.E.N. Club, which Beneš and

the writer-members viewed and used as a propagandistic forum. The Third

Section sponsored trips abroad for authors, artists, and musicians, and built

the Spoleˇcenský klub (Social Club), a luxurious gentleman’s club in the heart

of downtown Prague, for entertaining visiting foreigners and socializing with

Castle allies and intelligentsia.

Throughout the interwar period, the Castle faced many political chal-

lenges. At home, as chapter 3 explains, the Castle fought to dominate

national politics and to frame Czech nationalism; parliamentary leaders

and factions fought back. Of its enemies, the Castle viewed the radical

Right as the most dangerous. As opposed to the Castle’s Western-leaning

cosmopolitanism, the Right espoused Czech chauvinism, combined with

aggressive anti-German sentiment and gloriﬁcation of the Czechoslovak

Legionnaires (Czechoslovak World War I veterans) and the mythic Slavic

forebears of the Czech nation. In letters, in meetings, and in highly public

legal causes célèbres, the Castle and the Right vied not just for political

but also for mythic advantage. One of the most important arenas for

mythical combat was the press. Masaryk and Beneš involved themselves

deeply in the aﬀairs of the mass media, founding and abandoning vari-

ous newspapers and journals, and developing relationships with prominent

journalists to propagate their ideas. The Castle also worked to encour-

age the development of Masaryk’s personality cult; it published pamphlets

of his writings, books of photographs showing Masaryk sitting ramrod-

straight on horseback or cuddling his grandchildren, and worshipful biogra-

phies in almost every European language. The Castle’s work at home was

devoted to winning support from inﬂuential ﬁgures and sectors of the

electorate, and limiting the power of groups and people the Castle deemed

harmful.

Chapter 4 presents Czechoslovakia’s problematic international position,

which became more precarious as the 1930s wore on. German and Hungarian

propagandists had made inroads into the sympathies of the British elite,

who had long found the Treaty of Versailles distasteful and who mistrusted

Edvard Beneš. The growing distance between the British and French gov-

ernments weakened the Czechoslovak position vis-à-vis the Nazi threat. The

Castle relied on its diplomatic corps but also remained highly involved with

the foreign press, ﬁghting to persuade the Great Power media—and through

them, Great Power electorates and leaders—of Czechoslovakia’s strategic

and moral importance. The myth abroad relied on Masaryk, using him to

represent the Czechoslovak state. In contrast to the domestic variant, which

involved delegitimizing political ﬁgures the Castle saw as dangerous, the

20 Battle for the Castle

myth abroad claimed the country’s backing of the Castle and its values as a

fait accompli, portraying Czechoslovakia as an idyllic, tolerant, multiethnic

state, a Switzerland of the East. But other successor states—and discontented

Czechoslovak nationalities—wove their own mythic propaganda narratives,

in which Czechoslovakia was weak, hypocritical, and repressive. The Castle’s

“struggle for world sympathy” did not take place in a vacuum.

Both within

and outside interwar Czechoslovakia, the Castle’s version of modern Czech

nationalism was challenged by competing myth-narratives.

Chapter 5 explains the Castle myth’s tragedies and victories. During the

Republic’s last three rocky years, the Castle’s Europeanized adaptation of

Czech nationalism was given greater credence by several books written by

Castle intellectuals, including Conversations with Masaryk by Karel

Capek

and Ferdinand Peroutka’s multivolume history of the Republic’s early years,

Building the State. Both were written with the Castle’s strong support and

echo, whether strongly or subtly, the Castle mythic narrative. But it was

the Nazis who made these texts presciently elegiac, elevating would-be

myth to apparent fact. By December 1938,

Capek was dead, Beneš was in

exile in London, and the Nazis had annexed the Sudetenland and would

soon occupy Prague. Beneš’s second wartime exile reiterated the themes his

interwar propaganda campaign had developed: that Czechs were natural

democrats and paciﬁsts, that Czechoslovakia had been more devoted to

European ideals than Europe itself, and that it now needed Europe’s aid

and a second liberation. But, signiﬁcantly modifying the interwar myth,

Beneš balanced these themes with the political necessity of coming to terms

with the Soviet Union. Czech and Slovak intellectuals, between 1945 and

1948, criticized Masaryk’s republic and the Castle myth even while retaining

elements of them both—most powerfully, maintaining public reverence for

Masaryk and adapting his interwar leader cult to the post-1945 era. Every

political faction, including the Communists, claimed Masaryk as its own.

