History has no single gear, no set speed. Long periods of stability oscillate with moments of trauma, capable of sending societies in new directions. History was certainly on the move, to use Arnold Toynbee’s expression, in the Bohemia from which Ernest Gellner came. Once ruled by the Hapsburgs, it saw in his lifetime the interwar Czechoslovak democracy dominated by Tomáš Masaryk; a short period of ethnic tension and political stalemate after Munich; incorporation (without Slovakia) into the Third Reich; and a further short period of putative Czechoslovak independence followed by effective rule by Moscow between 1948 and 1989, leading in turn to renewed independence for Czechoslovakia and ultimately the creation of separate Czech and Slovak Republics. Gellner’s childhood was spent in Prague, and he returned to the city in 1945 after, as he put it, a first period of exile.1 A long second period of exile followed when he left again in 1946, convinced that communist rule would condemn Bohemia to a period of darkness as long as that which had followed the imposition of the Counter-Reformation after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620.
This chapter describes the formative period of Gellner’s life, leaving for later the evolution of his views about Czechoslovakia and the Czechs – in which lack of interest turned to engagement followed by return. The Hapsburg world from which his parents came needs to be evoked here. Memories of that world were part of his childhood, and some of its tensions – above all those to do with nationalism – were also present in the Czechoslovakia of his youth. Gellner’s brilliant parable about the character of nationalism, as the conflict between Megalomania and Ruritania, clearly derived from the late Hapsburg empire.2 Gellner’s theory will later be confronted with evidence drawn from late-nineteenth-century Bohemia, but my initial intention is simpler: to put his theory to one side in order to describe a social world as it appeared to him in his early years.
Identities were in flux in late nineteenth-century Bohemia. Two particular social forces need to be mentioned. First, industrialization utterly changed the character of social life. By 1914 Bohemia was producing fully half of the industrial output of the Empire, thereby turning peasants into urban industrial workers. But another force pointed in a different direction. Nationalist leaders sought to cage people vertically within national communities, preventing them from making lateral connections across them. This is a very careful formulation. Nationalist leaders were trying to create national identities; they were ‘nationalizers’ rather than representatives of preexisting communities. It is important in this regard to stress that the use of a given language did not necessarily determine one’s sense of belonging. German in particular was a language of social mobility, given its status in Vienna, for anyone who became fluent. German speakers had initially felt that the language transcended national identity, imagining that there would be some general movement towards the use of German, at once the language of a high culture and that employed at the heart of the imperial state. But this did not happen. Czech nationalist activists sought rather to create an alternative community. They turned Czech from a peasant dialect into a medium of high culture, thereby seeking to transform rather than merely to protect Czech speakers. Once they had achieved some success, a rationale for German nationalism developed in turn, that is, nationalist activists amongst German speakers sought to create a German-identified community capable of making its own demands.3 The general point can be put in a different way. Feelings of national belonging had been, and often remained, very weak. In areas of mixed language use people’s declared national identities switched back and forth in decennial censuses, deeply irritating nationalist militants.4 The censuses in question did not allow the reporting of multiple identities, nor did they provide the option of claiming an identity based merely on political loyalty to the Hapsburg state. Further, it was not possible to report a Jewish national identity. A word of warning should be issued at this point: both German and Czech nationalist movements were in fact loyal to the state, seeking to change its character rather than to destroy it.5 And by the turn of the century they had at least partial success, as Vienna partly abandoned its hopes of remaining a supranational entity by explicitly recognizing national group loyalties.6 This did not, however, prevent many Jews and socialists from remaining loyal to the ideal of a polity that would include or supersede all national affiliations.
The Jews of Bohemia, including Gellner’s forebears, faced unique difficulties. As the struggle between Czech and German nationalizers intensified, not least because state funds were often allocated based on the size of purportedly solid national communities, Jews were under pressure to choose sides. The more educated and urban among them were German speakers, many of whom were loyal to the empire. Because of the limited options provided by the census form, the crucial question was whether Jews would identify themselves with what might be termed the German or Czech ‘communities-in-formation’. If some Czech militants wanted Jews to assimilate completely, others resisted this – and Masaryk, despite his fundamental liberalism, was sufficiently ill-at-ease with Jews to reject assimilation in favour of integration, that is, to allow Jews civil rights while preferring that they remain a distinct cultural group. Many developments followed from this, including the creation of new Zionist politics, with intellectuals who felt especially ‘de-territorialized’ often moving between different positions in short order.7 Nonetheless, a generalization can be made: Jews slowly moved, under pressure, towards the Czech side, calculating that they had little choice given the demographic weight of Czech speakers in Bohemia.8 Some indication of the situation can be seen in 1921 figures for Prague: 94.2 per cent of Prague, as measured by mother tongue, claimed to be Czech, highlighting the absolute end of German-speakers’ hegemony in the city.9 Within the Jewish community 5,900 claimed Jewish national identity (the new census form allowed this religion, but no others, to be selected as a nationality), 7,426 chose German, and fully 16,342 opted for Czech identity. This last figure may well have been exaggerated, as many sought to hide their links to the German community.10 While Jews agreed to schooling in Czech, many took care to ensure that their children also gained German cultural capital. Gellner’s parents exemplify this situation.
Gellner’s father, Rudolf, came from the northern part of Bohemia, the area that became known as the Sudetenland. Rudolf’s maternal grandmother was born Friederike Meltzer and later married William Lobl. A family memoir by Julius Gellner, the younger brother of Rudolf, describes their marriage in these terms:
Mr Lobl was happy in his life in a small village: he got on well with all the peasants, though being a Jew and a very true believer – he ran the village shop, had a cow, a field and a little schnapps distillery, he was happy in his unlimited and unconditional belief in the goodness of God. Not so Friederike his wife: the strongest person I ever experienced (in direct contact) in my life, most powerful and dictatorial. She said one day, after having given birth to three children: ‘enough is enough – I want to go to the big town of Saaz’ … she wanted to live an intellectual life; indeed she did; she was not only a free thinker and an atheist, she believed in the rights of women …11
Their daughter, Anna Lobl, married Max Gellner, and the family initially lived in Kadan before moving, as the result of anti-Semitic riots, to Saaz in 1897 and to Prague in 1910. There were nine children; Rudolf was the eighth, born on 13 August 1897, and the fourth of five sons. The family was German speaking, and the names of the children – Hedwig, Toni, Otto, Elsa, Rosa, Fritz, Wilhelm, Rudolf and Julius – demonstrated, not least to Gellner at a later date, that the family’s fundamental loyalty was to Vienna.12 The dominant influence upon the children was that of the grandmother and mother; the latter came from a well-educated and affluent family, and surely gained centrality when Max’s two business ventures failed. The two parents and nine children initially lived in two rooms, and slept on mattresses held up by chairs. Poverty was counteracted by cultural capital for ‘literature was the substitute for luxury’. The eldest sister Hedwig would soothe the younger children to sleep by reciting the great monologues of Schiller’s Maria Stuart and Don Carlos, and especially Goethe’s Faust. The two eldest brothers later lived with rich local families, offering tuition for their children in exchange for room and board. If this helped the family to move to a slightly larger apartment, the character of family life did not much change: both Rudolf and Julius learnt great set pieces from Faust which they had to declaim to neighbours and visitors. The family made up for its lack of affluence by means of this emphasis on intellectual achievement, and through dramatic social mobility. Most of the brothers and at least one of the sisters gained doctorates in the professions. Hedwig ran the Zionist offices in Prague for many years, and then became a civil servant in Israel of sufficient seniority to embarrass her nephew by arranging for his transport by tank for a visit to the desert on what was probably his first journey to Israel in 1951. The two oldest brothers were lawyers; they started a law journal specializing in translation. Wilhelm became a medical doctor, eventually settling in Paris to work for agencies linked to the United Nations. Julius became a producer for the German Theatre in Prague before achieving fame as a theatrical producer in London. All Rudolf’s siblings were to escape the Holocaust by moving to Palestine or to England, with the exception of Otto who refused to leave the successful international law firm he had established, a decision that led to his family’s deaths, including his own, at the hands of the Nazis.
