Photo © Jaroslav Fišer
What’s more, the Czechs have quite a good reason for starting the weekend early. Outside Scandinavia, there’s probably no other European nation with more cottage- and cabin-owners than the Czech Republic. Some estimates suggest that there are 1.2 million of these holiday houses (see: Munich Agreement) and that every other Czech family has access to a second home in the countryside. During the communists, it was not uncommon for people to live out a kind of “inner exile” at their cabins, which were their private property. Therefore, all the physical efforts, money and time spent on maintenance were not wasted, because people were investing it in their own property.
Since the Czechs’ passionate love of their country houses hasn’t weakened much after the fall of communism, a foreigner is advised to take one necessary precaution: if you need to sort out an urgent matter in a public office, pray to God it’s not Friday afternoon.
Germans
„Fate has left us to clash and to co-operate with the Germans.” This is how František Palacký, the founder of history as a scientific discipline in Bohemia and one of the spiritual leaders of the nineteenth century Czech national revival once characterized the Czechs’ relations with their great Western neighbour.
However contradictory and ambivalent this may sound, it’s actually a very apt description. On the one hand, the Germans have played a totally irreplaceable part in the cultural and economic development of the Czech nation. On the other, no other country has caused the Czechs greater trauma.
Take a look at a map of Central Europe, and you’ll immediately understand what Palacký had in mind. Today, the Czech Republic’s border with Germany accounts for about 800 kilometres of its 2,300 kilometres of borders. But when you also remember that most of Polish Silesia until 1945 was a part of Germany (Prussia before 1918), and then recall that the Czechs’ southern neighbours, the Austrians, also belong to the Germanic culture, you realize that the Czechs have formed a Slavonic wedge in German territory for almost a millennium.
As some Czech cynics prefer to depict the situation: “We are like the birds that sit in the crocodile’s open jaws!” However wild this parallel might occur to you, it pinpoints some significant differences between the two nations.
Firstly, while the Germans are Central Europe’s largest ethnic group and by far its largest economy, one of the basic ingredients in the Czechs’ national identity is their self-perception as one of the continent’s smaller nations. To use Biblical terms, this is a story about a David who for one thousand years has been living next door to Goliath, and who, at times, has problems with curbing his feeling of inferiority.
Secondly, there is the language barrier, which originally was so insurmountable that the Czech word denoting a German — Němec — derives from the adjective němý, which actually means mute. Thirdly, the justified fear of being politically dominated — and during Second Word War liquidated — by the Germans has repeatedly driven Czech politicians to seek support and comfort from the Russians. The last attempt to team up with their big Slavonic fellows in the East cost the Czechs 40 years of stagnation, decay and thousands of lost lives (see: Communism).
Yet it would be wrong to describe the Czechs’ relations to the Germans merely as a somewhat troubled neighbourliness. Actually, this is a story about co-habitation. From the thirteenth century onwards, Bohemia and Moravia saw a constant influx of German settlers. Some of them were merchants invited by the Czech kings, while others were craftsmen offering their services. After the Battle of White Mountain, in 1620, there was also a significant influx of farmers, who took over estates left by exiled Czech Protestants (see: Foreigners). Even an invention as ultra-Czech as Pilsner beer should in reality be credited to Josef Groll, a Bavarian brewer who was headhunted to Western Bohemian Plzeň in 1842.
By 1918, when Czechoslovakia was founded, approximately three million ethnic Germans — more than one third of the population in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia — were living in the country’s Sudeten region. The capital Prague had at that time approximately 30,000 German inhabitants, most of them living in the area near Old Town Square. In addition to the Sudeten Germans, the majority of pre-war Bohemia and Moravia’s 100,000 Jews were either German speaking or bi-lingual, thus forming a natural bridge between Czech and German culture.
Take, for instance, Max Brod. This Prague-born, German-speaking Jew didn’t only do world literature a tremendous favour by saving and publishing his friend Franz Kafka’s manuscripts. Thanks to his German contacts and personal influence, Brod persuaded the Berliner Opera to stage the composer Leoš Janáček’s Jenufa, and he was also instrumental in presenting Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk to German readers. In both instances, a smashing success in Germany paved the way to global fame.
Photo © Terje B. Englund
During their 700 year presence in Bohemia and Moravia, the Germans have left so many traces that it’s hard today to say what’s originally Czech and what’s German.
Just look at Bohemia’s cities. Nobody doubts that Prague and the Hussite stronghold Tábor were founded by Slavs. But names like Nymburg (Neuenburg), Šumperk (Schönberg), Kolín (Köln) and Varnsdorf reveal that these cities’ first inhabitants almost certainly were of Germanic origin. It’s not that clear who the first settlers in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Liberec (Reichenberg), Cheb (Eger) and Domažlice (Tauss) was, but it’s unquestionable that these cities were completely dominated by Germans right up until 1945 (see: Munich Agreement).
As one might expect in nationalism-ridden Central Europe, several Bohemian cities that were originally dominated by Germans were in 1918 given not only Czech-sounding names (Budweis became Budějovice), but were also equipped with the adjective Czech — as in Český Krumlov. Is this an attempt to falsify history? No, it’s a verbatim translation of the original German name — Böhmisch Krumau.
The interesting thing, though, is that Böhmisch in German only refers to geography, i.e. the city is located in Bohemia and not Bavaria, and does not say anything about the inhabitants’ ethnic origin. Similarly, the German term Böhme means simply a person who lives in Bohemia, and might ethnically be a Czech, a German or even a person who didn’t care about his nationality. However, Český and Čech, the equivalent terms, do not leave any room for a German element.
The German influence on Czech culture is expressed even more strongly by the nearly half million people with surnames like Müller, Bauer and Töpfer, or with Germanic surnames masked by Czech orthography (Šubrt). Peculiarly enough, Honza, the most Czech of all Czech Christian names, is actually German Hans. True, a German-sounding surname is not necessarily an airtight proof that a person has German ancestors. The priests who kept the church registry were often zealous servants of the Emperor in Vienna (see: Religion) or heavy boozers (see: Cimrman, Jára), and germanised names by whim or by mistake.