The Czechs in a Nutshell

Terje B. Englund,

Prague, August 2004

Academic Titles

On a cold December day in 1996, the atmosphere in the Czech Parliament’s Chamber of Deputies was tense. Rumours were flying that Jan Kalvoda, Minister of Justice and Vice Premier, had committed a shocking and unforgivable sin. Now he was standing on the rostrum in front of 200 curious representatives.

What awful crime would this serious and respected politician confess to? Had he exposed himself indecently in a park late at night? Had Kalvoda, as had so many Czech politicians, been caught driving drunk? Or, heaven forbid, had the Minister of Justice accepted an envelope stuffed with banknotes (see: Corruption) from some lugubrious business people?

It turned out to be much worse. As an educated lawyer, Kalvoda was fully entitled to call himself Magistr — a Master of Law. But on several occasions, Kalvoda had been unfortunate enough to call himself JUDr. — a Doctor of Law. He had even misused the title when he signed official documents. For Kalvoda, there was only one thing to do: to commit hara-kiri publicly. In front of the flabbergasted parliamentarians, Kalvoda declared that he was immediately resigned from the government, and that his political career was finished forever.

For many foreigners, political suicide might seem a somewhat exaggerated punishment for just “upgrading” a Magistr to a Doktor. Not so for the Czechs. In this country, academic titles are indeed a serious matter. And, what’s more, they are almost a prerequisite for those who wish to make a career in politics or business, which, of course, indicates that Kalvoda is not the only title-abuser in this country.

The Czechs’ title craze has been explained by several theories. The Swedish writer and diplomat Ingmar Karlsson, for instance, believes it is a legacy from the Habsburg monarchy, when the Czechs, as a matter of national pride, did their utmost not to lag behind the similarly title-fixated Austrians. Another explanation is the importance that Czechoslovakia’s First Republic and its founder, president Tomáš G. Masaryk, attached to education as a means of strengthening the young state. And, finally, the communist regime’s foolish attempt to create a “classless society” resulted in an incredible inflation of titles, since people used them deliberately to signal that they, although moneyless and materially deprived, at least not were a part of the ruling proletariat.

However comic this title-mania may seem, a foreigner should take it deadly seriously. Not in the sense that an academic title actually guarantees that its bearer is an educated person. Some of the most vociferous racists in this country sport pompous academic titles (Jiří Karas, a parliamentarian who describes homosexuals as people who need urgent treatment, is both an Ing. and a JUDr.) and at least one member of the government plus several other big-shots have acquired titles for academic thesis’ which they very likely didn’t write themselves.

The problem is that you may commit a social blunder of significant magnitude if you do not address a Czech with his or her proper title. Actually, more title-crazed individuals (which practically means a vast majority of the population) may even interpret your omission as a deliberate insult.

But don’t despair — such blunders can be avoided by applying one simple precaution: don’t hesitate to address any person who doesn’t exercise an apparently manual profession as Pane inženýre or Paní doktorko. Of course, you might have a problem when meeting a person with two or even three titles (pane docente-kandidáte věd), and there is an obvious risk that you could unintentionally “upgrade” a Magistr or Inženýr. But as the Kalvoda affair and countless similar cases have proven, the Czechs are as happy as any other people to strut in borrowed plumes.

Albright, Madeleine

Outside the Czech Republic, it’s not commonly known that the first woman to become the United States’ equivalent of Minister of Foreign Affairs (Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001) is actually Czech by birth and that the Czech language is her mother tongue. Marie Jana Körbelová was born in Prague’s Smíchov district in May 1937 as the daughter of Czechoslovak diplomat Josef Körbel, who fled to England with his family after the Munich Agreement in 1938.

In 1948, the Körbels once more fled Czechoslovakia when another totalitarian ideology came to power (see: Communism). They settled in Colorado, and like thousands of other educated and democratically-minded Czechs who left everything they owned to live in freedom, Marie Jana — who changed her first name to Madeleine — and her family tried their best to make a living and become good citizens of their new homelands.