The Past and the Future of Bohemia
By Thomas Čapek.
The war proved to be a most efficient school mistress. It has enabled us to locate on the map cities, rivers and states whose existence, prior to August, 1914, wall all but unknown to the school boy. Furthermore, its has put America on speaking terms with the so-called small nations—the Serbs, Finns, Rumanians, Poles, Czechoslovaks and others.
Before the war the average Anglo-Saxon knew little about the Czechoslovaks and the little that the tourists from England and America have gleaned, while passing through the country from Dresden to Vienna, was distorted because observed through Austrian, that is German glasses. If the Vienna Neue Freie Presse and other Austrian journals chose to represent―or rather misrepresent―them to the world as scheming pan-Slav agitators, as narrow minded nationalists, in whose country it was unsafe for a foreign tourist to travel, as incorrigible trouble makers who, more than any other people in Austria, were responsible for the existence in the empire of racial struggles, the belief eventually gained ground that they were Pan-Slavs, chauvinists, trouble-breeders. Then there was the ever watchful mistress, Vienna, who saw to it that travelers from foreign lands should see and admire none other save her own charms. And yet Prague, the capital of Bohemia, has been spoken of by experienced travelers, Humboldt among them, as one of the most picturesque cities in Europe. The mistake of it was that pre-war travelers from England and America went to Vienna to get light on the Austrian Slav, instead of studying him in his homeland: Czechs in Bohemia, Poles in Galicia, the Croatian in Zagreb.
The Austrian Government put the Teutonic facade on everything in Bohemia and the lands once belonging to her—upon the telegraph, the railroad, commerce, industry, schools, banking, civil administration, the judiciary, the army. From the time of Marie Theresa every Hapsburg believed he was doing a patriotic service to civilization by repressing the non-German races in the empire. Students were punished for conversing in their mother tongue in the classrooms. Before the eighties of the last century one could not send a telegram in the Czech language from one part of Bohemia to another, though telegraph offices readily accepted messages in French and English. Towns with pure Czech population were not only required to have street signs in German, but the system imposed upon these municipalities administration that was Teutonic in form, if not always in spirit. It may seem incredible that Prague, the capital, succeeded in throwing off the Tentonic mask only in the early sixties, when the Czech element got the upper hand at municipal elections.
The revolutionary movement of 1848 was instrumental in introducing modern ideas in Austria. The label on Bohemia began to change in color. From pure Teutonic it was then transformed into Austro-Czech. Previous to 1848 the Czech language was barely tolerated. True, a number of patriots busied themselves with the revival of it—Jungmann, Palacký, Havlíček and others—but the sane, safe and conservative element of the burgeoise class long remained deaf to the entreaties of the revivalists. As to the attitude of the government toward the revivalist movement you were free to be a Czech, provided you did nothing to hurt the feeling of the Kaisertreu policeman and gendarme. After the introduction of constitutionalism the system—by the system was meant the dynasty, the beaurocracy, hierarchy, aristocracy and the militarists—resorted to every trick and devise to keep in political and economic subjection the non-Germanic majority in Austria and non-Magyar majority in Hungary. Census was falsified, suffrage was juggled with, representation in Parliament rested on fraud and gerrymander.
Thinking Czechs dreaded the German who looked upon the small Slavic nations around him—the Czechoslovaks, Poles, Lusatian Serbs—as his legitimate prey, as fertilizer of Greater Germany.
The Hussite Wars in the 15th century were, in the last analysis, both religious and racial. The proof of this lies in the fact that when they ended the Germans had been pushed everywhere to the border of the country. The dread of the Germans was the dominant theme of Czech history
