The Czechs in a Nutshell

Almost a century after Franz Josef was promoted to eternity, this awful tradition is still frightfully alive and kicking in the Czech Republic. In most hospitals, for instance, patients are woken up at six o’clock, even if the doctor’s visit is scheduled only at nine. In schools, lessons start at eight o’clock, while at the universities, lectures might begin even earlier. Also, in many Czech factories, production starts at least one hour earlier than is common in Western and Northern Europe. The government of Vladimír Špidla, which was installed in 2002, took this perversion so literally that it started some of its meetings at six o’clock in the morning!

To be fair, this tradition certainly doesn’t represent a serious problem, but it affects one, not insignificant, layer of the Czech society: beer drinkers. To give the millions of Czechs who spend the evening in a local hospoda a chance to sober up before work starts at six o’clock the next morning, most pubs mercilessly close at ten o’clock in the evening — i.e., at a time when people in other parts of Europe have just started the evening.

So, next time you are being kicked out of your local hospoda just in the middle of a spirited discussion about everything from football to quantum physics, don’t blame it on the poor innkeeper, but on His Imperial Highness Franz Josef!

Fridays

As you might have already noticed, the Czech Republic is not an Islamic country (see: Religion), and, therefore, Fridays should be an ordinary working day when business goes on as usual. However, anyone who has tried to sort out a problem at a public office in this country on a Friday afternoon has probably discovered that this day is not an ordinary day at all.

After noon on Friday, most Czech public offices tend to work with even bigger delays and troubles than earlier in the week. This, of course, is not a Czech speciality — public officials all over the Western world count down to the weekend. There are, however, few countries where the countdown is performed with greater fervency and matter of course than in the Czech Republic.

If you think this is a legacy of the former communist era, you’re right. During the former regime, it was commonly acknowledged that those who didn’t steal from their (state) employer stole from their families. In practise, this meant that everyone felt entitled to “borrow” bricks, machines, spare parts or whatever his or her company produced, for private use (by the way, how could this be deemed stealing, when everything belonged to the state, which equalled the people?) Subsequently, those who worked in public offices could, without greater pangs of conscience, snatch pens and pencils — but most of all time.

The private sector, which emerged after the Velvet Revolution, has put a more or less effective stop to this deep-rooted tradition. But the public sector, to put it mildly, has not been as successful. Czech state bureaucracy is almost as over-grown as it was under the communists. Symptomatically, some years ago, an elderly fellow was discovered in a dusty room at the Ministry of Interior, and nobody knew that he had been vegetating in the office for several decades.

When Václav Klaus’ government started its fight against bureaucracy in the middle of the 1990s, its first step was to establish a committee (which, after all, doesn’t seem all that illogical in the country of Franz Kafka). And still, the army of bureaucrats have lousy wages compared to the private sector, so who can blame them for compensating for a miserable salary by cutting out early on Fridays?

Photo © Jaroslav Fišer

What’s more, the Czechs have quite a good reason for starting the weekend early. Outside Scandinavia, there’s probably no other European nation with more cottage- and cabin-owners than the Czech Republic. Some estimates suggest that there are 1.2 million of these holiday houses (see: Munich Agreement) and that every other Czech family has access to a second home in the countryside. During the communists, it was not uncommon for people to live out a kind of “inner exile” at their cabins, which were their private property. Therefore, all the physical efforts, money and time spent on maintenance were not wasted, because people were investing it in their own property.

Since the Czechs’ passionate love of their country houses hasn’t weakened much after the fall of communism, a foreigner is advised to take one necessary precaution: if you need to sort out an urgent matter in a public office, pray to God it’s not Friday afternoon.

Germans