The Czechs in a Nutshell

There are those foreigners who don’t consider this as a bad joke, but as a cruel reality. Try to buy a new and impressive car, they’ll say. Park it on any public space in the Czech Republic, and then wait and see how long it will take until somebody, just out of pure envy, will make a long and ugly scratch in the enamel with a one-koruna coin. Maximum half an hour, the most pessimistic will say, adding that for the common Czech, envy is an even stronger urge than the sexual instinct.

Of course, this phenomenon can be explained with greater leniency towards the Czechs. Actually, it may seem that they are having a long-lasting and passionate love affair with the zlatá střední cesta (the golden, middle of the road). And the reason for this can probably be found in Czech history. Since most of the local nobility fled the country after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the remaining Czechs became a socially and economically very homogenous lot.

So, while other nations got their elite from the nobility, the Czechs made farmers and townspeople or even artists (see: Mácha, Karel Hynek) their aristocracy. This process was fuelled by industrialization, which in Bohemia started earlier and on a far more massive scale than in any other part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

As a result, a vast proletariat, where everyone was equally rich (or, if you’d like, equally poor) as his neighbour, was created. Needless to say, the communists’ attempt to build a classless society didn’t exactly make the average Czech more tolerant towards people being better off.

One shouldn’t, of course, take this middle-of-the-road theory too far, but it’s tempting to make one more point: it may seem that the strong fixation on equality and the corresponding aversion to everything that goes beyond the average (i.e., what’s not commonly accepted as main stream) have led to a certain timidity towards the new and unknown (see: Foreigners).

Radical changes, be it in politics, fashion, architecture or whatever, are not good. “The status quo may have its bad sides,” the saying goes. “But at least we know what we have, and things could always be far worse.” Considering the Czechs’ turbulent history, this attitude seems if not extremely brave, at least understandable.

Call it a deeply rooted sense of egalitarianism; call it envy or aversion against extremes or even a combination of all three. In any case, foreigners should learn a basic lesson. If you ostentatiously present yourself as better, richer, more successful or even different than the common herd, you’re not only making a fool of yourself, but also provoking your surroundings.

Certainly, nothing prevents you from actually being better, richer and more successful — as long as you don’t show off! Logically, the expected and non-provoking answer to Jak se máš? fully corresponds to the Czechs’ aversion of extremes: Ujde to — I’m doing fairly good.

Emigrants

When the Poles or Hungarians, not to mention the Russians, speak about their nation’s greatest daughters and sons, they usually don’t care if the persons concerned actually lived in the country their whole lives, or if she or he gained fame as a citizen of another state. The Slovaks go even further, by operating with long lists of “world famous” countrymen who nobody outside Slovakia has ever heard of.

With the Czechs, the situation is, as usual, somewhat less straightforward. Not that emigration, be it for political or economic reasons, is something new to them. The reform theologian and pedagogue Jan Amos Komenský is probably the most famous of the earliest Czech emigrants. Like thousands of other prominent Czechs who fled the country after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Komenský spent the rest of his learned life roaming about Europe.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Emperor in Vienna once more made Czechs leave their mother country, this time by encouraging Bohemian and Moravian farmers to settle in the Banat region in today’s Romania and in the northern parts of former Yugoslavia. In both areas, there are still Czech minority communities who vivaciously care for their cultural heritage, and you can thank industrious Czechs for founding the brewery that still produces ex-Yugoslavia’s only decent beer. There were even daredevils who settled in places like Volhynia in Western Ukraine and Kazakhstan.