The Czechs in a Nutshell

In many ways, this is a typical story about a brainy and ambitious Czech emigrant, who fights tremendous hardships and reaches world fame. Yet Albright’s story is unique. Not only because of her astonishing professional career, but because her background as a political refugee from Central Europe strongly influenced her in the job as the world’s most important foreign policy executive.

In her memoirs, Albright explains how her personal experience from the appeasement policy that led to the disastrous Munich Agreement and subsequently the Second World War and Holocaust (because they were Czech Jews, three of Albright’s grandparents were murdered in German concentration camps) made her a firm — and in the beginning a sole — advocate of a military action against Slobodan Miloševič‘s regime in Yugoslavia in 1999. She also hints that it was her personal influence, combined with president Václav Havel’s international prestige, that eventually ensured a somewhat-indifferent Czech Republic (see: Scepticism) membership in NATO.

Curiously enough, Madeleine Albright has not met the Czech emigrant’s traditional fate in her mother country — negligence, oblivion or even envy.

Instead, she was mentioned as a possible successor to president Václav Havel (which she politely declined). What’s more, to millions of Czech women (see: Feminism) she has proven that it’s possible to have almost any professional career, if you are only ambitious and bull-headed enough. And thirdly, she personifies the fate of thousands of Czechoslovak Jews born in the liberal First Republic, who were so thoroughly assimilated that they didn’t even know about their Jewish origins.

Alcoholics

One might think that Czech alcoholics are not particularly different from alcoholics in any other part of Europe. Which would basically be true, if it not were for their two national peculiarities: their imposing number, and their easy life.

The percentage of the population suffering from alcoholism (see: Beer) dwarfs that of most other countries on the continent, but thanks to the extremely generous spread of watering holes (see: Hospoda) combined with a correspondingly generous tolerance towards drunkards, many Czech alcoholics manage to survive socially and, perhaps more surprisingly, also professionally. Unfortunately, their frequent appearance behind the steering wheel is less successful (see: Driving a Car).

The term alcoholic is, admittedly, pretty woolly. The Welsh writer (and heavy drinker) Dylan Thomas once sarcastically pointed out that the pejorative “alcoholic” is used about a person you don’t like, but who drinks as much as you do. It’s not known which definition is used by Prague’s Apolinář Hospital, the country’s leading research institution in the field of alcohol addiction, but doctors there estimate that some 300,000 Czechs deserve the label full-fledged alcoholics, while another 2 million persons are regarded as heavy drinkers, although not (yet) alcoholics. In other words, almost 25 percent of the Czech population has a drinking problem.

When the total consumption of alcoholic beverages is broken down in litres of pure ethanol per capita, each and every citizen in this country pours down more than nine litres annually, which places the Czechs among Europe’s most soggy nations — after the French, Portuguese and Hungarians. But those are the official statistics. If you also include all the hooch, which is distilled and subsequently drunken in private homes — the inhabitants of Moravia are especially vigorous — the Czechs probably come out as medal winners of the European Drunkards’ League.

As already mentioned, there are some rather obvious reasons for this wild boozing. Just like other manifestations of hedonism, the commonly respected moral code treats drunkenness with extreme tolerance (see: Urination). As the famous photographer Jan Saudek puts it — I don't have any drinking problem. I just drink, get drunk, and fall asleep. That’s no problem.

This attitude was widely cultivated during the years of communism, when cheap and easily accessible alcohol was one of the goodies with which the regime rewarded the population for their “loyalty”. Symptomatically, the Czech Republic is still one of those rare European countries where bars and restaurants charge more for non-alcoholic beverages than for beer.