In Quest of History

On Czech Statehood and Identity

Jiří Přibáň & Karel Hvížd’ala

Published by Charles University, Karolinum Press

Translation by Stuart Hoskins

Cover and layout by /3. dílna/

Typeset and printed by Karolinum Press, Czech Republic

First English edition

Originally published in Czech as Hledání dějin. O české státnosti a identitě,

Prague: Karolinum Press, 2018.

Reviewed by Pavel Kolář (European University Institute, Fiesole)

Jan Kuklík (Charles University, Prague)

© Karolinum Press, 2019

© Karel Hvížd’ala, Jiří Přibáň 2019

Translation © Stuart Hoskins, 2019

ISBN 978-80-246-4290-1 (epub)

ISBN 978-80-246-4289-5 (mobi)

ISBN 978-80-246-4288-8 (pdf)

ISBN 978-80-246-4267-3 (print)

Let us then seek as those who would find, and find as those who would seek.

ST AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

The purpose of history as a science is to enrich and expand human consciousness.

ZDENĚK KALISTA

CONTENTS

1. Preface

2. History and National Identity

3. The Formation of Nations and Nationalism

4. Law without the State and State Law: from the Middle Ages to Modernity

5. Modern Times, State Sovereignty and the Nation

6. The Nation, Culture and History

7. The National Revival and the Right to Self-determination

8. Cultural Idealism and Political Realism

9. The Republic of Educated Citizens, or Masaryk’s Attempt at a Central European Utopia

10. Intellectuals and Politics

11. Two Totalitarian Regimes

12. From the Disintegration of the State to the Disintegration of the Regime

13. About the Authors

PREFACE

That we are experiencing a cultural watershed is growing into a refrain for our times. Globalisation has assimilated individual national societies into a single world society that we all share. There is no escape from this society; it has become our destiny. We share hopes and fears, technological advances that are groundbreaking and unprecedented in human history, and the classic political, economic and ecological crises that have been dogging us since the dawn of history.

In this global society, modern nations and their states are rapidly and radically evolving, yet remain, in the minds of those who belong to them, an imaginary community where moral ideals and political goals are pursued and attained. For some, the nation state is a tool of globalisation; others see it as a last-chance emergency brake before we crash into globalisation’s calamitous fallout.

People are clamouring against the march of global civilisation, but are forced to react to it both within and outside their national cultures because it cannot be pushed aside or sidestepped. We can also see this in the emerging generation’s protests and political engagement: unlike the older generation of rapidly globalising professional classes, they believe that global risks are just as serious as the local defence of democracy in their own country. Similar threads run throughout our civilisation: in France and Germany there are the Greens, in the Czech Republic the Pirates and A Million Moments for Democracy, in Hong Kong the student movement, and so on.

Central Europe is a place whose modern history has spawned more cultural watersheds than its inhabitants have been able to cope with by civilised means. The history of the Czech nation and its statehood is no exception. Historians and politicians, idealists and realists, democrats and their enemies all seek to understand these watersheds. Everyone is on a quest for history, even if their minds are set on the present and future. This is also true of our dialogue between a legal philosopher living in Cardiff and a probing journalist from Prague.

While the internet has foisted this idea on today’s globalised humanity that speed and concise communication are paramount, we have headed in the opposite direction in this book: we try to amplify the context both territorially and temporally. In our republic’s centenary year, we concentrated on key points in our history, ranging from the 9th to the 21st century. This allowed us to peer into the past and ask ourselves how we perceived and understood our history at different times, why this was so, and what it means for our present and future.

In certain respects, this is a quest to stop history from being reduced to a screen on which we project our frustrations. We were keen to return to the public arena those issues that tend to be contained within the walls of academia or that we generally steer clear of.

We extend our gratitude to Pavel Kolář, a comparative historian from the European University Institute in Florence, and Jan Kuklík, a legal historian and the dean of the Faculty of Law at Charles University in Prague, for their valuable advice and comments on the manuscript.

We would like to thank Petr Valo, the director of the Karolinum Press, and his deputies Martin Janeček and Milan Šusta for giving us the impetus to write this book.

KH and JP, 2018

History and National Identity

Karel Hvížd’ala: Czechoslovakia was proclaimed an independent state on 28 October 1918, yet in the century since there have been only two periods when it was truly master of its own fate: from the time it came into being until 1938, and then post 1989. At the end of 1992, it split into two separate states. If we are serious about discussing the history of Czech statehood and Czech identity, we should perhaps start by taking a look at the first historically documented beginnings of the Bohemian medieval state, which would take us back to the 9th century and the baptism of Duke Bořivoj. I firmly believe that our current gripes and grumbles are rooted far in the past. Can this be attributed to historical events and facts per se, or rather to how they have been interpreted in the accounts we call history?

