The Czechs in a Nutshell

As one might expect in a region where history is omnipresent, the reason for Austria’s shabby image lies in the past — both in its older and more modern chapters.

When Ferdinand of Habsburg ascended to the Czech throne in 1526, the Czech kingdom, politically dominated by Protestants (see: Hus, Jan) formally became a part of the strongly Catholic Austrian Empire (see: Religion). The tensions between the king in Vienna and his quarrelsome subjects in Prague seethed and boiled for almost a century, until they reached their climax with the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, where the Czechs were beaten into their boots, and their kingdom was practically reduced to a province of Austria.

The official historiography that emerged with the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918 depicted — and often still depicts — the three centuries when the Czechs were ruled from Vienna as “the era of darkness”. This was certainly a handy slogan for creating a Czech national identity, and the inglorious defeat at White Mountain unquestionably brought about some harsh consequences for the Czechs, but compared to real life during those 300 years, it was most probably a dramatic exaggeration.

Bar a period following the 1848 uprising against the Habsburgs, which had stronger public support in Hungary and other parts of the Empire, Vienna enhanced the cultural and economic development of Bohemia and Moravia. How could Bohemia otherwise become the Empire’s industrial hub? Logically, what Vienna didn’t support was the demand for Czech sovereignty that emerged during the national revival in the middle of nineteenth century (see: Czech Language).

In the slightly nationalistic climate that followed the separation of Czechoslovakia in 1993 it’s not a politically correct question, but one can ask whether the broad masses of Czechs were all that dissatisfied as the Emperor’s subjects.

What really infuriated them, was Franz Josef’s decision not to come to Prague to be crowned a Czech king, and also the fact that Hungary, in 1867, was made Austria’s equal within the Empire, while the Czechs were not. But basically, the Czechs’ ambiguous attitude to the Austro-Hungarian Empire is reminiscent of those two old ladies who went to the manager of the hotel where they were staying to complain about the food. “It’s completely inedible,” one of them snorted. “And the portions are far too small,” the other added.

However, the last years of kakánie (a popular Czech renaming of the Empire, based on the frequently used abbreviation kk — kaiserlich und königlich, which resembles that verb kakat — to take a dump) were far from funny.

When Austria-Hungary in 1914 declared war on Serbia, the Czech population was drawn into a carnage in which they didn’t have any political interest (see: Švejk, The Good Soldier), and which ultimately cost more than 200.000 young Czechs their lives. Still, almost every city, town and village in Bohemia and Moravia has a monument honouring the huge sacrifice that the Czech nation had to pay “because of those ΨΔ↓א! Austrians”.

Only twenty years after Czechoslovakia’s First Republic was established, hell broke loose once again. Most Austrians were thrilled when their countryman Adolf Hitler in March 1938 incorporated Austria into Nazi Germany, and they were not too sad when Bohemia and Moravia were occupied by Nazi troops a year later (see: Munich Agreement). It’s not exactly heroic, but perhaps understandable that the Czechs longed for revenge after the war. As soon as Russian troops had liberated Southern Moravia, thousands of ethnic Germans — including children, women and old people — were gathered in Brno, and then forced to march more than 50 kilometres without stopping all the way to Austria.

After the Velvet Revolution, some very vocal Austrians, most notably Jörg Haider and his supporters, have advocated that the Czechs should do penance for the “death march” and similar atrocities, and also that the subsequent confiscation of the expelled Germans’ property needs to be discussed. This is regarded as a caustic provocation by a vast majority of the Czech population, who feel that the Austrians should praise themselves lucky to be considered victims of Nazi aggression, and not as Hitler’s enthusiastic supporters, which might be more appropriate.

This goes double for the Czechoslovak Germans expelled to Austria in 1945. They should, as the Czech Republic’s former premier Miloš Zeman (see: Carlsbad English Bitters) once subtly declared, be “grateful for not being executed as traitors”. As a result of these historic resentments, even the smallest and most insignificant Czech-Austrian spat has a tendency to end up as wild discussions about the Second World War.