Rudolf ran away from home to fight as a volunteer in the First World War. ‘The state of mind in which he did it must have been strange and contradictory’, in the later judgement of his son, ‘because he was at the same time some kind of pacifist’.13 He was wounded, saved by Russian soldiers after lying in the snow for two days, and imprisoned near Lake Baikal – where, with prisoners giving lectures to each other, he received, in his son’s estimation, an education in what must then have been one of the greatest universities in the world.14 The young Rudolf developed a fascination with Russian culture and language; it seems that he visited Russia two or three times in the interwar period.15 These sentiments were passed on to his son, who in his own turn loved to speak Russian and spent a sabbatical year in Moscow in 1988–89.16 Rudolf was sympathetic to the Bolshevik revolution. Amongst his fellow prisoners was Arnošt Kolman (1892–1979), a cultural Zionist who became a communist in Russia during the war, and who was later something of an official mouthpiece of the regime in Prague.17 Rudolf eventually left aboard a ship from Vladivostock and passed through Yokohama, perhaps receiving help from the Jewish community in the latter city. His intellectual interests then led him to Berlin to find out more about Max Weber, who had recently died and whom he came to admire greatly.18 He then returned to Prague to gain further qualification in law at the German university.19 He married on 30 January 1923. The marriage took place against the wishes of his eldest sister, who had extremely high expectations of her siblings. There is a sense in which she was right. Ernest André Gellner was born in Paris, on 9 December 1925, because Rudolf was undertaking research for a second doctorate on the works of the anti-revolutionary thinkers De Maistre and Lamennais. This project had to be abandoned, and Rudolf became a frustrated intellectual.20 The birth of a second child in 1929, Marianne Rita, doubtless made an academic career still less likely. There was genuine poverty in the early years of the marriage, survival on one occasion dependent on the selling of books. Thereafter Rudolf gained employment in a chemical firm, and eventually established one of his own with a partner, Arnošt Taussig. Rudolf was the brains behind the business while his partner excelled at ‘salesmanship’, a formula they would reproduce successfully in England.21 Rudolf’s continuing intellectual interests found an outlet when he became the publisher of Právo Československé (which means both ‘Czechoslovak Law’ and ‘Czechoslovak Right’), a legal journal that was close to the official ideology of the republic and which offered commentaries on new legislation. The young Ernest would see the proofs in the apartment, often with the title page badly printed. He would joke that the journal should have been called ‘Czechoslovak Right with Crooked Letters’. ‘The symbolism of Czechoslovak Right having wobbly letters was not lost on me, even at the time’.22
Ernest’s mother, Anna Fantl, came from Krumlov, a beautiful medieval town in the south of Bohemia, much patronized by Viennese artists in the years before the First World War. Her family, comprised of the parents and three daughters, was predominantly German speaking. Anna was born on 13 November 1894, and so was slightly older than her husband. Her family had been more economically secure than Rudolf’s, although it suffered badly due to the decision to invest in Imperial War Bonds in 1914 – on the mistaken grounds that these would be secure. But the family was never much more than lower middle class. It seems likely that the family had liberal leanings. The young Ernest was upset by a copy of a locally famous painting showing the arrest by Austrian police of Karel Havlíček, the outspoken Czech nationalist militant and journalist, that hung in the family house, and asked about its meaning.23 Secularization had taken place in Anna’s family a generation before it had in Rudolf’s. Anna herself had Zionist leanings. In 1921 she worked for the twelfth Zionist Congress in Karlovy Vary.24 She too moved to Prague, and worked as a secretary in the Zionist offices together with Hedwig. There she met Rudolf. Her Zionism, her considerable gift for languages (amplified sometime before the marriage by a year spent in England), and the fact that she married into an exceptionally intellectual family might indicate some concern with ideas. But Anna was not an intellectual; indeed, by common assent she was not very well educated. She was extremely warm and was remembered with great affection by Eric Hošek, whose mother was a friend of Anna’s. The boys, too, became friends, and their mothers decided to send them to the same primary school.25
Gellner was much impressed with Perry Anderson’s powerful argument that the exiles and émigrés who came to Britain from Central and Eastern Europe tended to adopt conservative views, while those with more radical opinions moved to the United States.26 But Gellner was not always careful with the details of particular texts, and attributed an interpretation to Anderson – that the difference can be explained by the fact that the former but not the latter had lost their estates – that the essay does not in fact contain. This reading lies behind Gellner’s insistence, at the end of his life, that his family had never enjoyed privilege:
Both families I spring from were unambiguously petty bourgeois, and provincial to boot. The family only became very precariously middle class in culture (but not yet economically) during my father’s generation and in the course of my youth. My father had a degree and so even did some of his sisters, but my mother had only pretty elementary education.27
This somewhat downplays the cultural development and educational achievements of Rudolf’s family: it was unusual, for example, for women to obtain degrees. Further, Rudolf and Anna were able to establish a niche in the intellectual life of the city. The family lived in the Dejvice district and their longest residency was in an apartment on Veverková, the street on which Prague’s modern art gallery was then found. This location is revealing. It was a new middle-class area, far removed from more recognizably Jewish areas of the city. Gellner remembered the meetings of many Czech intellectuals in the apartment. Amongst them were the sociologists Josef Navrátil, the last pre-war director of the Masaryk Institute; Karel Kupka, who worked in the Institut d’Études Slaves in Paris and wrote several articles on Max Weber; the architect and painter Arne Hošek; and Moritz Winternitz, an Indologist at the German university in Prague. An interview with Gellner late in his life led his friend, the sociologist Jiří Musil, to portray the parents as patriots of the first Czechoslovakia, deeply supportive of Masaryk’s ideals, and integrated into the new local high culture.28
This was a deeply prosaic culture: social democratic and liberal, antifascist and opposed to irrational tendencies of all kinds.29 The most general characterization of the family must be that it was ‘Czechoslovakifying’, but with knowledge of a Jewish cultural background and of Zionism. They were happy to take the holidays allowed to Jewish students – although these were used for picnics and other family outings. Jewish cultural identity emphatically did not translate into any Jewish religious observances, not even the minimal ones of circumcision or bar mitzvahs. Gellner was profoundly ignorant of the details of Jewish religious observances to the end of his days.