Jiří Přibáň: National identity, its historical origins, and the political autonomy of each of these themes would make for a work spanning numerous volumes. And each of those volumes could stir up untold heated debates. Nationalism, for instance, can be defined quite simply as an ideology that demands the reconciliation of ethnic and political boundaries and legitimises power via the principle of popular sovereignty, in which the rulers and the rest of society together shape their integral national unity. Note, though, how many political and cultural ideals and disputes hide behind this definition and how this definition has been manifested in the history of various nations. History, including national history, then primarily becomes a matter of storytelling about the past. Through those narratives and stories, we pass on everything that we consider important in our history and that we believe gives it meaning. I am fond of the puristically conceived word dějepis [loosely “event-writing”] that we use in Czech to translate historia, the Greek term that originally meant a general capacity to become cognisant, through a narrative, of what has been learned. Histor generally designated a learned or wise man. The Czech dějepis mirrors that original inner dynamic, where the historian’s task is to write down past events and the expectation is that this very description, in itself, is an event and hence forms part of the history from which we should learn and enlighten ourselves. Consequently, unlike Latin’s neutralised historia, the Czech dějepis continues to remind us that every historical narrative is self-referential, by which I mean that, ultimately, it always folds back on itself as part of history, the historical narrative, and the wisdom attached to history. History is the process of hauling yesteryear into the present so that past events acquire meaning and purpose for the current generation. National history has that and more: it is imbued with numerous existential questions such as “who are we?”, “where do we come from?”, and “where are we going?”, which are pivotal, and all the more dangerous for it, because they also conjure up the illusion that nations are special, chosen to take on humanity’s historical tasks, and that they have been here since time immemorial as natural groupings of people whose claim to their own existence takes precedence over any other right of an individual or group, or even of any other nation. Likewise, history routinely creates the illusion that the state is some sort of eternal political institution in which a nation finds and confirms its own existence and identity. In point of fact, the state is a product of modern politics, and the nation is an imaginary community devised by political romantics in the modern industrial age. Were every nation to exercise an unconditional right to self-determination in its own state, total political chaos and anarchy would ensue on a global scale.

To be sure, we tend to forget that today’s nations are a product of the 19th century, and yet we see politicians in the Czech Republic and surrounding countries increasingly talking about the nation, national interests and national sovereignty as though this were something eternal, ancient beyond memory. What are our chances of extracting ourselves from this trap?

If we are to understand the historical processes behind the formation of the state and the birth of modern nations organising themselves politically into nation states, we must dispense with grand ideologies and established doctrines and, instead, study the specific language and lexicon used by society to describe its own history. Rather than concentrating on general patterns and abstract concepts, we should turn our attention to the specific speech that has been employed and the peculiar forms of power that are associated with it. Words are weapons and the past is littered with countless examples of how historical narratives become battlefields. The modern history of nation states eloquently documents this knack of bygone times to fashion myths and, by then invoking them, to foment wars and mobilise entire populations. This is precisely why we need to stop trying to find any objective rhyme or reason in the course of history, to stop searching for some Weltgeist of humanism manifesting itself in the process of human civilisation, or any other straitjackets laced up by philosophy as it seeks to understand human history. The idea that, in history, we will discover some transcendental principle in the form of progress, freedom, reason or humanity is untenable. Instead of the speculative philosophy of history familiar, say, to 19th-century national revivalists or revolutionary Marxists, we need to ponder particular historical situations and periods that may be construed as significant junctions where various relations between the structure of society and its semantics intersect. In other words, it is necessary to understand the processes underlying how society both organises and describes itself. Observe, for example, how modern Western societies describe their structures in crystal-clear terms, such as the state, the nation or sovereignty, while at the same time infusing them with equally clean-cut ideals, such as freedom, equality and fraternity. Our job is to peel back this “clean” description to lay bare the “dirty” and intricate world of economic, pedagogical, moral or legal structures and the most diverse technologies of power. This distinction between “clean” and “dirty” history cannot be viewed in any moral or philosophical sense, by which I mean we cannot uncover any true essence of history and figure out how it works and where it’s headed. That sort of moralism would be as unseemly as any speculative philosophy of history. What we do need to do, though, is expose even the contemporary “dirty” language and lexicon within the seemingly “clean” structures and concepts we use to describe our history. The aim is to grasp how, even under the surface of apparently unambiguous, accepted concepts in the history of modern society and politics, there are always specific conflicts with smudged contours and historically haphazard processes and consequences.