After the 1948 Communist takeover, the idea of a democratic Czechoslo-

vakia was relegated to the realm of the mythic. By then many Czechoslovaks

had already turned away from the Castle myth and its creators. The postwar

Czechoslovak Communists were the largest party in Czech history, and drew

a substantial plurality of votes in the 1946 elections. But for opponents of

the regime and émigrés, many of them former Castle staﬀers, the power

of an idealized Czechoslovak democracy only gained strength in response

to the horror of the Communist coup. The epilogue notes the continuing

dominance of the Castle myth in the English-language academic writings of

émigrés, expatriates, and allies, defending and mourning the Castle’s golden

republic. The Castle’s ﬁnal mythographic triumph came about nostalgically,

through the literary work of exile and underground historians, journalists,

politicians, and the Westerners they taught or inﬂuenced.

The Golden Republic 21

All successful myths incorporate elements of generally recognized truth,

and the Castle myth is no exception.

The interwar Czechoslovak Republic

was, by the 1930 s, the lone Habsburg successor state to retain democratic

norms and practices. Its minority nationalities, religious believers, and polit-

ical groupings enjoyed greater tolerance than they would have elsewhere in

the region. Czechoslovakia was, as the myth claimed, closer economically

to the wealthy West than many of its neighbors, thanks to the Austrian

Empire’s nineteenth-century industrialization of the Bohemian lands and to

the stringent deﬂationary policies of the Czechoslovak leadership after 1918.

Masaryk and Beneš were devoted to democracy, as they understood that

term, and rejected violent revolutionary change. They also believed in the

principles of collective security and peaceful coexistence, which constituted

the underpinnings of the postwar peace and Czechoslovakia’s existence.

But the mythologized national narrative obscures important facts about

interwar Czechoslovakia. Masaryk and Beneš harbored real doubts about

parliamentary democracy even as they fought to defend it. At times they

even contemplated leading executive coups d’etat to control an unruly Par-

liament, or denying the vote to troublesome groups within the electorate,

such as soldiers or women. Some of their behind-the-scenes meddling in

the aﬀairs of the press or individual politicians’ careers was questionable in a

democratic context. Moreover, other groups within Czech politics, especially

the P

etka and its successors, rebuked or ignored the wishes of the voters and

refused to cede power to the next generation. Czechoslovak rule has been

described as a gerontocracy, in which most of the leading politicians came

of age under Austria and kept tight control over their parliamentarians.

In short, Czechoslovakia had more in common with its neighbors than the

myth implies, such as Pitsudski’s Poland, Horthyite Hungary, and even late

Weimar Germany’s “authoritarian democracy,” increasingly dependent on

an authoritarian chancellor to maneuver around a hamstrung and divided

Parliament. Study of the real Czechoslovak democracy can teach us far

more about the functioning of interwar democracies and European pol-

itics than can the idealized golden republic, the romance of the mythic

notwithstanding.

The myth (and closed archives during the Communist era) also obscured,

for a long time, the actual political engagement of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk,

whose complex vision and equally ambiguous politics lay at the core of First

Republic political culture. Rather than the ﬁgurehead president suggested by

the myth and its texts, archival documents and newer historiography portray

Masaryk as an active, canny politician. He was more than willing to use con-

nections, the bully pulpit of the presidency, his substantial charisma, and his

personal ﬁnances to back his allies and block his opponents. He never went

so far as to establish martial law or ban oppositional political parties, even

22 Battle for the Castle

those he considered dangerous. Nevertheless, Masaryk was no philosopher-

king. He never quite relinquished the particularist, hierarchical political

framework he had learned under imperial Austria. A political pugilist, he

sometimes lacked the grace and wisdom to know when to abandon the ﬁght.