The census return of 1930 supports this view, but adds a little complexity. The law required people to identify their birthplace, their date of arrival in Prague, the district in which their legal records were kept, their nationality by mother tongue, their religion, and their profession. One element of the Gellner census return perhaps gives evidence of loyalty to Masaryk’s world, and certainly to parental desire for their children to function successfully within it. A Roman Catholic Czech maid, Božena Krudičkova, lived with the family so as to ensure that the children would be fluent in Czech, which was indeed used between them, while the parents spoke together in German despite the fact that they had also learned Czech. Beyond that there are interesting complexities. A German-speaking governess of Jewish religion, Paula Gutmann, lived with the family, to ensure familiarity with German language and culture.30 Then the father claimed German as nationality by mother tongue for himself and for the two children. In contrast, Anna’s nationality was declared to be Jewish. Both the parents and children were accorded a Jewish background in the religion column. This census return suggests that there may have been some difference of opinion within the family, given that Anna’s nationality is reported as Jewish. This view may also be supported by her earlier work for the Zionist bureau, as well as by a passport application of 1938 in which her religion is given as ‘Israel’ – a term somewhat stronger than ‘Jewish’.31 One reason for this change was the clear understanding on the part of the Jewish community of Masaryk’s desire to diminish the size of the German population. Nonetheless Rudolf identified himself as German, despite the family’s admiration for Masaryk.32
There were obvious reasons for the admiration of Masaryk. Czechoslovakia was the only new democracy east of the Rhine to endure after the Great War. It proved to be an exceptionally vibrant society. The republic was radically democratic, instituting a mass of social reform programmes – from the right of women to vote to tenant protection, from the removal of all aristocratic privilege to varied acts ensuring the protection of labour rights. Czechoslovakia attracted thousands of students from Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, while many Jewish students from Hungary and Poland came either for university or for technical training. Prague boasted not just German and Czech universities, but also a Ukrainian one. The German university was particularly distinguished, numbering amongst its staff Rudolf Carnap.33 Ukrainian and Russian émigrés and exiles flocked there, including Roman Jakobson who did a great deal to create the celebrated Czech school of linguistics, noting when he left for the United States in 1939 that he felt more Czech than anything else. French and Russian gymnasia and an English grammar school were opened, adding to the four German gymnasia already in existence. If intellectuals of the right moved to Belgrade and many of the left to Berlin, Prague tended to attract social democrats. The culture of the city at that time looked resolutely to the West, and particularly to the United States, whose powerful avant-garde art was much admired.
One should not idealize this world. The weakness of the Second Republic established after Munich showed that liberal democracy had not taken very deep root. Crucially, national groupings failed to reach any final form of political accommodation. Czech nationalists occupied the German theatre in the early 1920s, and they protested vehemently against the showing of German films in Prague cinemas in the 1930s. This is one element that lies behind the Republic’s notable democratic deficit. A form of power-sharing between the major political interests, the petka, prevented full popular participation, not least because the Sudeten Germans were excluded for a long period. Perhaps this was inevitable; it seemed to allow the country to function. There was also a second element to consider. Masaryk and Edvard Beneš tended to see politics as a science rather than as an arena for competing interests, thereby creating what was very much a ‘guided’ democracy, in which the ruling forces never lost an election.34 Still, one should not judge a democracy by timeless, Platonic standards. Prague in those years was a vibrant success, especially when seen in comparative terms.
Gellner was a particularly handsome and mischievous child, often getting into scrapes as the result of ‘dares’. The family was apparently a peaceful one, however, and there was little outward sign of differences between the parents.35 At the weekends the family would visit Rudolf’s father Max, who lived in the old town, and close relations were maintained with Anna’s sisters.36 Winter holidays were taken in the Reichenberg mountains in northern Bohemia. Some part of summer holidays were spent in Příbram, a small town to the south of Prague, where Anna’s sister Ida helped her husband, Bergmann, run an ironmonger’s shop.37 The importance of the periods spent in Příbram needs to be underlined: Gellner was as aware of rural life as he was of the extreme poverty in Prague, whose population and industrial power both grew rapidly in the interwar period. Further, the young boy attended summer camps, then highly popular in Central Europe: he learnt Czech songs, became a fine skater, and gained a proficiency in canoeing that he retained thereafter.38 Beneath this pleasant upbringing, however, there were tensions within the family, which sometimes strained relations. Gellner himself apparently felt that the father was closer to the daughter, and later claimed, as previously noted, that he was blamed for curtailing his father’s intellectual career. Equally, he felt suffocated by the mother, who habitually opened his mail even when he was an adult. Her desire to ‘feed him up’ apparently explained his near-vegetarian diet.39 He certainly felt that his childhood had been unhappy and made this clear to his own children, who were well aware of his desire to give them the sort of upbringing of which he felt deprived. It is hard to weigh these psychological dynamics against the disorientation and sense of loss resulting from exile. Both elements contributed to his sentiments and character.
Gellner went to two schools in Prague. His primary school, which he entered in 1931, was ‘amiably named “By the Little Fountain”, which suggests an inn rather than a school … [It was on] the edge of the park where one might meet the President on his rides if one was lucky’.40 It was within walking distance from his home, and he attended lessons with Eric Hošek who remained a friend thereafter. The school was Czech, and this led to a particular scene that Gellner would recount in later life. After the singing of a popular song, he put his hand up in class and said that he knew a different set of words, and then sang a German version. This was received with sufficient coldness that he never made the same mistake again. One detail of the school reports – repeated in his next school – is worth noting. Despite a lack of religious upbringing he was classified as Jewish or Hebrew, and thereby exempted from religious instruction.
In 1935 Ernest transferred to the Prague English Grammar School. One of his classmates was Otto Pick, who later also escaped to England, before pursuing an academic career, first in the United States and then in England.41 Pick’s parents had sent him to the school because they could see the writing on the wall. They had relatives in England, and felt that an English education might help emigration. Perhaps a similar calculation motivated Ernest’s parents. Rudolf’s sister Elsa had married an Englishman who worked in a shipping firm, and with whom she had three daughters; this happy fact made the acquisition of a visa much more likely.42 The school was also attractive, however, solely for the quality of the education it provided, and Gellner was sufficiently fond of it that he later went to some trouble to track down former pupils of whom he was aware, from before and after his time there.43 In later life he described being taught by figures resembling Auden and Isherwood, that is, by casually dressed and relaxed young men who had attended public schools and Oxbridge. This was a happy contrast to the strict formalism of both Czech and German education. Indeed, one of his first assignments was to learn how to tell a joke in English. His school reports show that his progress was superior, with ‘very good’ marks sustained for more than half the subjects studied.