But such considerations are too complicated. Politicians and the media shun them, afraid of alienating voters, readers or listeners. And that flings the door open wide to power-hungry populists and fabulists who have simple pre-cooked solutions for any problem. The internet has helped this shift and decay by marginalising debate with a barrage of emotionally-charged sound bites. Instead of the collective, it gives life to the connective…

The paradox of modern society is that its life is influenced far more by future expectations than past experience and tradition, yet its hunger for historical stories, and thirst for their moral significance, continues to mount. The social predominance of expectations over experience, then, also increases the specific expectation that history has answers to the questions posed by the present. Even the famous end-of-history thesis written by the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojéve and retold by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama after 1989 as a historic victory of liberal democracy is nothing more than an attempt to decipher the definitive meaning of human history. Although Fukuyama’s thesis provoked the ire of both the left and the right, blazing from their respective ideological positions, I think its most problematic factor is that, in Popper’s words, it is merely another example of the “poverty of historicism”. Nevertheless, if we were to say that there are no metaphysical or dialectical laws concealed in history, that does not necessarily mean that they are entirely meaningless for us. On the contrary, historical narratives retain importance even in our post-traditional age, with its fixation on future expectations. At the same time, however, these narratives are evidently unable to guarantee the validity of any social contract or general consensus. Has history been relegated to a social pastime, meaning that, in reality, the numbers of books, journals and other periodicals devoted to history paradoxically document the ascent of a post-historical age? Can we even question whether history has meaning if teachers and their pupils, as every generation passes, attach so little importance to historical knowledge? What do we actually expect from “history” teaching?

I think that might be oversimplifying things…

I take your point because, in historical science, sociology and the philosophy of history these days, extreme views denying history per se are coming to light. The entirely correct and necessary criticism of the former social-Darwinist or Marxist concept of history as a linear time in which the objective law of human progress and the supremacy of modern times over all past experience and tradition has now been repeatedly turned into a nihilistic assertion that every historical narrative is merely a form of cultural hegemony and elitism, ethnocentric supremacy or political ideology and oppression by the powers that be. This is particularly true of national history, where the original Romantic apotheosis of nations has given way to an equally passionate hatred of any manifestation of national culture. It is as though fanatical nationalism has been replaced by an equally fanatical struggle against everything that has something to do with the nation as a social group and the sense of belonging it engenders. Admittedly, historians have helped to shape the collective memories of modern nations and their myths, but that does not mean that history is “just” a handmaiden in the service of political leaders and elitist interests. Nor does it suggest, in the slightest, that we could say that nations – because they are “imaginary”, or “invented”, communities formed in modern times – are only a plaything and consequence of those interests. The imaginariness of nations in no way implies that these communities did not actually exist and that we can shrug them off as the product of a “false” consciousness. The sociological term “imagined communities”, encompassing not only the nation, but also, for instance, religious communities and economic classes, certainly doesn’t mean that such communities do not exist or are based on ideological lies. It simply denotes large social groups that we, as individuals, can never see in their entirety in our lifetime, but we can imagine them all too well through various symbols, feel a strong bond with them, and share a collective identity with others. What we imagine, and what is therefore imagined, is simultaneously very real and has a major impact on our social life. We must realise that society itself is one such imagined community, and yet, in a very real sense, we experience its existence every day. We need to adopt the same approach to nations and their history, as well as to their very specific forms of social organisation and life, which includes not only the national economy and art, but also the state. Quite a few people these days may feel that this opinion is nothing to wonder at, but in the first half of the 20th century it was routine for many historians, sociologists and ethnologists to adhere to the naturalistic notion that social and cultural differences between various ethnicities and nations were the legacy of biological disparities and inherited characteristics established by a shared biological – read “racial” – origin. When the German sociologist Max Weber claimed that ethnic groups were actually artificial social creations, that is, that they were not natürlich but künstlich, and that they were based on subjective beliefs about a shared community and its fate, he wasn’t exactly voicing the view of the majority. What is more, Weber argued that it was not beliefs that make a community, but that a community forms its own system of beliefs. He also argued that creating a community such as a nation always results in efforts to monopolise power within it and to secure status. So when we talk of the nation, we have to look not for its natural foundations, but for the socially moulded power constellation and privileges within its political organisation.

This is why we manufactured the Czechoslovak nation, so that we could proclaim a state. But can we then really talk about history as a scientific discipline? Is not this, too, largely just a construct, a fiction, as we have seen it increasingly being discussed?

Some historians really are fighting doggedly against their own scientific discipline, labelling it a science in the service of political power and its ideology, the worst specimen of which is nationalism justifying the repressive policy pursued by nation states and imperial superpowers alike. For example, the controversial Israeli historian Shlomo Sand has recently described history, in his Twilight of History, as a science that has always served the nation state and its interests, and calls historians “priests of this official cult”, tasked with shaping national identity and maintaining the collective memory in various forms, starting with history lessons at school, then museum exhibitions and, ultimately, all manner of academic institutions and historical institutes.

