Chapter 1
A Land with No Name
“In the beginning there was the Word,” says the First Book of Moses, and these words literally have universal validity. But not in the land populated by the scrutinized nation.We’re not saying that this is the most atheistic nation in the world, it’s just the fact that the land that has been inhabited by the Czechsfor more than thirteen centuries, still has no name. Really: even the smallest of the small central-African mini states has a name (if by sheer coincidence the venerable reader of Xenophobe happens to come from there, we mean naturally that such states may be small by size, however Great their importance), and every South-American dictatorship (should you have your roots here we mean:“exceedingly enlightened system of government, concerned solely with the safety and security of its people”) boasts its own name. Only the Czechs have nothing, no one-word term with which to denote their homeland.
On the territory of the Czech basin – which is essentially a hilly country surrounded by marginally higher mountains– an important feudal domain evolved. It was called the CzechKingdom. Today, a democratic system is to be found here. Its name isthe CzechRepublic. Not long ago, Czechs lived in a joint state with the Slovaks. Their state used to be known as Czechoslovakia. The Czechs, therefore, can express their homeland using either an adjective – “czech”, or in compounds;the noun is simply missing!
There is in existence the name“Cechy”(sometimes translated as Bohemia), but that refers only to the western part of the territory, while the eastern area is called Moravia. In the lower orders (meaning the entire industry) of Czech journalism (one the authors of these lines is, of course,a journalist) is the tendency to use the neologism Czechia (Cesko), but it isnot only non-mellifluous, but from the lips of foreigners it also sounds somewhat abusive. Barring nothing short of a linguistic miracle, the Czechs will forever have to be content with merely an adjective. It must simplybe good enough for them to live in a Republic, which is Czech.
As is the case in some legends, we are entering – to follow in the footsteps of mythical heroes – a land which has no name. Our task is not to find such a name, nor to create it; what we really want to do is just have a look around atwhat the inhabitants of these peculiar quarters are like. They are a People who do have a name; the Czechs.
You’d better believe, this task isn’t much easier either.
Chapter 2
National Identity
How They See Themselves
The Czechs see themselves as a novel hero. Not, however, a psychologically torn, post-modern hero from the novels of the Czech author Milan Kundera. Not even the hero fighter from old Czech legends. But a figure, somewhat rotund, talkative, even garrulous and indulgent in beer and pickled sausages (a local delicacy peculiarly called “utopence”, which translates as ´sinkers´or ´drowned people´). This hero is the good old soldier Svejk.
Svejk, even though a soldier, was essentially antimilitarist. All the same, he was drafted into the World War (nobody could foresee that soon an ordinal number ´First´ would have to be added) and there he proved to be so idiotic and incompetent, as to become a totally useless cog in the war machine. Svejk is a good-hearted, easy going creature, popular in collective, his tales are murderouslyhilarious. Although he is “superanuated by arbitration for idiocy” – a politically correct term today would be that he is absolved from military service on the basis of an evaluation of his IQ – totally stupid he certainly is not. In Czech pubs and in literature lecture theatres alike, there is, even eighty years after the first publication of the book, a lively discussion about whether or not Svejk was a real idiot, or if he just successfully pretended rages on. In any case, he proved himself to be more sensible than all the blood-thirsty warmongers around.
Svejk is an inconspicuous Czech fellow. On his lips a smile and endless tales, he slips with almost proverbial luck from any scrimmage. He is a life-long outsider, but hestill knows how to live life to the full. He can not be sad for very long. While other national opuses elate the idea of love (truth, honour etc…) being stronger than death, Svejk claims, that virtue also lies a in jolly mind, endless tall tales, a certain degree of shallowness and limitless willingness not to get involved in any situation. Svejk is not a participant of history, he is its saboteur. For his ability to sail through life the termsvejkinghas been coined.
Every Czech is a bit like Svejk. A Czech who reads Jaroslav Hasek’s The tales of the Good Old Soldier Svejk in the First World War,is looking in the mirror. And he looks with satisfaction, like a Donna trying on a new necklace before the ball.
Svejkingcarries with itself also one great frustration. Inability to be a driving force of history and inseminator of ideas to redeem mankind becomes some kind of general sociological retardation. In short the Czechs suffer from an exemplary inferiority complex of a small nation.