This did not mean that his intellectual formation was English in character. Very much to the contrary, his sentimental education at this time was overwhelmingly Czech. Several indications of the depth of this early identity can be seen from Gellner’s later behaviour. He was in the habit of singing Czech songs with Peter Stern (who had married the sister of Michael McMullen, a close friend Gellner made at Oxford).44 Then there is his declaration late in life about his fondness for Czech folk songs, responding to the charge made by critics of his theory of nationalism that he was insensible to nationalism’s emotional appeal:
… I am deeply sensitive to the spell of nationalism. I can play about thirty Bohemian folk songs (or songs presented as such in my youth) on my mouth organ. My oldest friend, whom I have known since the age of three or four and who is Czech and a patriot, cannot bear to hear me play them because he says I do it in such a schmaltzy way, ‘crying into the mouth organ’. I do not think I could have written the book on nationalism which I did write, were I not capable of crying, with the help of a little alcohol, over folk songs, which happen to be my favourite form of music.45
This is the appropriate moment to reiterate that, while he knew the tricultural world of Kafka, he was part of a different generation which was able to envision belonging – ‘re-territorialization’ – within a world which was, especially in comparative perspective, manifestly attractive. It was precisely the abandonment of a potential site of belonging that was so painful for Gellner, and which led him to classify his periods away as those of exile. Two elements of identification are relevant here.
The most obvious element was simply that the presence of Masaryk symbolized the possibility of entrance into mainstream society. The presence of the Founder-President of Czechoslovakia was absolutely pervasive in the new state’s public life, not least in schoolrooms where his picture was displayed. He had been a professional philosopher and sociologist before becoming the ‘President-Liberator’. He maintained that the Czechs were returning to the path upon which they had set out before the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. Czech democracy and Czech liberalism had been foreshadowed by the Hussite proto-Reformation of the fifteenth century, the socially radical practice of the Taborites, and the elective monarchy of George of Podĕbrady with its plans for a novel and peaceful international order. Their incipient progress was brutally halted by the triumph of the Hapsburg Counter-Reformation.46 Further, Masaryk was internationalist in his intellectual sources, and provided a philosophical justification for Czech state formation. In his World Revolution, published in 1925, the year of Gellner’s birth, he argued that the Czech national revolution was vindicated as part of a wider global triumph of democracy and liberal national self-determination that was displacing theocratic and absolutist modes of governance, which were locally represented by the decaying Hapsburg Empire.47 Gellner late in life described the impact of Masaryk’s general credo on his fellow citizens in these terms:
The West is democratic, the West is strong, it is democratic because it is strong and strong because democratic, and because this is the way world history is going. We had been in on this splendid movement sooner than most, as early as the fifteenth century, we had been unjustly deprived of our birthright, but now we are safely back where we belong, and so we are indeed safe … I have had my primary education, and two and a half years of secondary education, in Prague schools, and I can only say that this message emanated, unambiguously and confidently, from the portraits of the President-Liberator which adorned every classroom. Major premise: world history is our guide and guarantor. Minor premise: world history has chosen democracy and the West as its agents, and therefore they are irresistible, and their allies (notably ourselves) are safe.48
There was much to admire in the life of this philosopher-president, including his debunking of fraudulent manuscripts intended to demonstrate Czech medieval glories and his brave public stance in defence of Rudolf Hilsner, a Jew falsely accused of ritual murder. Masaryk was a nationalist for whom Gellner had a lifelong appreciation, a man who did not knowingly embrace ethnic fictions and who resisted the anti-Semitism of many of his co-nationals. When Masaryk died in 1937, the young Gellner was one of those who walked past his coffin at the great national ceremony.49
Quite as important were the books that influenced the young schoolboy. He particularly enjoyed the works of Karel Čapek, Egon Erwin Kisch, Jaroslav Žak, Jaroslav Hašek, František Kopta and Vitezslav Nezval.50 Čapek was probably the most important humanist Czech writer in the 1920s and 1930s, and a close friend of Masaryk. He warned against the dangers of modern civilization, and in his work, mainly his plays, he was anti-fascist – dying after Munich, popular myth had it, of a broken heart. Kisch was a committed journalist who wrote in German about his travels and about the lives of Prague people on the margin of society. Žak was a teacher writing witty stories from the grammar school milieu. Hašek was perhaps the best-known Czech writer internationally, thanks to his hero The Good Soldier Švejk. An indication of the distance of Gellner’s generation from that of Kafka’s is contained in a 1975 review of a new edition of the novel – in which Gellner claimed that the low humour and cunning compromises of Švejk were quite as much part of the Czech character as were the metaphysical mysteries of Kafka. Gellner further claimed that one of the characters in Švejk was based on a distant relation, the superb but drunken poet František Gellner, drawings of whose public readings hung in his house in Hampshire in later years.51 Kopta was the author of novels about the Czech legions in Siberia – that is, the legions which fought briefly against the Bolsheviks in 1919. Gellner particularly remembered being impressed by Nezval’s Fifty-Two Bitter Ballads: these Villon-like poems were for a time his favourite reading.52 To this portrait of long-run background intellectual influences can be added the political satires of Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich, which came to the fore in the 1930s. Gellner apparently particularly liked their ‘Heavy Barbara’ sketch, which involved a struggle between two mythical countries, Eidam and Yberland, the latter of which resembled Nazi Germany.
If there was a prospect of genuine belonging, it was not automatic or unconscious. At the age of eleven he would, he later remembered, systematically miss out one word at random from the national oath taken as the Czechoslovak flag was raised at his summer camp, not out of disloyalty, but because he felt it too early to commit himself until he had ‘figured it all out’.53 This element of contingency in his identity was surely exacerbated by storm clouds in the political sky.54 The happy decade of the 1920s for the multinational Czechoslovakian state came into question in the 1930s. Deep tensions came to characterize Prague life. With unemployment came an exacerbation of poverty, and there were a few pro-fascist demonstrations and many anti-fascist ones – unsurprisingly, given that Prague had become the home of the exiled organizations of both Austrian and German social democracy. Edvard Beneš, another professorial president, uncritically absorbed from Masaryk a facile liberal historicism – the belief that history was patterned, and that democracy was its telos. This led Beneš to believe at the time of the Anschluss in 1938 that the Nazis were doomed, and left the new Republic’s leaders insufficiently alarmed by the rise of Hitler.55 Many Sudeten German speakers turned to the Third Reich. Konrad Heinlein, their leader, increasingly took instructions directly from the Nazis, and sought to make it impossible for Prague to govern the Sudetenland.56 Appallingly ignorant British intervention, first by Lord Runciman and then by Neville Chamberlain, encouraged France to abandon its defence treaty obligations to Czechoslovakia. This led to the handing over on a plate of the Sudetenland to Hitler in the Munich agreement signed on 29 September 1938. Czechoslovakia lost 86 per cent of its glass production, 80 per cent of its textiles, and 70 per cent of its iron and steel industries. Still more important, it lost its defensive lines, allowing Hitler easy entry six months later.