Essays in the same vein can also be found in our country…

This harsh condemnation of history and historians exemplifies more than historical relativism; it is a form of intellectual reduction and moral blindness that sees only power-driven and ideological context behind every text while completely overlooking the fact that, say, national history these days is typically studied in a global context in which national political interests are just one of many variables. Similarly, the relationship between history and state power is not merely servile, but also critical. For instance, a historian or sociologist who studies police or ministerial statistics does not automatically accept the official interpretation of the data. Historical and social sciences have their own methods, which are far from just “mythologising”; they are also critical and, above all, independent. Those who assume the mantle of “myth-busters” paradoxically claim that history does not exist, yet they themselves are devising a canon of critical historical science that defines how history is to be written. For example, Sand’s conclusion that the rise and fall of modern history is linked to the nation state turns a blind eye not only to the long line of historical studies that do not address the history of the nation state at all, but also ignores the internal disputes and conflicts within historical science that confirm its relative independence of the primarily political creation of national monuments, cults and myths. History, then, does not exist solely to legitimise the myths of a nation state, just as the nation state is not just a perverse institution of mass extermination and ethnic cleansing. This intellectual nihilism masquerading as a myth-buster’s pseudo-Romantic moral mission must be rejected along with all self-absorption in national history and the glorification of nations as the only historically natural group for which there is an absolute raison d‘être in the architecture of the state. Crowding out national identity in the name of universal ideals is just another form of the same fanaticism that once stoked national hatred. Today, that very same hatred is reserved for all those who do not prescribe horror of the nation comme il faut and do not regard the nation state as the source of all political evil. A high degree of intellectual balance and civic courage is still required today in order to sidestep these fanaticisms and simplifications.

My generation came of age in the Stalinist 1950s and, without even telling ourselves how important history was, we methodically sought it out in our families’ bookcases, in witness accounts and in second-hand bookshops. What we really wanted to know was what was going on in Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1938 and from 1945 to 1948, and what had been wrongly defamed or glorified. How did your generation view history?

History isn’t what it used to be! This is how we might flip a sentence by the poet Paul Valéry, who more than a hundred years ago remarked that “the trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be”. It would be unthinkable to claim offhand that history doesn’t exist, but its intrinsic value, importance and narrative styles do appear to be evolving to the extent that, for example, the political and pedagogical influence of history is steadily waning. Nevertheless, there are historical points of intersection, key events, fateful decisions and protagonists that, for individuals, social groupings, and political communities and clans, such as nations, give meaning to their own existence. Our two bouts of autonomy that you mentioned are, timewise, entirely negligible periods which, put together, make up less than half a century in one nation’s history. Yet note the swelling pride (whether or not it is justified is irrelevant) in the First Republic or dismay at the disintegration of the shared state of Czechs and Slovaks in 1992. For my generation, which grew up in the “normalisation” period of the 1970s and 1980s, history was an intellectual alternative to the ideological ballast of the present and also a form of moral resistance, a way of manifesting our contempt for the current situation. History can play an exceptional role of this nature only in historically exceptional times. Today, however, we are faced with the completely opposite question, namely whether history, which is no longer a fateful alternative for present generations, can survive as a literary and moral story. In other words, in this day and age the question is not only “what is the meaning of history?”, but also “what is the point of narrating past events – history – at all?”

I’m afraid that, before we consider your question, we will have to go back to what the historians Josef Pekař and his teacher Jaroslav Goll started at the turn of the 20th century, by which I mean take our leave of the revivalist programme and the entrenched stereotypes and symbols that peep out at us from all manner of widely distributed papers.

I agree that we need to deal critically with historical stereotypes and symbols, including those that historians used to – and still do – devise about themselves, referring to themselves as “Masarykians” or “Pekařians”, or when someone invokes Rádl’s moralist diction in his philosophy of national history. If we remove ourselves from this contemporary tribal warfare between historians and their schools, we find that what interests us today about Pekař’s famous 1928 lecture The Meaning of Czech History is not so much the dispute over Palacký or Masaryk’s concept of national history, as the assertion that our history has the meaning that it has fashioned for itself and that has been imprinted on it by the historiography of one time or another, whether that be the Chronicle of Dalimil, the work of Václav Hájek of Libočany, or the writings of Balbín or Palacký. In this respect, the meaning of history lies in its active creation, and we cannot exclude from that Hanka and Linda’s forged Manuscripts or the modern-day national myths conjured up by Zdeněk Nejedlý or, on film, Otakar Vávra. Pekař was lambasted for his positivist and empirical method and “science for science’s sake” or “history for history’s sake”. However, he wanted to extricate history from the philosophy of history, where Masaryk was containing it by subordinating empirical methods to teleological judgements on the Czech nation’s roles in human history and to metaphysical notions that our national history had a profound religious meaning. Besides the important idea that the meaning of history is determined solely by history, i.e. that historical science can rely only on its own methods and observations, rather than on metaphysical ideas and ideals, Pekař’s lecture contains another very important and critical idea – that no nation is a chosen people or has a particular historical purpose. The notion that national history has meaning is inextricably linked to belief in the fact that a nation is chosen, i.e. that each nation has a different historical purpose and hence different historical tasks and meaning within human history. This idea can be found, for example, in Hegel’s Philosophy of History and in certain later works by Romantic philosophers, who attributed various ideas and creative acts to various nations in various periods of history. It was as though every nation had been chosen by a historical spirit for various tasks, and the purpose of its existence was to accomplish those tasks and thus contribute to the absolute development of humanity. Pekař rejected philosophical speculation in his criticism of both Palacký and Masaryk’s concepts of national history, but he realised that national patriotism cannot get by without historical science and that this science contributes to the defence of national existence, even though this is never just a matter of will and decision, but the product of much more complicated contexts derived from historical development.