Don’t get confused: there are 10 million Czechs and other similarly large (a Czech will say small) nations would refer to themselves always as medium sized. If Hungarians, Portuguese or Swedes were small, what would Luxembourgians be? Or the inhabitants of San Marino?! You know what? Take a trip to Rome and try to ask the Pope whether Vatican is a small state. We think we know what he’d say…
But the Czechs consider themselves to be small. They rate theirown character as dove-like; and that allegedly goes for all Slavs. (The behaviour of Serbs, Croats or Russians in the recent or current wars should not be mentioned in this respect.) In history the Czechs were always the innocently invaded ones – here from the west, here from the east – while all they ever wanted to do was to invent, write poetry and generally just create in the name of the wellbeing of the nation and mankind (in that order). The invaders have stolen the drawings and plans, exploited them and from then onpassed them off as their own.
Thus, only very few inventions managed to get smuggled all the way to the patent-office by the Czech chaps. For example the Veverka cousins undoubtedly invented something called the “ruchadlo” - an obscure improvement to the common plough! The world had to sit up with awe. This story is a part of the primary school curriculum in the scrutinized land and every small child knows it by heart. It is a wonder that the birthdates of the learned cousins have not yet been proclaimed a national holiday in the calendar. (To be sure it’d be a very popular one, for in this case it would have to be two days.) The Czechs are extremely proud about of their “ruchadlo”. The fact that nobody really knows what a “ruchadlo” exactly is, and what it’s good fordoes not change anything one iota.
The Czechs would no doubt easily excel over the other nations, only if here Vienna, there Berlin or Moscow and today Brussels would not hinder them. So they stand pushed aside somewhat and they wonder why the CNN news service does not offer a regular daily rubric Good News from Czechia. It is clearly an injustice and a shameful omission, but the Czechs – the Svejks are taking it bravely…
Despite all this, the Czechs have among them the biggest personality in all mankind. Jara Cimrman:the most colossally intelligent multi-inventor and mega-creator ever. This fictional character of non existent genius was born a few years ago in one of the Prague’s theatres. This literary persona however,recently stepped down from stage and entered the real, almost political,world, when in a national TV poll was Jara Cimrman voted with a landslide majority as the greatest Czech ever! The organizers were reluctant to announce a non existent figure the overall winner of a poll, which for example in Britain Winston Churchill took the lead. For this reason they had the poor Cimrman disqualified and the winner was the medieval monarch, King Chrles IV. (Vaclav Havel only took third place). The Czechs simply ´svejked´the poll; they wouldn’thave it any other way.
How Others See Them
There’s a really embarrassing misunderstanding: the word for‘Slav’ blends in some languages with the expression for a slave and the word Czech in one West European language which we shan’t mention, equals Gypsy. Nothing could be more removed from the truth – the Czechs love sedate life and they don´t yearn for anything even remotedly suggesting Gypsy romanticism. And slaves? That is totally out of question! If you want something from them, all one needs to do is to pay them;failing that you can simply threaten them with the loss of current benefits. In full awareness of the old Marx maxim,“freedom is accepted necessity”, Czechs will be more than pleased to do anything. So, what you mean by “slaves”, hey?
Copernicus, who first calculated that not the Earth but the Sun is the centre of what we call thanks to him a solar system, appears to have passed some way above the heads of the Czechs.The Czechs may possibly still believe to this day that the Earth is at the centre of universe. They don’t care about astronomy, but about philosophy. Lets carry on with the thesis, so we get its real sense; so – the Earth is the centre of Universe, Europe is the centre of Earth and Czechia is at the centre of Europe (The Czech Republic indeed lies roughly at the centre of this continent; all it takes is to look at the map – not forgetting that the eastern borders of Europe are not formed by the suburbs of Munich but by the Urals.) It follows logically, then, that Czechia indeed is the absolute centre of the Universe.
Hardly a year passes without some ´new´ villages claiming, on the basis of computing with the aid of a school atlas, a ruler and a cheap calculator bought for one Euro at the stationery shop, that they, and they alone, are in the exact geometrical centre of Czechia. A small blemish on these claims is the sheer number of these abutments, of which in vain Archimedes dreamt („Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.“). There are roughly eighty and the number is growing.
Founding themselves in this sovereign position, the Czechs leave all the other real and quazi-nations to themselves to fathom their exclusive role. From this speculation then stems some unbelievable political model theories. Like Czechia being not only the link between the West and East, but also the proverbial cauldron in which all that‘s good from both West and East melts: manifestly in to a Czech national pride. But nowto the question „Why specifically Czechia? Why not, say, Madagascar?“ the Czech politicians are unable give a precize answer, but they are working on it.
