The Czechs in a Nutshell

When Nikita Khrushchev’s political thaw finally reached Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, Austria gave full backing to Alexander Dubček and his comrade-reformers. One might even claim that Helmut Zilk, the boss of Austrian state television at that time and later Vienna’s flamboyant mayor, personally contributed to kick-starting the Prague Spring when he launched a tele-bridge where Czech and Austrian teams competed live. In 1968, when the attempt to reform communism ended in tragedy, Premier Bruno Kreisky (check the origin of that name!) personally ensured that Austria for the next two decades adapted a very generous — and in the Czech Republic never fully appreciated — policy towards Czech political emigrants.

It’s a telling expression of all the misunderstandings and failures accompanying the Czech-Austrian relations that when president Václav Havel, in the late 1990s, decided to reward Helmut Zilk with a state order for his personal contribution to help Czechs and Slovaks, it all ended in a scandal. The Czech Ministry of Interior ran a routine check on Vienna’s popular and respected mayor and found his name registered among the communist secret police StB’s foreign informers (see: Lustration). Thus, a well-meant step towards reconciliation turned out to be just another slap in the face.

Ultimately, to understand the Czechs’ relations to the Austrians, it’s tempting to use a theory, developed by the writer Herman Hesse, that also applies to their relations to the Germans:

If you dislike a person, you dislike something in him that is a part of yourself. Consequently, the Czechs dislike the Austrians even more than they dislike the Germans, because they, thanks to the centuries of Habsburg rule, have even more in common with them. But the difference is not too significant. As every Czech knows — Austrians are basically Germans who wear hats!

Balkans

It happens year after year: when the holiday season starts in July, almost one million Czechs (correct, that’s 10 percent of the population!) pack their Škodas full of beer, camping gear and food, and head off to the South. After a swift, eight-hour drive, most of them (see: Driving a Car) reach a camping site, pension or hotel on Croatia’s beautiful Adriatic cost.

Of course, the sea (plus relatively low prices) is what primarily draws all those Czech landlubbers to Croatia. But there are lots of other advantages, too. Croatian is a Slavonic language, and a Czech can, with some effort, communicate in his or her mother tongue. Their respective cultural heritage is not that different, as both the Czechs and the Croatians were for hundreds of years a part of Austria-Hungary, and both nations have experienced a communist regime, although Tito’s Yugoslavia was definitely a lighter and more colourful version of one than Husák’s grey Czechoslovakia.

This, you might conclude, must make the Czechs feel almost at home in Croatia and mentally very close to the Balkan region. Peculiarly enough, you’re both absolutely right and completely wrong. Yes, most Czechs apparently feel almost at home in Croatia. And no, barring the former Soviet Union (see: Russians), it’s hard to imagine a geographic area that has a worse image than the countries on the Balkan Peninsula.

To je hotový Balkán (That’s the Balkan way of doing things) is a common exclamation when a Czech encounters unpleasant phenomena such as corruption, bulging bureaucracy, souring criminality, chaos, violence, religious intolerance or unacceptably temperamental behaviour (see: Communication). Jaroslav Hašek’s soldier Švejk often refers to the wine cellar “Sarajevo” where people are fighting all the time. The name of a Bosnian city, Maglaj, has even become a frequently used expression in Czech language for anything that is wild and unpleasant. V hospodě je maglajz means that the pub is stuffed with people who very likely are beating the guts out of each other.

Not surprisingly, the Czechs’ belittling attitude towards the Balkan has its roots in history. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the south-eastern part of Europe was more or less in constant turmoil. This affected the Czechs quite directly, since the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which they were a part of, occupied Bosnia in 1878.