Throughout the late 1930s the adults in Ernest’s family could not have been unaware of increased danger to themselves and to the state. ‘As Munich time approached, the anticipation of war and of the bombing of Prague which, it was thought, would certainly accompany it, caused my mother to take me and my sister to a small town in central Bohemia where her kin (one of only two Jewish families in the community) ran an ironmonger shop’.57 He recalled President Beneš announcing that he had a plan to cope with the crisis, but subsequently resigning and flying off to Switzerland: ‘In Czech, the word plan is the same as the final part of the word aeroplane, and the joke went around – yes, he had a plan, an aeroplane.’58 After Munich, the returning Gellners had to prove they were residents of Prague when the authorities tried to stop an influx of refugees from the Sudetenland, fearing that if too many German speakers came into the diminished Czechoslovakia they might endanger the new state by giving Hitler a new irredentist argument.59 Any lingering optimism the Gellners may have had would have received a salutary blow from the speed with which the Nazis rounded up political opponents and Jews as soon as they entered the Sudetenland. Catholic anti-Semitism also became a much more palpable force in Czechoslovakia. It had always been vigorous in neighbouring Austria, and was legitimated there as government policy after the Anschluss with the German Reich. Gellner recalled that his teacher of Czech literature, who would abandon membership in the League Against Bolshevism to become a member of the Communist Party after the war, ‘just happened to select, for reading aloud, a passage from a novel about peasant life in which the main character indulged in an anti-Semitic expletive’.60 The Second Republic itself was witness to intensifying conflict between Slovaks and Czechs. ‘Masaryk had hoped that the Czechs and Slovaks would come together as the English and Scotch had done; the Slovaks turned out to be the Irish’.61 The Slovaks found Czech talk of their ‘little brother’ patronizing, and their growing self-assertion prefigured future crises.62 In these circumstances it was not surprising that the dictum often repeated in the last years of the republic was that there were Czechs and Slovaks, but the only real Czechoslovaks were the Jews.63
Rudolf traveled to England twice in 1938 to make arrangements for a life abroad. But the family was still living in Prague on 15 March 1939 when the Nazis marched in, perhaps because Rudolf and Taussig had had difficulty in selling their small chemical firm. The family was in a perilous situation. It was, however, possible for Anna and her two children to leave by train, though this required Rudolf overruling Anna’s sisters, who felt it irresponsible to leave given that Ernest’s sister Marianne had a severe cold.64 They eventually reached England on 9 April 1939, after a difficult journey through Belgium, apparently escaping inspection on one occasion because someone had written on the door of their carriage that the inmates had diphtheria. But Rudolf and Taussig were twice turned back at the Polish border. Otto Pick’s father was shot dead while trying to cross the border illegally, but Rudolf and Taussig were luckier, and entered Poland illegally and clandestinely on their third attempt.65 There they made contact with some old friends of Rudolf’s from his period of imprisonment near Lake Baikal. They were well-placed inside the Communist Party, and this somehow enabled them to provide documents allowing the two Czechs to reach England through Sweden. Rudolf arrived in England on 23 May 1939.
The family was reunited in London. Initially they joined Rudolf’s brother Wilhelm on Parliament Hill in North London, but in short order were able to find their own place in nearby Highgate at 11 Makepeace Avenue, London N6. This remained Ernest’s home until he married, except for two years spent evacuated at St Albans and time spent on active service and at Edinburgh University. Rudolf and Taussig went into business again, and began to make money immediately through a process that turned waste plastic chips and cuttings into plastic sheets.66 The family was financially secure, and Ernest was even somewhat spoiled by his parents according to one of his university friends.67 At a later date, Rudolf was able to support his son’s initial fieldwork expenses as an anthropology doctoral student.68 During the course of the 1960s the firm became very successful, with a turnover of perhaps more than a million pounds. The social scene in Highgate reproduced part of the world from which the parents had come. Rudolf and Anna continued to speak together in German, to the embarrassment of their daughter when she brought home friends during the war. Intellectual life was taken seriously, with Rudolf soon showing considerable knowledge of English literature. Ernest’s friends from university were welcomed into the Gellner home, but family tensions remained. The parents did visit Prague once after the war, but showed no desire to return: their world had gone.69 Anna died in 1954. The father then married Olga Koerbel, a widow of similar background who had two children of her own.70 Rudolf’s political views were apparently middle of the road, veering from support for the Labour Party to enthusiasm for the Social Democrats. It is possible that some monies were sent to Israel, but there was no evidence of any fervent Zionism. Rudolf died in 1987. Marianne Gellner married in the early 1960s and lived thereafter in Hampstead, dying a decade after her brother.
Gellner’s family has retained his school reports in England. He spent a year at Highgate School. Some of his teachers’ comments about him are revealing. In early 1940 the headmaster noted that he was ‘probably the most able boy in this division. He is contra-suggestive and to some extent anti-social. He works at subjects which interest him and scamps everything else’. His form master added that he was ‘able but awkward. Affects a cynical indifference’. His English history teacher was irritated: ‘He has done no work, and made no progress’, but then had second thoughts and added in different ink, ‘He is able’. Despite these misgivings, there was a good deal of sympathy for him, with the headmaster noting in his final report that ‘he is a silent boy, but would seem to have plenty of character’. Gellner completed his schooling between 1941 and 1943 at the St Albans’s County School for Boys, which he described later as ‘not-quite-a-grammar school’.71 He enjoyed sports and began to do well academically, with comments being made that he was ‘fertile in his views’, and with regard to his studies in history, ‘Ideas brilliant. But he needs to work harder on the facts’. In 1941 he took School Certificate exams, gaining high grades in English, Czech and German, with passes in Elementary Maths, European History, British History and Geography; he failed French, and would later joke about his success in mediating the translation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind.72 In 1942 he took four subjects in the Higher School Certificate: English, Mathematics, History and Advanced German. He was able to win an open scholarship to Balliol College in Oxford, aided both by the academic character of the school, and by Balliol’s desire to recruit outside the normal private-school milieu. Gellner later described himself as the beneficiary of the ‘Portuguese colonial policy’ of A. D. Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who wanted to ‘keep the natives peaceful by getting the able ones from below into Balliol.… [he aimed at] one third upper class, one third grammar school, one third Scotsmen and foreigners. The upper class were to teach the others manners, the grammar school to introduce some brains into the upper class. He put it as brutally as that’.73 The description suggests that Gellner was bound to be something of an outsider: Jewish but not really Jewish, far from completely English, and a grammar school boy to boot.
He arrived at the age of eighteen in the Michaelmas term of 1943. He had decided to study ‘Modern Greats’, the combined course in Philosophy, Politics and Economics which Oxford had introduced to complement if not supersede the ‘Greats’ (Greek, Latin, Ancient History and Classical Philosophy). This programme was one of Oxford’s most significant acts of modernization in the social and human sciences, though it would be after Gellner’s time that political science and economics were professionalized to the standards of American universities. Philosophy was then widely regarded as the premier subject. As in other colleges, a measure of unofficial streaming took place in Balliol. Although philosophy was Gellner’s great interest, he was initially judged to be slightly below par in that field and was accordingly pushed into a concentration in economics. He was tutored by Thomas Balogh, and rather disliked the subject.74 His other tutors were for philosophy the Master, A. D. Lindsay, the liberal anti-fascist and expositor of Hegel; and for politics Frank Pakenham, the Catholic anti-fascist and historian of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (later to become Lord Longford).75 Gellner was apparently a lively student, constantly in trouble with the authorities, mostly for coming home after curfew; but for the intervention of Lindsay, he would on one occasion have been expelled. He has been described as being incredibly handsome – lithe and athletic, ‘Pan-like’, brooding and Byronic, witty, intellectual, and very interested in going out with women.76 He made friends with Paul Stirling, who was to introduce him to social anthropology at the London School of Economics; Donald MacRae, with whom he was to have considerable difficulty within the Sociology Department at the LSE; Michael McMullen, with whom he attended meetings of the Labour Club; Martin Milligan; and John Hajnal, later to become a distinguished demographer and colleague at the LSE. Hajnal’s family was also Jewish in background, arriving in England from Hungary, through Holland, some years earlier. Gellner is said by Hajnal to have repeatedly insisted in their earliest conversations that ‘it was a disaster to be a Jew in modern Europe’. In an immediate sense this is an all too comprehensible statement: the Final Solution had just begun. But Hajnal saw it then, and now, as a form of resentment at being Jewish.77 The charge of ‘self-hatred’ is commonly made against liberal, secular figures of Jewish origin, especially if they are not enthusiastic partisans of current Israeli governments. But this is a complicated matter, considered at length below.