How They See Others
„…they advised us not to talk German in Prague. For years racial animosity between the German minority and the Czech majority has raged throughout Bohemia, and to be mistaken for a German in certain streets of Prague is inconvenient to a man whose staying powers in a race are not what once they were,“ wrote already in the 19th century in his famous book ´Three men on the Brummel´ Jerome Klapka Jerome, „However, we did talk German in certain streets in Prague,“ adds, „it was a case of talking German or nothing.The Praguer is an exceedingly
acute person; some subtle falsity of accent, some slight grammatical inaccuracy, may have crept into our German, revealing to him the fact that, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, we were no true-born Germans.“
If the reader has a command of German, he too can, like the English writer, use it sometimes. For the Czechs, had the three million strong German population removed after the Second World War from the Czech Lands, or rather from Czechia, actually the then Czechoslovakia…you see the confusioncaused by a missing noun!... the Czechs in short forcibly chased out their Germans and still to this day have the delusion of the victors in this age-old neighbourly dispute. The look therefore at German tourists with a mixture of condescension and envy. They are fully aware of the economic potential of their western neigbour. A potential, which they hope to find a small part of in the visitors‘ wallets.
To be a German is not a crime in the scrutinized country anymore. However a citizen of that nation must count with being viewed, regradless of his true character, as exceedingly unsympathetic, coarse and bigheaded creature, devoid of even the most elementary sense of humor.
All traditional German virtues: a sense of comradeship, orderliness, dutifullness, obedience and so forth – are to Czechs almost a complete list of human depravities. Nothing would please a Czech more than to have the opportunity to ridicule these German qualities. A joke was going round towards the end of the Second World War:
„Do you know what true camaraderie is? When a German soldier is returning from leave back to the Eastern front and the entire army is marching 300 miles to meet him.“
It is quite remarkable that Germans are not the victims of Czech jokes really all that often, it‘s not because of some cunningly hidden affections, but more likely that the Germans are not worth their while. (When Czechs are poking jokes at someone, it´s usually the members of super-powers such as the Americans, Russians or the Martians. Only these are worthy to be compared with.)
The Czech term for Germans originated from the adjective „dumb“. The ancient Czechs simply could not understand the ancient Germans and thus with prefectlysound logic, but factual nonsensicality, concluded that Germans can´t talk. To be dumb is a time-honoured and well-proven formula for the safe survival of a German in Czechia. For the Czechs are much more, in fact really very much more, tolerant towards the dumb.
To the south of the Czech border lies Austria, which has the undisputably bad luck of its inhabitants being German speaking too. They are pardoned though, mainly thanks to the fact of being less numerous than Germans and therefore attracting less reservations. The Austrians and Germans somehow blend together to the Czech eye. Not because of the poor geographical knowledge of the scrutinized nation, but more likely because of the well tried methods of Viennese diplomacy, which managed to convince the whole world that Hitler was a German, while Mozart an Austrian – even though it was exactly the other way round.Also Austrians did not endear themselves to many Czechs when, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, they put up in their shops insulting notices:„Czechs, don´t steal!“ One half of the nation felt insulted by this wild suspicion, while the other half mused over how could the Austrians have foundout.
On the other hand, the most amicably accepted nation are the Slovaks. Czechs have even pardoned them for dissafiliating themselves from the Czechs towards the end of the last century after decades of coexistence. With the patronizing attitude of older brothers, the Czechs tell the Slovaks – whose economy is much more progressive than that of Czechia – how to run their housekeeping and can‘t understand why their fatherly advice is rejected. The Slovaks are also not „dumb“, their language is so similar that membrs of both nations easily understand each other. To the Czechs, who by and large don´t master any foreign language, it gives the elated feeling of true worldliness.
A Czech also partly understands the Pole who, however, has got the handicap of being lazy, pig-headed and tasteless. In the eighties, when the Poles under the flag of the opposition union movement Solidarity were fighting the communists, the Czechs were saying that the real cause was justlaziness.Today, when the Polish currency, the Zloty climbs upwards again, they claim for a change, all Poles to be black-market racketeers. This devastating criticism however, does not prevent the cheap street markets of Polish border towns from being chock-a-block every weekend with eager Czech shoppers.
The Czech Lands were for centuries a territory of mixed nations: besides the Czech majority lived both Germans and Jews. First the Germansdealt with the Jews (concentration camps) and then the Czechs with the Germans (expulsion). The CzechRepublictoday is therefore a nationally compact white island in the sea of the global bustle of races. Or at least this is how the followers of the extreme right would like to see it. The reality is, however, somewhat different: there is an unknown number of Romanies living in the country, which nobody is allowed to count under the rules of political correctness. Just as it’s unacceptable to call a Roma a Gypsy – the only exemption is the popular traditional type of sausage called The Gypsy. The Czechs agree on one thing: rather than a Roma, they will accept a German for a neigbour. For Romanies are lazy (even more than Poles), noisy (even more than Germans) and they steal (even more than Czechs). That really is a murderous combination.