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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2020
The article reconstructs the ambivalence of the relationship of Czech society to the Habsburg monarchy and its legacy. While this period can be retrospectively contrasted with the twentieth century as a time of relative stability, it is also recognized in Czech collective memory as a time of national subalternity and inequality. Sometimes the imperial legacy is also blamed for the absence of civic virtues in Czech political culture. The study traces the roots of these Czech approaches in the thought of Czech historian and national leader František Palacký (who proposed federalist reform of the empire) and the ideas of the first Czechoslovak president Tomáš G. Masaryk (who declared “de-Austrianization” to be a doctrine of the new state as well as a basis for new civic virtues). The essay also touches on popular culture images in Hašek΄s Schweik and the phenomenon of Jára da Cimrman, which contribute to an ambivalent and infantilizing image of the times of empire.
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12 Friedrich Engels, Revolution and Counter-revolution in Germany (1852), 29, at www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/revolution-counterrevolution-germany.pdf (accessed October 3, 2019).
13 František Palacký, “Letter sent by František Palacký to Frankfurt,” (1848), at spinnet.humanities.uva.nl/images/2010-12/letter_by_palacky.pdf (accessed October 3, 2019).
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16 Immediately after the declaration of dualism, Palacký acted on his own warning by undertaking a demonstrative trip to Moscow.
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22 Theocracy sounds like a relatively strange description of the Central Powers, especially from Masaryk, who saw as a key question of the modern age the lost relationship between man and religion. Masaryk coined this non-intuitive label to underline the archaic power structure of those countries, with the monarch ruling “by the grace of God” in contrast with modern democracies.
23 Ibid.
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26 Some Czech Catholics even left their church and founded the new “national” Hussite church. Still, Catholicism had a majority in the country, albeit often involving only formal membership in the church.
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31 Kundera, “Tragedy of Central Europe.”
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