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"There is nothing comparable to "The Czech Reader." It makes a unique and highly valuable contribution to understanding the Czech interpretation of their own history, of who they are, and what historical events constituted them as a nation and a people."--Silvia Tomaskova, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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THE CZECH READER

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations..........................................................................................xiAcknowledgments................................................................................................xvGuide to Pronunciation.........................................................................................xviiIntroduction...................................................................................................1I Between Myth and History (The Premyslid Dynasty).............................................................7II Navel of the Earth (Charles IV–Václav IV)........................................................31III Against Everyone (The Hussite Revolution)..................................................................47IV Struggles for Court, City, Country (Vladislav II Jagiellon–Rudolph II)................................67V Defeated Protestants, Victorious Catholics (Ferdinand II–Charles VI)...................................83VI From the Enlightenment to Romantic Nationalism (Maria Theresa–Revolution of 1848).....................111VII Defeated Politicians, Victorious Intellectuals (1848–1867)...........................................145VIII From National Self-Determination to Cosmopolitanism (1867–1918).....................................187IX The First Czechoslovak Republic (1918–1938)...........................................................239X Between Hitler and Stalin (1938–1948)..................................................................295XI "Ideal" Socialism (1948–1968).........................................................................335XII "Real" Socialism (1968–1989).........................................................................385XIII The Decades after the Velvet Revolution (1989–2009).................................................463Epilogue.......................................................................................................503Suggestions for Further Reading................................................................................507Acknowledgment of Copyright and Sources........................................................................521Index..........................................................................................................529

Chapter One

Romans called the Celtic tribes in the Czech lands Boii, and from this name is derived not only "Bohemia" and the German word Böhmen, but perhaps also the name for Bavaria. At the end of the first millennium BCE, the Celts died out in the Czech lands, followed by the Germans, who left the country around 530 CE. Czechs and Moravians arrived in East Central Europe soon after, together with Slovaks, Poles, and other western Slavs. They supposedly called the land Cechy, after a mythical ancestor. In the nineteenth century, the term "Czech" began to be used to distinguish ethnic Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia from their German and Jewish compatriots.

In the Czech lands nomadic pagans soon metamorphosed into settlements of Christians, led by rulers in the rough castle town of Praha (Prague). This history is fragmentary and fraught with the dynastic clashes and murderous ambition so often romanticized in the propaganda of nation building. There is no doubt, however, that the establishment of the Carolingian empire in the second half of the eighth century was of crucial importance for the future of the Czech lands. Central Europe was actually created by Charlemagne, together with the first Western European empire. Western Europe needed a chain of vassal states to protect its inland borders, a huge buffer zone separating it from Eastern Europe.

The earliest historical accounts—and rich archeological records—come from southern Moravia. There, in the ninth century, the Great Moravian Empire was established, adopting Christianity and expanding into southwestern Slovakia and Bohemia. In 880 a papal decree describes the archbishopric of Great Moravia, with Methodius as its head, and the Slavic liturgical language, then used alongside Latin. Methodius and his brother Cyril—Greeks from Thessalonica, where both Slavic and Greek were spoken—had been dispatched by the Byzantine emperor as missionaries to the Great Moravian Empire. The brothers founded the Slavic literary tradition by translating Christian liturgical texts into Old Slavonic. In 863–67, Cyril wrote an important prologue to his translations of the four Gospels, the first poem in Old Church Slavonic.

Only in the tenth century did political power move to Prague, after the Great Moravian Empire was destroyed in 906 by a Magyar invasion. From Prague to Mikulcice, the presumed center of the earliest western Slavic empire, is today only two and a half hours' drive. But in Czech history this topographical shift meant a leap from the edge of the Byzantine Empire, Greek culture, and Old Church Slavonic into the orbit of Latin and the Roman Empire, which was reinstalled in 962. Old Church Slavonic survives in the song "Hospodine pomiluj ny" ("Lord, have mercy on us"), still sung in Czech churches. Not only does it contain Old Slavic words like pomiluj, it does not include any word that might not have originated in that language.

In the creation of the Czech state, the crucial role was played by Duke Boleslav I (935–72), at first adversary and later ally of the first Holy Roman emperor, Otto I. Boleslav I is called "the Cruel" because he assassinated his ruler and older brother, the later sanctified Václav I (ca. 907–35). His reason was that he opposed not his brother's Christian zeal but Václav's fealty to the Germans. Boleslav began to rule Bohemia (and perhaps also Moravia) from a network of castles, extracting taxes to maintain his powerful armed forces. We have an eyewitness report of Boleslav and the Slavs of his time from a Jewish trader who visited Prague in the tenth century.

The ambitious vision of Boleslav I was later realized in the Golden Bull of Sicily of September 26, 1212, wherein Emperor Frederick II affirmed the Premysl Otakar I (1198–1230) as the king, rather than the duke, of Bohemia and recognized the independent position of the Bohemian kingdom in the empire. From that time onward the election of the Bohemian king was an internal matter, but the Czech ruler, as one of the foremost imperial princes, had a key position in electing Holy Roman emperors.

The rise of Prague's rulers led them to claim a respectable past. Cosmas of Prague (ca. 1045–1125), who wrote the first Czech chronicle, played down the Moravian roots of the Czech state and replaced them with a founding myth starring the soothsayer Princess Libu?e and Premysl the Ploughman. The story, significantly set west of Prague, suggested an exceptional dynasty and a state without equal. Not long after Cosmas finished his chronicle, the Prague-centered myth of Premysl the Ploughman was painted on the wall of the Premyslid rotunda in Znojmo, one of the oldest "historical" paintings in Europe. Following the collapse of the ancient Roman Empire, the visual arts survived in only a few places; monumental architecture, sculpture, and painting began to revive only in the twelfth century. Czechs were active participants in this revival.

What made...