Masaryk is often quoted as saying he hoped for ﬁfty years of peace, so

that the Czechoslovak Republic could ﬁrmly establish itself. In the end, the

Republic only got twenty, which have been termed “decades of crisis.”

That

despairing epithet is borne out by a competitive, tense atmosphere, both

domestically and internationally. The intellectuals discussed here did battle

on behalf of the Castle, its ideas, and its leaders, defending not just their

political agenda but their larger vision for Czechoslovakia and for Europe.

This book tells this story but also conveys the interrelated story of a much

wider conﬂict, which in the end swept up the young Czechoslovak state.

To paraphrase former British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, while good

policy can be ruined by bad propaganda, good propaganda cannot correct

for bad policy; the propagandists of Orbis proved helpless against European

realpolitik.

The Castle lost its battle. But, just as clearly, it won the mythic war.

Its symbols and narrative, rooted in and extending those of the nineteenth

century, restructured Czech national self-understanding. The myth’s shifts

and reinterpretations set out what it meant to be Czechoslovak, and brieﬂy

established an illusion of community, at least for (some) Czechs and Slovaks,

if not for Czechoslovakia’s other inhabitants. Castle mythic politics set the

terms, during and after the interwar years, for discussing the legitimate use of

power. The Castle’s propaganda apparatus, and its connections to prominent

writers and academics, helped spread the myth throughout Czechoslovakia

and Europe, and then to the United States, where it lingered in political and

academic discourse for generations, shaping American understanding of the

Czechs, East-Central Europe, and Europe more generally. Setting out the

historical evolution of this powerful mythology that has underpinned Czech

nationalism during the twentieth century and beyond can help us continue

to better understand, and to move beyond, the myth.

Myth and Wartime

n autumn 1915, the young academic and journalist Edvard

Beneš ﬂed Prague on a forged passport. He was trying to evade

the Austrian authorities, who knew he had been one of a group of Czechs

plotting against the empire from the moment the Great War broke out in

autumn 1914. Beneš made it to Switzerland and from there to Paris. Along

with his mentor, the academic sociologist and public gadﬂy Tomáš Garrigue

Masaryk, and the dashing Slovak astronomer and pilot Milan Rastislav

Štefánik, Beneš spent the rest of the war agitating for the establishment of

an independent Czechoslovakia. Their work succeeded beyond their wildest

imagining. On November 4, 1918, in a car ﬂying the Czechoslovak state

colors, Beneš was driven to the Paris peace talks as foreign minister of the

new Czechoslovak state.

This story—of a few inconsequential professors successfully petitioning

the Great Powers, amassing an army, and persuading the world’s leaders

to guarantee the existence of a new state—is also the story of the cre-

ation of that state’s myth, and its propagation via propaganda. Masaryk,

Beneš, and Štefánik devoted an enormous amount of energy and resources

24 Battle for the Castle

to propaganda and cultural diplomacy, within and outside governmental

circles. They established the equivalent of a propaganda ministry and press

agency in several Great Power capitals. They also dedicated considerable time

to cultivating contacts in political circles, academe, and the highest levels of

society, not to mention Czech and Slovak colonies abroad.

The story they told, on the pages of journal articles, in private salons, in

lecture halls, emphasized what became a familiar set of themes. The Czechs,

so the story went, were as Western in their values and in their political incli-

nations as the Westerners themselves: they were Enlightenment rationalists

yearning to be free of Austrian repression. They ought to be joined with their

fellow Slavs, the Slovaks, to lead an East European state that was dedicated to

tolerance, egalitarianism, and human rights, and was capable of joining with

the West. Not coincidentally, this same state, with Western support, might

help withstand German aggression and contain Bolshevik social radicalism.

