Finally, a tip: if you are invited to celebrate Christmas with a Czech family, remember to take a look under your plate (preferably, without tipping the carp and potato salad onto the table cloth). If your hosts observe the old traditions, you’ll find a carp’s scale under it. Be sure to take it with you — it’s bound to bring you good luck!
Central Europe
There are few things that enrage a Czech more than foreigners speaking about the Czech Republic as a part of Eastern Europe. Their indignation is quite understandable. Just because former Czechoslovakia spent some 40 years under Moscow’s yoke and the Czech and Russian languages have common roots, if s pretty harsh to rub out the Czechs’ almost 600 years of history as an independent principality and kingdom incorporated in the Holy Roman Empire, and later 300 years as a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In school, Czech children learn that their country has been in the very locus of European history since the Middle Ages. This might be considered slightly ethno-centric, but by and large, it’s not that far out.
Take, for instance, the Reformation. Most people believe it started with the German Martin Luther. But actually, it was triggered by the Czech priest Jan Hus, who thundered so intensely against the Catholic Church’s trade with indulgences that the Vatican found it most convenient to burn him on a stake, in 1415 — and thus provided the Czechs with the first of their many “heroic debacles”.
Photo © Terje B. Englund
The Thirty Years’ War, in which more or less every state on the European continent became involved, started in 1618, when protestant Czechs threw the Catholic king’s counsellors out of a window at the Prague Castle (see: Battle of White Mountain). Luckily for the counsellors, they both survived this defenestration, thanks to the latrine in which the gentlemen landed.
Two Czech kings, Charles IV (1316-1378) and Rudolf II (1552-1612) were even elected Emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. True, the title sounds quite impressive compared to the rather limited power that the Emperor exercised, and neither of them spoke Czech as their mother tongue (the former was from the Western German Luxembourg dynasty, the latter was an Austrian Habsburg). Still, for today’s Czechs, they both represent indisputable evidence that this country, from a historical point of view, is an integrated part of Central Europe, and has no more in common with “Eastern Europe” than Austria, Germany or, say, Luxembourg.
Of course, this problem goes beyond religion and history. Take a look at the older buildings that surround you in any Bohemian and Moravian town. Read Kafka, Švejk, Kundera and Seifert (see: First Republic), listen to the music of Smetana, Dvořák and Martinů, or visit a gallery with the paintings of Josef Čapek, Emil Filla and Kamil Lhoták.
In short, there are thousands of examples within architecture, literature, music and the arts that prove beyond any doubt that Czech culture can be placed — literally speaking — in the middle of Europe. The renowned linguist R.G.A. de Bray puts it like this:
“Czech culture forms an ideal synthesis of East and West. Antonin Dvořák’s opera Rusalka is a perfect example: an essentially Slavonic legend, with a Slav atmosphere of mystery and longing, set out against Dvořák’s rich melodious music, Slav in spirit, if you will, but Western in technique and harmony.”
And if this still shouldn’t convince a sceptical foreigner, there is the ultimate argument at hand: geography. Prague is situated more to the West than Vienna, Stockholm and Helsinki. Does anybody speak about these cities as East European?
To outsiders, this may seem completely irrelevant; who cares about the difference between Central and Eastern Europe? Well, most Czechs do. Like it or not, it’s a question about national identity. While the countries in Central Europe are regarded as countries that were “kidnapped from Europe by the Soviet Union”, as Milan Kundera writes, Eastern Europe is the mafia-infested, vodka-drinking part of Europe that still is mired in its communist past.
No matter how arbitrary and snobbish this border-line might occur to you, the essence of it is clear as crystaclass="underline" in a Czech context, the nomenclature “Eastern Europe” should be used with the utmost care and only in a strictly geographical context.
Ultimately, this leads us to another, even more academic question. Where on earth is the border between Central and Eastern Europe? Certainly, the Czechs don’t have the slightest doubt that they belong to Central Europe. As do the Hungarians, Slovaks, Austrians, Slovenes, Croatians (see: Balkans) and all the other nations in the former Austro-Hungarian empire.
But what about Poland, whose eastern part constituted the Russian empire’s western-most province for more than a hundred years? And Galicia and Ruthenia, which for centuries belonged to the same monarchy as the Czechs, but now are a part of Ukraine. Where do the Baltic states belong?
The farther east you go, the more diffuse is the perception of the borderline between Central and Eastern Europe. The Polish writer Jacek Wozniakowski once got so frustrated by this vagueness that he decided to settle the question once and for all. The criterion he used was the frequency and the standard of public toilets in different European countries.
Not surprisingly, Wozniakowski found that his Polish motherland is clearly a part of Central Europe, while Belarus is not. Of course, if Wozniakowski’s criterion is applied consequently, several states, which have always regarded themselves to be hard-core Western Europe, could risk ending up in its very Eastern part.
Charter 77
Czechoslovakia’s president Gustav Husák was by all accounts convinced he had made a good deal when he solemnly signed the final act at the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in August 1975.
The Helsinki Agreement, approved by the USA, the Soviet Union and 34 other Western states, finally confirmed the new borders that emerged in Europe after the Second World War, and formally cemented the control that the Russians (and their local vassals like Husák) had taken over Central and Eastern Europe.
Yet the Western countries didn’t want to give the Russians the deal they so overtly longed for without anything in return. That’s why the Helsinki Agreement also contained paragraphs that obliged all countries, regardless of their ideology, to respect basic human rights. But just like his Soviet protector Leonid Brezhnev, Czechoslovakia’s Husák considered this to be liberal mumbo-jumbo without any practical relevance.
Surprisingly enough, it was not the rebellious Poles or the relatively liberal Hungarians, but the oppressed and resigned Czechs (see: Communism), who soon proved Husák completely wrong.
When a Prague court convicted a group of Frank Zappa clones called The Plastic People of the Universe of subversion (a term the Bolshevik regime used for any activity displaying the slightest expression of individual freedom), playwright Václav Havel and a group of his dissident friends published a document, in January 1977, titled Charter 77 (the name was inspired by the English Magna Carta of liberties from 1215) where they modestly reminded the regime of the human rights commitments it had solemnly signed a year and a half earlier in Helsinki.