We have to expound on that a little. In The Czech Question (1895), Masaryk criticised the ideological vacuity of Czech politics and pitted the religiously founded humanity of the 15th-century Bohemian Reformation against its pragmatism. Pekař countered that Hussitism and the Unity of the Brethren were purely medieval phenomena that could not be conflated with the later formation of a modern nation steeped in the Enlightenment and liberalism. However, I would say that both stances have remained very important for us to this day. How do you feel about this?

There is a disparity between Masaryk’s concept of national history and its historical significance. Masaryk’s critical and rational approach to Czech history at a time when many viewed history as the mythologising justification of national existence was of utmost importance for the modern formulation of the Czech question and both the political and cultural programme. Masaryk definitely didn’t see the Czech nation as a historically chosen people representing a unique meaning in history or of history per se. Eschewing this notion of a culturally or racially chosen people, Masaryk probes the question of meaning as a matter of the political and moral shepherding of national life. The meaning of historical purpose is thus imposed on a nation on the basis of its present situation and its future direction. In The Czech Question, Masaryk literally writes: “We are rising from the dead and the world expects words of redemption from us.” The national revival therefore had the historical task of contributing to the moral and political revolution of the modern world. Imposing on the Czech nation the moral task of fulfilling the universal religious ideals of Christianity and embracing it in politics as a mission to establish a democratic society as part of the world revolution – this was indeed Masaryk’s revolutionary vision. It contributed, among other things, to the criticism of politics and national identity derived from Slavophile tribal affiliation. However, it should be noted that Pekař criticised Palacký’s concept of national history more generally for being based on the idea of autonomous historical development taking place in clashes and struggles with the outer Germanic world. In this historical narrative, the Czechs became the bearers of a higher culture that, in the face of violence and the warlike German spirit, historically advocated freedom and peace, which was supposedly characteristic not only of the Czechs, but of all Slavs. Pekař countered this with the idea that the historical development of the Czech nation was not decided by any original high Old Slavonic culture, but by the ability to open up to foreign influences and to accept them as its own. Pekař also pointed out that the millennium of Czech history from the 10th to the 20th centuries was determined primarily by the extent to which we, too, participated in broader European history. In this sense, for instance, he viewed Hussitism as a period in which the Czech nation was Europeanised to such a degree that it felt so culturally strong that “we ourselves wanted to give guidance to Europe, our teacher and governess”. Needless to say, for Pekař this governess was not a chosen continent with an autonomous and historically unique culture and role. Rather, this was a culture whose origins “were shaped enormously by the Orient, Antiquity and the Arab world”. Although Masaryk and Pekař’s philosophy of history and historical methods are markedly different from each another, in principle both men were able to dispel strong contemporary prejudices implying that our history was a constant conflict with the world around us, in the face of which we had to distinguish and define our own uniqueness if we were to have any success in defending our right to national existence. In contrast to this, both Masaryk and Pekař agree that the meaning of our national existence is not determined by the nation as an ethnic or racial community, but as a historically formed community that is constantly mutating just as history itself is reshaped. In other words, every era creates its own Czechs, setting them very specific tasks and ascribing specific meaning to their existence.

The historian Dušan Třeštík also drew attention to this in the 1990s when he said that we need to reinvent the Czech nation. What he actually meant was that history is not just positivist knowledge, but also comprises constantly changing value judgements.

I agree entirely that history’s job is to explore the past, but the story and narrative are always loaded with a specific value-charged bullet that we use to shape our present and find our bearings in the future. There are moments in the collective memory of any modern nation in which national identity is inherent. It is not important in the slightest whether these events really happened or have been thought up by historians and national revivalists. They may be tragic or heroically celebrated. Through them, modern nations come up with answers to the question of where they come from, what they are, and where they are heading, and, out of these historical events, they compose their own meaningful narratives of history and try to cobble together universally valid canons from them. Historical texts pile up and often contradict each other, but, most of all, they assure us that even products of social imagination, such as modern nations, can share a very specific historical experience and thus confirm that they have a right to exist. As the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs said: collective memory is our lived history. Rather than start at the beginning, which always gives the illusion of a fixed point from which we can move through the universe of history, it is important – as we have already mentioned – to enquire into the nodal points and key events that still make sense and have somehow left their mark on historical developments or the present. And we need to keep revisiting them with the same tenacity with which, for example, the Czech novelist and dissident Ludvík Vaculík wrote his feuilletons Spring is Here and A Day in August every year. I would even say that history only makes sense if we put up historical resistance to it. In this context, I am particularly fond of a sentence Vaculík wrote in A Day in August in 1985, during the normalisation era: “The situation is numbing me; it looks like I’m not resisting enough.”