Gellner seems to have been particularly prone to depression during and after the war years, and his mother would soon fear that he might allow himself to be killed in action.78 After just a year at Oxford, Gellner was called up by the Czech authorities on 14 February 1944.79 Deferment would have been possible, so it seems that he chose to join the 1st Czechoslovak Armoured Brigade, aged nineteen, on 2 August 1944.80 The Brigade had been formed in September 1943 from remnants of the French Army’s 1st Czechoslovak Division. The Brigade was apparently a rather inefficient unit, not least because it was comprised of very varied elements: Jewish refugees (Gellner among them, for his military identification was simply that of ‘Jew’); former members of the International Brigades who had fought in Spain; and Czech Silesians who had been forced to fight first for Germany, then, when captured in North Africa, for the Foreign Legion, and finally transferred to the Brigade as the result of an arrangement between Beneš and De Gaulle.81 On 21 August 1944 Beneš addressed the troops shortly before they left, outlining his hopes for a new Czechoslovak Republic to be built along the lines established by Masaryk – but noting that Germans and Hungarians would have a place in the new state only if they had fought alongside the Allies. Under the command of Major General Alois Liška, the Brigade of about 4,000 officers and men played the major role in besieging Dunkirk, alternately attacking and being attacked by the energetic German garrison. The Brigade’s mission, to contain but not take Dunkirk, was achieved. The Allied Forces (for some French and Canadians were present) managed to keep the far larger enemy force of 15,500 bottled up, aided by a German shortage of supplies. The Germans only surrendered on 9 May 1945, by which time 167 members of the Brigade had been killed and 461 wounded. Gellner did not himself provide an assessment of the impact of his military service, but it clearly mattered to him: he returned with his wife to the scene of the siege at a later time, though he could not recognize the exact location of the lines. On 15 February 1945 he received the Military Memorial Medal from the Ministry of National Defence.
One memory Gellner retained from his service was the ability of Czech cooks, working from the same ingredients, to produce far better meals than their British counterparts. Another memory involved his political education. He recognized that a simple private, Drehulka, had great authority, and guessed that this reflected his political status, acquired as a member of the International Brigades that had fought in Spain. ‘I remember arguing with him about the early de jure recognition by the USSR of Badoglio’s government in Italy, which if I remember correctly preceded the similar recognition by the Western allies, and mocking him about the lack of fastidiousness on the part of the Kremlin concerning its allies – anyone would do’.82 The considerable precociousness and self-confidence shown here can only have been massively enhanced by the experience of being continuously under fire. Crucially, his later habit of always speaking his own mind is likely tied to his escaping the possibility of an early death; he had joined up with two other men, one of whom died after being shot by a sniper’s bullet.
Gellner later asked the Labour politician R. H. S. Crossman, who had served at Allied Headquarters during the war, why the Brigade was not placed under Patton’s command since he was driving towards Bohemia. Apparently, the hatred between Montgomery and Patton was so intense that the British commander would not release any extra troops to his American rival.83 Only when Prague was attacked by the Russians was the Brigade allowed to move, probably on 5 May 1945. This meant that the Brigade only reached Prague on 18 May 1945, eight days after the arrival of Soviet-sponsored Czechoslovak troops commanded by Ludvik Svoboda. Still, Gellner took part in victory parades in his native country, driving his half-track in Pilsen in May, where he was inspected as part of the guard of honour, and marching across Charles Bridge in Prague shortly afterwards.84 As the Russians had occupied Prague, the Brigade was only allowed in the city between 28 and 31 May 1945, returning after that to their barracks in Silberberg.
Gellner claimed to have carried four books with him in the toolbox of the half-track he drove to Prague for the victory parade in May: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, and Cyril Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave.85 The first two were anti-Stalinist and indeed anti-Marxist novels, but their narratives were inspired by Marxism and treated it seriously. Burnham’s work was described by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills as ‘Marx for the Managers’,86 and is a founding (though often forgotten) text in the theory of industrial society – it argues that expertise rather than wealth is now the universal basis of authority. The authors of the first three books were disillusioned left-wingers, profoundly horrified at the consequences of Leninism: Burnham would end up as a right-wing Cold Warrior, while Koestler’s evolution was more complex.87 Connolly’s book, as Gellner put it, was ‘not formally counter-revolutionary but not a leftist edifying text’.88 All four books would have reinforced the young Gellner’s individualism and his opposition to communism. It is likely that they also contributed to his abiding intellectual interest in Marxism, and Marxist-influenced criticisms of ‘actually existing socialism’. He never would embrace Marxism, observing that for a person of his age and background he belonged to ‘what sometimes felt like a small minority … those who never passed through a Marxist phase’.89 Three of the books in his toolbox must have whetted his later appetite for a sociology that would be influenced by historical materialism, that would take seriously stratification based on knowledge as well as on property, and that would reject Marx and Engels’s utopian politics, which in the hands of practical power-seekers had become a blueprint for totalitarian regimes.