The myth did not linger too long on the Germans in Bohemia and Moravia,

or Hungarians in Slovakia. Nor did it pause to consider too deeply how

Czechoslovakia might actually defend itself against a rearmed Germany or

what it might mean for the West to have binding international commitments

in Central and Eastern Europe.

Although Masaryk and Beneš were working in a novel scenario, their ideas

displayed marked continuity with the past, drawing heavily on romantic

nineteenth-century interpretations of Czech history. Since 1820, the political

imaginary developed in Bohemia and Moravia had involved radical, even

utopian attempts to reconﬁgure Austrian political culture to suit Czech

nationalist goals and hopes.

This chapter aims to contextualize Masaryk,

Beneš, and Czech nationalism against the backdrop of the nineteenth

century. Czech nationalist ideological traditions and the Czech political

infrastructure, including political parties and their partisan press, were estab-

lished during this period. This era’s events and leaders also provided the

vocabulary for modern Czech nationalist discourse. Masaryk and Beneš

selected some parts of the nineteenth-century tradition and minimized oth-

ers in creating and representing abroad what became the “Czechoslovak”

nation. Moreover, they and other politicians continued to shift and reinvent

the terms of Czech and Czechoslovak mythology, during and after the war,

using nineteenth-century nationalist themes.

The chapter’s second goal is to explain how Masaryk’s and Beneš’s work

abroad during the war shifted the terms, and some of the content, of Czech

nationalism for the rest of the century. Before 1914, Masaryk and Beneš were

academics, Masaryk famed mainly as a public intellectual and the leader

of a tiny party in the Reichsrat (Austria’s imperial parliament); Beneš, a

sociologist and freelance journalist, was almost completely unknown. They

were of minuscule political importance compared with the leaders of the

Myth and Wartime 25

well-established Czech party system, who declined to follow them into exile.

Not until 1917 were they certain that domestic political leaders supported

their work abroad. Their vision of a Western-leaning Czechoslovak republic

competed with ﬁrmly rooted notions of a re-created Czech kingdom, most

likely with a Romanov on the throne, situated within a Russian-led greater

Slavic empire.

The war shifted the terms of this conversation. Certain nationalist themes

or emphases suddenly became more plausible, others less signiﬁcant or even,

brieﬂy, ridiculous. For example, the Bolshevik Revolution put paid to the

fantasy of a European Slavic federation ruled by Romanovs. Also, wartime

activity would legitimate, or discredit, postwar leadership. In Czechoslovakia

as elsewhere in Europe, the ideas and experiences of the First World War

inﬂuenced political and cultural elites and their actions for the next twenty

years. In particular, the outcome of the war granted credence to Masaryk

and Beneš’s unconventional interpretation of Czech nationalism—to their

modernization of the Czech nationalist myth. Their triumphant wartime

experience became an important card to play within the political shuﬄing

and dealing of the First Czechoslovak Republic. But it did not constitute

an automatic trumping of other Czech politicians, either philosophically

or in terms of direct power. The claims that Czech national values meant

automatic adherence to the ideals and politics of the Western Great Powers,

or that Masaryk and Beneš deserved credit as the founders of the new state,

aroused considerable dissent in 1918 and afterward.

Bookish Radicals

Unlike Beneš, Tomáš Masaryk already possessed authority and a consider-

able reputation by 1914. But almost no one would have predicted that his

inﬂuence would ever transcend the printed page. As a professor at Prague’s

Charles University, his students—many of whom would later take leading

positions in Czech letters, art, and, to a lesser extent, in politics—found

his persona and ideas mesmerizing. Masaryk’s reinvention of the Czech

national past, as well as his vaguely progressive, morality-laden discussion

of democracy, would both become central to Czech political culture in the

twentieth century.

Masaryk was born in 1850 near Hodonín on the Moravian-Slovak border.

His father, once a serf, served as a coachman, bailiﬀ, and farmer on a large

estate. His mother was a former cook who had served in grand households; it

was she who inspired young Tomáš to pursue his studies. The family moved

often from estate to estate in southeastern Moravia, and Tomáš’s education—

his route out of the static social hierarchy of the empire’s provinces—was