How would you define what has been termed “the Czech question”?

As we know all too well, Masaryk formulated the Czech question in his work of the same title as a response to the Manuscripts debate. In doing so, he freed history once and for all from its servility to the political mythologisation of national history. At the same time, however, this question had a purely political slant because Czech national politics had to react to the social, economic, and even constitutional and political changes sweeping through the Habsburg monarchy in the second half of the 19th century. That is why we must always read Masaryk’s The Czech Question together with his reflective Our Current Crisis, and place both of these works in the context of a time when Hubert Gordon Schauer, now barely remembered, asked a fundamental question about the meaning and purpose of our historical right and struggle to preserve our national identity and language in a lopsided battle with the Germanic environment around us.

Begging your pardon, but perhaps we ought to recall how Gordon Schauer articulated his questions. He was asking whether Czech society was big enough and morally strong enough to build a culture of its own, and whether the efforts put into the national revival might not be better invested in general cultural pursuits within the framework of German culture. His text was published in the magazine Čas in 1886. At the time, there were even rumours that the essay had been initiated by Masaryk himself.

More’s the shame that, in this “dispute” over the meaning of Czech history, we tend to stick to subsequent polemics from the first half of the 20th century. Schauer’s reflective essay Our Two Questions embraces the general and yet utterly crucial dilemma of any national revival and self-determination, as you have quoted in your question: whether the efforts and energies devoted to preserving national identity and the language are exhausting the domestic elite and intelligentsia, which could otherwise directly target universal goals such as scientific or political progress and the moral rebirth of society. Masaryk viewed this sceptically formulated question as a challenge to the political advancement of his philosophy of history, where there is no place for fabricated myths, but where historical events and the course of history carry higher metaphysical meaning. For Masaryk, the universal “ideals of humanity” were to form the bedrock for the continuity of Czech history, from Hussitism and the Unity of the Brethren to the idea of national revival formulated by Palacký. According to Masaryk, the purpose of Czech politics was to spiritually and morally “awaken” the nation. As you have said, this metaphysical concept of history was opposed by Pekař and other adherents of Goll’s positivist school in historiography, who rejected not only the culturally mythologising, but also political function of historical science. The Czech question, then, was more than half a century’s conflict that was not so much about the meaning of Czech history as it was – much more – about the status and autonomy of historical science. In other words, history can only have scientific responsibility; it cannot be assigned the cultural task of bolstering national identity or the metaphysical task of political and moral rebirth based on philosophical and religious ideals. When we explore the historical significance of that dispute about the Czech question and the meaning of Czech history, waged by historians, and also among the broader public and politicians, from the final decades of the 19th century until the turn of 1939, when, in the wake of Munich, it was brought to a definitive end by the Nazi occupation (which paradoxically returned the whole saga to square one and to the plane of the existential struggle for bare survival), our understanding of the whole controversy should be that an emancipated nation can only ask history to deliver history, not national mythology or political metaphysics.

In your opinion, this is the answer to the question of the meaning of Czech history and the meaning of narratives about historical events, from which we have digressed. But does this question of meaning, as you yourself say, also affect the political, cultural and social present?