His earliest philosophical enthusiasm was for Schopenhauer, a taste he shared with his great-grandmother, Friederike Lobl.90 He also told of an early and avid interest, when a young soldier at St. Omer, in Sartre and Camus – indeed, if his later testimony is to be believed, he preferred literary magazines and these authors’ books to the alternatives of the public baths or the local brothel.91 This interest in existentialism partially explains his attendance at Charles University for a term.92 He spent time at the lectures of Jan Patočka, later chosen as one of the spokesmen of Charter 77, a role which perhaps led to his death from a heart attack following prolonged interrogation at the hands of the police. Gellner claimed to have learned little from these lectures, finding them opaque, not least as the philosopher invented countless new words on the grounds that Czech was insufficiently flexible, ‘but the intensity of his manner somehow kept me coming to the lectures’.93
But he did not stay in Prague for long. For one thing, the Jewish community in the Czech lands had been more or less wiped out: its numbers had fallen from perhaps a quarter of a million to less than ten thousand. For another, he was appalled by the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, even though he fully understood the motives behind it.94 His later conviction that the fate of national minorities was usually assimilation, expulsion or death had roots in the fates of both the Czech Jews and the Bohemian Germans. He was witness to moral devastation and to a new occupation – albeit a temporary one, as the Red Army troops soon left, only to return in 1968. In the fragments of a report, or draft short journal note, entitled ‘No Winter’s Tale’ (and in another copy ‘Bohemia Today’), he described seeing Red Army officers billeted in the family home, which must have been traumatic, no matter how detachedly he presented it.95 The text shows his partial contempt for the Czechs at that moment, noting the ‘cheerful attempt by everyone to exculpate as many friends [from the charge of collaboration with the Nazis] as possible by any means at hand’.96 He was irritated at how Czechs responded to those who had been forced to leave before 1940, deducing that ‘there will always tend to be a psychological friction between the émigré and the home-stayer’.97 He was also shocked at Jews’ complicity in their own fate, trying ‘to solve the enigma of the passivity with which people, knowing what was in store for them, went to death with no attempt at resistance or escape, even the young and the vigorous’.98 He was struck by the explanations which insisted on the ‘incredibly strong urge to obey whatever has the outward garb of rightful authority’ and ‘the human ability to bear the anticipation of anything provided there is a rut to get into’.99 He also witnessed the incipient recovery of Czech nationalism, the Czech language and Czech literary life after six years of Germanification: ‘The importance of such cultural issues can only be realized by someone acquainted with Irish, Welsh or Palestinian Jewish conditions, where a language and its literary tradition is being consciously built up or revived’ – an important comment because it strikingly accentuates the extent of his own Czech identification.100 In September 1945 he attended the trial of Josef Pfitzner, previously a professor at the German university in Prague who became mayor under the Nazis, and noted the failure of the trial to respect due process – somehow the time of his execution was known well before the jury went into session to pronounce the verdict. He observed the execution, and the novel torture of hanging the condemned by two ropes in order to prolong his consciousness. He carefully and anthropologically noted the composition of the jeering and applauding crowd: ‘in order of quantity: women, both proletarian and better dressed … , men, almost all working or lower middle-class, .… and Red Army men’.101 The latter were the real power in the new Bohemia.
He saw power change hands within his own Brigade as well as in the society at large. He remembered it vividly later:
In the Brigade, the Communists had their own hierarchy and chain of command which, for them, overruled the formal command structure. To this day, I remember the name of a simple private soldier, Drehulka, who evidently had great authority over some fellow soldiers, irrespective of his rank in relation to theirs. Soon after we settled down in a country area he was suddenly promoted, or rather re-promoted, to the rank of lieutenant, which had been his grade in the International Brigade in Spain, thus confirming what I had guessed anyway about the basis of his otherwise mysterious influence … One of the most memorable recruiting posters of the Communist Party in Prague read: ‘Anyone with a clean shield into the party!’ Nominally, this meant that the Party welcomed those who had behaved well under the Occupation. The real meaning of the slogan was perfectly clear to all: if your shield is filthy, we in the Party will scrub it clean for you. We like people we can trust because we have something on them and because we know they are willing to do dirty work …102
He thought that Czechoslovakia was in for another three hundred years of oppression. There was significant and authentic local support for communism, and limited active opposition. The Czechs had no doubt that Germany would revive, and no faith that the West would protect them from that revival, quite naturally given their experience at Munich. They were therefore disposed to appease their own communists as the lesser evil, especially in light of the fact that they were expelling their own Germans. Gellner later placed part of the blame on the legacy of Masaryk, and in doing so he deployed Karl Popper’s criticism of historicism. The Czechs had been taught to base their morals on historical evolution, and merely transferred their loyalties to communism once democracy failed: ‘The truth is both ironic and bitter, but inescapable: Masaryk’s philosophy of history did eventually lead to 1948’.103 The failure of the Czechs to fight for themselves and their consensual dispositions towards one another, in particular their failure to confront collaborators, be they Nazi or Communist, would always astonish him.104
In Prague he re-established contact with Eric Hošek, with whom he came to play table tennis – one special rule of which, established at Gellner’s suggestion, was that the loser had to try to kiss the first girl who entered the room.105 Hošek found him Anglicized and was not surprised that he eventually left, but Gellner’s motivations were more complex than Hošek’s implied thesis of de-Czechification.106 The Red Army, the Holocaust, Czech collaboration with the Nazis, the great revenge expulsion of the Germans, and the coming victory of communism had thoroughly cured him of his schoolboy nostalgia for Prague. He returned to Oxford to complete his degree in 1946–7. He was never in fact formally demobilized. As he recalled forty-five years later, ‘I was released on indefinite leave to complete my education … Technically I’m still on leave from No. 1 Company, Motorized Infantry Battalion, 1st Armoured Brigade … I spent about half a term at Prague University, and then I acquired the required papers and went back to England and Oxford’.107 The decision was taken in a situation of fear and apprehension. He was an exile rather than an émigré.
At the age of thirteen Gellner underwent the trauma of that dangerous journey across Europe, and lost his friends and his social moorings. In his teenage years he dreamed constantly of Prague, viscerally longing to go back.108 The return to Prague led him to see this as an illusion, and he was forced to leave behind the feelings of belonging formed during his childhood. In this sense, the title of this chapter is entirely apt. But in another sense the title misleads. When parents speak to their children in moments of trouble they reassure them, insisting that ‘things will be all right’. This is not surprising since most parents – Gellner included – wish for their children to escape trauma. But a moment’s thought makes one realize that trauma can enable just as it can crush. Certainly Gellner would not have been the person he became without experiencing his traumatic childhood.
One result of this background is that Gellner became deeply socially observant. In later years he noted that his first sociological observation, probably made in the 1930s, concerned the five ways in which young Jewish men lost their virginity. Three of these are clearly remembered: the son of the owner of a textile factory with a mill worker in Brno; a working-class boy with a prostitute; and the son of Prague intellectuals with someone from the same background while at summer camp – with a further observation probably describing the conditions of very traditional Jews, and another with a tourist in the spa town Karlovy Vary.109 This is of course a trivial example, though the humour and the subject matter are characteristic of its author. But much more was involved here. Gellner was a natural anthropologist, an outsider constantly and with dry irony observing the customs of social and intellectual groups wherever he found himself. Many found him to be exceptionally stimulating company precisely because nothing was taken for granted. His mind was always at work.
The conclusion of Jiří Musil’s account of Gellner’s early years in Prague is on the mark. Gellner had seen the squalor and poverty as well as the prosperity engendered by capitalist modernization; but he had considerable appreciation for agrarian life, to some extent as it really existed, but mostly as it was envisaged by urban intellectuals. He was then transplanted against his will to England, then the most industrialized state in the world. He could, in short, understand the transition to modernity better than many of his future English contemporaries because he had witnessed and experienced it in a compressed form during his own abbreviated childhood.110 He would become the philosopher of this transition. He had grown up, he would learn in retrospect, in the perfect laboratory for someone interested in nationalism. He had seen people ‘metamorphose’, not, Kafka-style, into insects, but into other identities. He could see within his own extended family the tensions between Zionism and acculturation, and he was aware of Marxism, not least because of his father’s background and the left’s counter-assault on fascism. Gellner learnt early that authentic multi-culturalism, contrary to the sometimes naïve academic misrepresentations of recent years, could mean serious conflict, even extermination of some groups. It could compel a ‘choice’: assimilate or be expelled (or worse). His parents had had to choose an identity, and then were forced to leave and to ‘choose’ another. Bluntly, he had lived through a failed nation-building project.111 As already noted, he argued in later years that there were but three ways in which national homogeneity could be achieved: through assimilation, genocide, or the creation of a new state of one’s own.112
Finally, there was a visceral quality to his search for some sort of solid foundations by means of which to live his life. In later years, after admitting that he benefited from none of the solace that comes to believers, he noted certain consequent advantages:
But, not having had a faith, I think I do understand – that’s an arrogant claim, but I think I do understand – what Descartes and Hume and Kant were about, namely, the struggle to establish the foundations of knowledge. What those people tried to establish, I think I do understand. Never having been a member of a community but having been on the margins of a number gave me an understanding of what nineteenth-century romanticism is about, what the yearning for community is all about. Communal marginalism gives one that, and lack of faith gives one understanding of what the main thrust of thought is about.113
These matters will of course concern us later. What matters next, however, is something altogether more straightforward. The question which faced him upon his return to England was simple: what sort of identity would be provided by his adopted country?
