Does this attitude explain why the “right-wing” government in the first half of the 1990s was so hesitant to sell state industry to foreign investors, as the Hungarians had done, but instead launched an unsuccessful voucher privatisation program for the country’s citizens? Or was it rather an expression of the golden hands formula — the notion that the Czechs have a God-given talent for creative improvisation (see: Cimrman, Jára)?
In any case, the xenophobic revival in the 1990s has by now, to all appearances, passed its peak. Besides that, the Czechs have, during their turbulent history, demonstrated an amazing capability to adapt to new regimes, so there’s no reason to paint the devil on the wall. The historian Dušan Třeštík probably hit the nail on the head when he stated that the Czechs have already become completely normal Europeans. “The only problem is that they’re not yet aware of it.”
Franz Josef
To the citizens of the Habsburg empire, Franz Josef I — who ruled his multi-national subjects with a firm hand for an incredible period stretching from 1848 to 1916 — was something like Queen Victoria to the British: a seemingly immortal symbol of the empire’s stability, the predictability of its conservative politics and the moral values preached by the Catholic Church (see: Religion).
However, when the First World War ended in late 1918 and the Danube Empire fell apart, Franz Josef was soon forgotten by his former Slavonic subjects, not least by the Czechs, who had lost more than two hundred thousand young men in a meaningless war they never supported. Neither had they forgotten that the Emperor, or Mister Procházka, as they spitefully called him (a newspaper once printed a photo of the Emperor in Prague with the caption Procházka na mostě, or “A Walk on the Bridge”), for letting himself, in 1867, be crowned as king of the Hungarians, while he didn’t take the trouble to go to Prague to be crowned as the king of the Czechs.
And when his nephew, Franz Ferdinand — the unlucky fellow in Sarajevo — married a lady from the Czech gentry, Žofie Chotková, both the Emperor and his court reacted with unconcealed horror. Franz Ferdinand was even pressed to accept the condition that the children of such an “unequal” marriage would have no rights to ascend to the imperial throne.
Small wonder, then, that the citizens of newly-established Czechoslovakia exceeded one another in smashing statues of the former Emperor. Jaroslav Hašek, the author of the tales about the good soldier Švejk, uses one episode to pinpoint the Czechs’ aversion towards Franz Josef: when flies “decorate” the Emperor’s portrait in a hospoda with their waste products, the Czech innkeeper (and millions of readers with him) hardly manages to hide his pleasure, while the Austrian undercover agent goes bananas and arrests the poor guy.
Yet Franz Josef has left one tradition that still characterizes the Czechs’ daily life. One of Franz Josef’s allegedly numerous virtues was his great diligence. Thus, in all the 68 years he ruled, the Emperor went to bed early (okay, often with his mistress), and — even more importantly — woke up and started working at an almost ungodly early hour.
Some pundits claim that the real reason was not diligence, but rather the Emperor’s long-lasting problems with insomnia. Be this as it may, the consequence was inevitable: when Franz Josef was busily working at six o’clock in the morning, his staff and administration were also busily working at six o’clock. And when state bureaucrats all over the empire jumped out of bed before the sun rose, private industry, trade and transport couldn’t be far behind. In short: the Austro-Hungarian empire must have been hell for all of us late sleepers.
Almost a century after Franz Josef was promoted to eternity, this awful tradition is still frightfully alive and kicking in the Czech Republic. In most hospitals, for instance, patients are woken up at six o’clock, even if the doctor’s visit is scheduled only at nine. In schools, lessons start at eight o’clock, while at the universities, lectures might begin even earlier. Also, in many Czech factories, production starts at least one hour earlier than is common in Western and Northern Europe. The government of Vladimír Špidla, which was installed in 2002, took this perversion so literally that it started some of its meetings at six o’clock in the morning!
To be fair, this tradition certainly doesn’t represent a serious problem, but it affects one, not insignificant, layer of the Czech society: beer drinkers. To give the millions of Czechs who spend the evening in a local hospoda a chance to sober up before work starts at six o’clock the next morning, most pubs mercilessly close at ten o’clock in the evening — i.e., at a time when people in other parts of Europe have just started the evening.
So, next time you are being kicked out of your local hospoda just in the middle of a spirited discussion about everything from football to quantum physics, don’t blame it on the poor innkeeper, but on His Imperial Highness Franz Josef!
Fridays
As you might have already noticed, the Czech Republic is not an Islamic country (see: Religion), and, therefore, Fridays should be an ordinary working day when business goes on as usual. However, anyone who has tried to sort out a problem at a public office in this country on a Friday afternoon has probably discovered that this day is not an ordinary day at all.
After noon on Friday, most Czech public offices tend to work with even bigger delays and troubles than earlier in the week. This, of course, is not a Czech speciality — public officials all over the Western world count down to the weekend. There are, however, few countries where the countdown is performed with greater fervency and matter of course than in the Czech Republic.
If you think this is a legacy of the former communist era, you’re right. During the former regime, it was commonly acknowledged that those who didn’t steal from their (state) employer stole from their families. In practise, this meant that everyone felt entitled to “borrow” bricks, machines, spare parts or whatever his or her company produced, for private use (by the way, how could this be deemed stealing, when everything belonged to the state, which equalled the people?) Subsequently, those who worked in public offices could, without greater pangs of conscience, snatch pens and pencils — but most of all time.
The private sector, which emerged after the Velvet Revolution, has put a more or less effective stop to this deep-rooted tradition. But the public sector, to put it mildly, has not been as successful. Czech state bureaucracy is almost as over-grown as it was under the communists. Symptomatically, some years ago, an elderly fellow was discovered in a dusty room at the Ministry of Interior, and nobody knew that he had been vegetating in the office for several decades.
When Václav Klaus’ government started its fight against bureaucracy in the middle of the 1990s, its first step was to establish a committee (which, after all, doesn’t seem all that illogical in the country of Franz Kafka). And still, the army of bureaucrats have lousy wages compared to the private sector, so who can blame them for compensating for a miserable salary by cutting out early on Fridays?