Yes, this is the second and more general plane of the whole dispute, namely that the Czech question, no matter how it is formulated by historical language and lined with historical events and quarrels, always also affects the national present and future expectations in both a good and a bad way. In this sense, every generation is compelled to ask its own “Czech question”. Zdeněk Nejedlý placed it in the service of communist ideology and power, while Karel Kosík formulated it in the context of critical Marxist philosophy as a general struggle against the bureaucratic alienation of modern humankind. Kosík’s Our Current Crisis of spring 1968 returned the topic of national and political crisis to a philosophical context by construing the question of the meaning of Czech history as part of a general question about the meaning of human existence. That text repeats the well-known themes of the geography and heritage of Central Europe as a space where there are cultural and political clashes between East and West, Rome and Byzantium, individualism and collectivism, and so on. At this point in time, Kosík viewed the Czech question as a challenge to engage in the active and distinct synthesis of all the contradictions and the various influences mentioned – an active search for true human existence, thereby making a stand against the indifference and superficiality of life. As we know, the August occupation transformed this question of “crisis” into a question of “Czech destiny” and saw Milan Kundera and Václav Havel clash in late 1968 and the months that followed. In his Czech Destiny, Kundera regarded this destiny as a historical dispute between alliance and sovereignty, the latter of which the Czech nation aspired to but was being denied. He was actually elaborating on an original proposition from a speech he had delivered at the Fourth Congress of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in June 1967, in which he contrasted the mentality of large nations with the mentality of small nations, who must steadfastly struggle for their existence and the historical significance of that existence, as though theirs was the pursuit of something non-axiomatic that needed to be moulded anew constantly and every day. While Kundera thought that the Soviet occupation of 1968 was fated to happen as part of this historical destiny, it is interesting how actively Václav Havel embroiled himself in the entire conflict in his rejoinder Czech Destiny?, the question mark in the title doubling up as an exclamation mark warning against the very notion of “national destiny”. Havel went in very hard and very personally for the time, generalising Kundera’s view as a classic way in which a political situation was translated into a fatum, thus inhibiting not only critical assessment of the real causes of the crisis, but also opportunities to resolve it. Havel then pitted specific historical responsibility against general historical parallels and abstract context.

Paradoxically, as Václav Havel later told me in Disturbing the Peace, Kundera’s attitude galvanised the first large-scale writers’ petition at the dawn of the normalisation era, challenging the sentences handed down to dissidents and demanding a Christmas amnesty.

And that’s not all. It is interesting how this dispute subsequently fringed historical and ethical discussions of Czech dissent and how it informed, say, Patočka’s reflections on Czech history and Czechness, and Pithart’s Sixty-Eight, in which the author describes the political debacle of reformist communism, in its broader historical and cultural context, as an example of traditional Czech inability to pursue a practical policy and shoulder responsibility for it. We need only dwell a little on these historical disputations and reflections on modern Czech history, of which – because they themselves shape it – they also happen to be a quite fundamental part, to realise that the Czech question is also a question of the political role of erudition and intellectuals in modern Czech history! It combines intellectual doubts, moral imperatives and cultural stereotypes. The Czech nation was originally formed as a cultural community that had to codify its own language, which it then used as a vehicle to establish its own educational attainment. Only after language, science and modern culture have been “constituted” can we address the question of political constitution. This means, among other things, that the national revivalists and their education and knowledge were of huge importance. As the political responsibility of Czech intellectuals has always reached very high, it is hardly surprising that the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic was a philosopher and that his closest associate and successor was a sociologist and political scientist. In this context, Havel’s more recent presidency also appears to be a paradoxical fusion of a quite exceptional historical situation and cultural tradition. Here, Czech society places on its intellectuals unrealistic political expectations that usually give way to traditional mistrust and loathing, sometimes mutating into outright hatred. From the perspective of social psychopathology, it was also fascinating to observe the narrowly technocratic Václav Klaus as, exhibiting the traditional posturing of the Czech petty bourgeois, he attacked the intellectuals while securing a professorship for himself at Charles University, pointedly insisting on being addressed as “professor”, and scooping up honorary doctorates from the regional universities of post-Soviet countries. And the original purpose of Miloš Zeman’s once-famous quips was also to demonstrate the general knowledge of their progenitor at a time when he had not yet sunk to the bottom of his linguistic, political and cultural cesspool. This is precisely why the scandal surrounding his “quote” from Peroutka’s non-existent article was so important to him that he felt no sense of shame or embarrassment about it, nor did he baulk at the prospect of an ignominious lawsuit. I think that, even taking into account these cultural and political traditions and historical disputes playing out at crucial points in Czech national history, it is now relevant to ask ourselves, once more, the Czech question about the meaning of history. As in the past, this question can broach fundamental topics of the present and the problems of our national future. And I hope that we get to discuss some of these themes and issues in our conversations here.

What, then, do we need to resist in 2018 if we are to take a more accurate and bolder look at ourselves and not succumb to fatalism?

Neither of us is a historian, so let’s keep the focus throughout our talks on exploring what makes up the living history of a nation. This concerns the relationship between structures and semantics, that is, between how society is shaped and how it describes itself, including the constant permeation of seemingly pure and clear historical concepts with their dirty and opaque historical background. We also have the tremendous historical advantage and the truly social and political luxury of having been governed, over the last three decades, by people we have freely and democratically elected as our representatives, and no foreign power poses a direct threat to us. Consequently, we might end up being our own worst enemy, but the reality is that we do not have to constantly defend and justify our bare existence and independence as the world crowds around. We do not need Masaryk’s index finger raised in guidance to a young and immature nation. Nor do we need fists clenched as the only and futile response to the occupation of our country. And we have no need at all for any “official interpretations” of history, or the branding of history as “good” or “bad” according to some moral distinction, where historically variegated narratives are typically reduced to black-and-white images of national history. That is the domain not only of ever-popular efforts to guard our precious little national pond, but also of the simplifying criticism of political scientists who reconstruct Czech history as a place of permanent backwardness and the inability to be a part of “Europe”, “the West”, and the like.

