The Czechs in a Nutshell

Later, at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States gave Czechoslovakia the formal go-ahead to finish the operation. The Czechs didn’t waste their time. By the end of 1946, about 2.9 million Sudeten Germans — including social democrats who opposed Henlein’s SdP — had been mercilessly chucked out of the country, without any more belongings than the few things they could carry with them. Historians still disagree, but estimates suggest that at least 23,000 persons died during this “transfer”, as it is officially called in Czech.

Within three years of the end of the war, the number of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia was reduced to 150,000 persons (less than five percent of the pre-war community), who immediately had to assimilate into their Czech surroundings.

Judged by modern standards, the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans suspiciously resembles collective guilt and ethnic cleansing as lately seen in the former Yugoslavia. To most Czechs, though, it was a fair and deserved repayment for their undeniable participation in crushing democratic Czechoslovakia in 1938. It has also convinced many Czechs, especially older ones, that co-habitation with foreigners never brings anything good, and that multiculturalism is Western mumbo-jumbo.

Mushrooms

In one of his lectures, the legendary linguist Vladimír Skalička presented a theory that once and for all pinpointed the quintessential difference between Europe’s Germanic and Slavonic peoples.

“There is one decisive criterion,” the great linguist maintained. “While the Germanic nations detest mushrooms, the Slavonic peoples cherish mushrooms as a gastronomic delicacy, and use any opportunity to go to the forests and pick them.”

Photo © Terje B. Englund

The alleged cultural clash between the Germanic peoples and the Slavs definitely belongs in history’s graveyard. Yet in one respect professor Skalička was right. The Czechs are downright crazy about mushrooms! In late summer and autumn, a foreigner might even get the impression that the number of sponge-hunting Czechs roaming about in the forests with a punnet largely exceeds the possible number of mushrooms.

Why? As the professor said — mushrooms are considered to be a delicacy. If Czech cuisine in general appears to be — mildly speaking — a bit dull, this certainly doesn’t go for mushrooms. Any decent cook in the country knows at least a dozen ways to transform the fungus into more or less tasty dishes. And lots of other cooks know how to prepare the mushrooms that give you week-long hallucinations...

The advice to the foreigner is therefore evident: you needn’t become a mushroom freak, nor even pretend that the fungi dishes taste wonderful. But never speak derogatorily about them! In addition to insulting the Czechs’ cultural values, you will be perceived as a barbarian!

National Identity

Some years ago a sociologist, Jiří Pacek, confronted the readers of the daily Lidové Noviny with an intriguing question: when Pepa Novák, the average Czech, is to describe his country’s national identity, he normally doesn’t pull his punches. The Czechs by and large regard themselves to be a very cultivated, highly educated and broad-minded nation with golden hands and a natural flair for egalitarianism, improvisation and, not least, humour (see: Švejk, The Good Soldier).

However, when the same Pepa is to present his views of the individual Czechs who are actually living around him, then he’ll probably change his tune completely: “The average Czech is a sly and conformist egoist,” Pepa would say, “capable of adapting to almost any degree of suppression from any rotten regime as long as it gives him some advantages.”

How, then, can these selfish anti-heroes create such a broad-minded and educated people? Pacek didn’t offer any clear answers to the puzzle, except for concluding that the Czechs’ view of their national identity doesn’t agree much with the view they have of themselves. However, the social anthropologist Ladislav Holý, a Czech who fled to Great Britain after the Soviet invasion, didn’t intend to accept this contradiction. As soon as the Velvet Revolution’s dust settled, he returned to his native country to conduct a broad field survey of how Czechs from various layers of society perceive their national identity.

Later, the results of the survey were presented in a book, which Holý gave the rather striking title “The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation”. As one might expect when Holý was considered a foreigner, his conclusions didn’t go well down with all his Czech colleagues.