But this hinges on learning to live without an official interpretation of history and on seeking its meaning over and over again, i.e. on learning to think of and rethink history. What questions should we be asking ourselves in this context?

An official interpretation of history makes no sense in a free society because, among other things, we do not discover history as a set of objective laws underpinning humanity’s development. Instead, every piece of historical and empirically verifiable knowledge is always subject to a certain means of interpretation. Notice how contemporary historians often talk about the need for critical discussion, review or re-evaluation of past knowledge, and the reconstruction of historical interpretations. Today’s historians routinely and fondly “reject ideological clichés”, “critically discern the past” and “critically contemplate historical periods”, seeing themselves as scientists who, sure of the solid knowledge of present-day historical science, reshape the general historical consciousness of society. Critical reflection of history has paradoxically been transformed into the highly popular history of historians. Yet when we say that there is a need for a critical discovery of the past or a re-evaluation of historical narratives, we do not have in mind the possibility of arbitrarily making up stories about history. On the contrary, it is intellectually challenging not to fabricate history, but to think of and rethink it. If we narrate our history while having our own experience of it, we are exposed to the need to constantly determine its significance and meaning from a specific perspective and in specific situations. History is nothing but hermeneutics of the past, where each account of the past is simultaneously an interpretation. We need to keep our heads all the more in order to understand the meaning of the Czech state a hundred years on from its modern democratic and liberal foundation within the common Czechoslovak Republic, and to grasp what being a mature European and democratic nation means to us today. These questions and answers are directly related to the changes that the nation state, as a political institution, has gone through in Europe and across the world over the last fifty years, and to the process generally referred to as the globalisation of society.

The Formation of Nations and Nationalism

I would like to start this chapter by recalling Dušan Třeštík’s claim that history is a projection of the past that leads not to the present, but to the future…

… and so we will explore everything that gives meaning to our common present and moulds the collective memory of the historically established social group known as the Czech nation, and how the notion of the Czech state and its actual historical creation and present form and attendant ideals have impressed themselves in that memory. Let’s look into the points of intersection we have mentioned, as well as events, documents and other texts, and most of all the political and constitutional contexts, which can offer us an answer to the question of the historical meaning of Czech statehood and the way it has been transformed in today’s globalised society. When I say that, I do not just have in mind the historical nodal points and watershed events that we accept almost without thinking, such as the founding of Charles University in 1348, the formation of an independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, the Munich Agreement of 1938, the Communist takeover in February 1948, and the August occupation in 1968. We should also be asking ourselves, for instance, about the historical significance of Wenceslas II’s monetary reform, the work done by Italian craftsmen in the Czech Lands in the 18th century, the establishment of Masaryk’s Realist Party, and the mutual influence of Czech and French Surrealism. And these questions should be a form of intellectual resistance to what is presented to society as either the trivialisation or heroisation of national history. History, in my view, is the ability to put up intellectual resistance to the historical events that bear down on us, be they wars, revolutions, or scientific discoveries and the technical transformation of our civilisation. I think, for example, that Bořivoj’s baptism in around 883 should be regarded first and foremost as an important moment when the Czechs – as pointed out by our expert on the Early Middle Ages, Dušan Třeštík – made history. They made history because Bořivoj, who lived from about 852 to 890, is the first historically documented Czech ruler and Přemyslid, mentioned in the Chronica Boemorum, in the Legend of Christian and in Fuit in provincia Boemorum, the legend about his wife, St Ludmila. Going down in history means becoming a part of historical documents and the stories that are told in them. It is not so much whether this is sooner or later than other nations; what is important is that, at that moment, political events in the territory of what is now our state become historically not only important, but also documented. The seat of the ruling power moves from Levý Hradec to Hradčany, the marriage to Ludmila unites the prominent Pšovans and Přemyslids, who are ruling over the territory of our country, and baptism by Archbishop Methodius in Great Moravia weakens the influence wielded by the monarchs of East Francia. These are undoubtedly big events at the time. They profoundly defined the early medieval politics subsequently applied in the territory of our state. The figure of Bořivoj, then, is associated not only with political control of this area, but also with the House of Přemyslids and the laying of the cultural, religious and dynastic foundations of society at that time. What’s more, I have a very personal relationship with Bořivoj and Ludmila because Odolena Voda, where I come from, is located directly on the route between Mělník and Levý Hradec, so I could always see the very earliest topography and formation of the Přemyslids’ power and social influence before my very eyes, and literally feel it in my bones.

Vážení čtenáři, právě jste dočetli ukázku z knihy In Quest of History.
Pokud se Vám líbila, celou knihu si můžete zakoupit v našem e-shopu.