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1J. Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, Current Anthropology, vol. 32, 1991, p. 65.
2Nations and Nationalism, Oxford, 1983, pp. 58–62.
3P. Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience and National Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914, Ann Arbor, 1996.
4P. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambridge, (MA), 2006.
5Judson, in Exclusive Revolutionaries, gives details of some of the ambitions of German activists; the situation of Czech activists is brilliantly analysed by P. Bugge, Czech Nation-Building, National Self-Perception and Politics, 1780–1914, Doctoral Dissertation, Aarhus University, 1994 (revised edition forthcoming from Harvard University Press). Bugge’s book is exemplary in demonstrating that no Czech nationalist militant sought secession from the Hapsburgs in the late nineteenth century.
6Analysis of various plans can be found in J. King, Budweisers into Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics, 1848–1948, Princeton, 2002.
7S. Spector, Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle, Berkeley, 2000. Spector offers a brilliant account of a de-territorialized group of intellectuals – whose numbers included Kafka, Egon Erwin Kisch, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Hans Kohn, Alfred Fuchs, Pavel Eisner and Hugo Bergmann – moving between Czech identity, populist Judaism, high German culture, Zionism, and Catholicism. Kohn is one of the most well-known theorists of nationalism, but most of these thinkers had distinctive ideas about the national question.
8H. Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry: National Conflict and Jewish Society in Bohemia, 1870–1918, Oxford, 1988; and Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands, Berkeley, 2000.
9The classic analysis of this process remains G. Cohen, The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague, 1861–1914, Second Edition, West Lafayette, 2006.
10Kieval, The Making of Czech Jewry, chapter 7.
11J. Gellner, ‘England Receives Me as a Human Being’, unpublished memoir written in the 1970s. Julius Gellner appears in T. Ambrose, Hitler’s Loss: What Britain and America Gained from Europe’s Cultural Exiles, London, 2001, pp. 99–100. This memoir is the main source for the information in this paragraph. Ernest Gellner’s son David possesses two family trees, one drawn up with his father in 1984, the other with his grandfather a year later, which contain a good deal of further detailed information.
12Jiří Musil, ‘The Prague Roots of Ernest Gellner’s Thinking’, in J. A. Hall and I. C. Jarvie (eds), The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, Amsterdam, 1995, p. 31.
13Asked by his son whether he had killed anyone in the war, Rudi replied that he had always taken care to shoot into thin air, not wishing to be responsible for the death of another human being. These details come from Gellner’s address at the funeral of his father in December 1987, in the possession of David Gellner.
14Ibid.
15Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, pp. 31–2.
16He started to learn the language, without much respect for grammatical rules, from the late 1960s, working at it first by listening to records, and later by going to Russian films. In the last decade of his life he liked to listen to Chekhov on records that he had brought back from one of his visits there.
17Kolman was imprisoned in Germany for six months in 1922 before living in the Soviet Union until 1945. His return to Prague lasted only until 1948 when he was arrested and taken to the Soviet Union, where he spent three and a half years in prison. He returned to Prague in 1959. Ernest Gellner went out of his way to meet him, and wrote an essay about him in 1958 which showed how Kolman was testing the waters after de-Stalinization, and trying to reconcile contemporary physics with an improved version of dialectical materialism (‘Ernst Kolman: or, knowledge and communism’, Social Survey, vol. 23, 1958). Musil observes that ‘Kolman was very proud of the amount of time that he spent in prison’ under diverse regimes (‘The Prague Roots’, p. 31). Apparently Rudolf also knew Rudolf Slánský, executed in 1952 after a Stalinist show trial made particularly infamous on account of its open anti-Semitism. Kolman eventually protested against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, but he was not arrested, and left for Sweden in 1976 never to return. It is worth noting here in passing Gellner’s considerable linguistic abilities, including the ability to read Russian at this time, though his oral skills were learned much later.
18Weber was not well known in Czechoslovakia at the time, so this interest probably reflects the influence of his time in prison.
19It is not clear whether this was a diploma or a doctorate. Rudolf was always known as Dr Gellner, and the first doctorate seems to have been earned either in Prague or Berlin before his son was born.
20Ernest later said in private conversation that he felt blamed for the end of his father’s intellectual career. This may have been so, but it seems to have been exacerbated by Rudolf witnessing the son having the career that he had himself wanted – something which made Rudolf at once proud and envious. (Information on this point comes from several sources, notably Michael McMullen, interviewed in February 2003).
21J. Gellner, ‘England Receives Me as a Human Being’, p. 44.
22‘Funeral Address’.
23Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, p. 32. Gellner did not specify exactly why he found the picture disturbing.
24A copy of a letter furnished by the bureau in Karlovy Vary, asking the central organization to enter her name into their books as a member of Congress staff, attests to this.
25A great deal of information about Gellner’s Prague years was given by Hošek in an interview in January 1999.
26P. Anderson, ‘Components of the National Culture’, New Left Review, no. 50, 1968.
27‘Reply to Critics’, in Hall and Jarvie, The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, p. 624.
28Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, passim. The relations between Gellner and Musil are described below, principally in chapter 6.
29Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, p. 36.
30Paula Gutmann left at some point, but she was replaced by another German-speaking governess (interview with Marianne Sigmon, February 2003).
31The ‘may’ in this sentence is deliberate. Ernest’s sister has no memory of Anna’s support for Zionist causes being stronger than Rudolf’s, noting that the father considered giving money to Israel (interview with Marianne Sigmon, February 2003).
32Jiří Musil worked hard to obtain the census return; help in interpreting it was given by Roman Szporluk and Hillel Kieval.
33The young Willard van Orman Quine, later Harvard’s most distinguished twentieth-century philosopher of logic, was tutored by Carnap in Prague in the years just before the war, and spoke to Gellner of their meetings during a visit to Prague in the early 1990s.
34P. Bugge, ‘Czech Democracy 1918–39 – Paragon or Parody?’, Bohemia, vol. 47, 2006–7.
35This point was stressed by Hošek in an interview in January 1999.
36Interview with Marianne Sigmon, February 2003.
37Gellner made a point of taking a long detour to Příbram, probably in 1992, when returning from a Central European University student outing to Krumlov.
38Miroslav Hroch once claimed that at least some of the songs Gellner still knew late in life were in fact Slovak.
39These last sentences draw upon Gellner’s own account as given to many people, notably to members of his own family. Some of his friends – notably Hošek and McMullen – were mystified by Gellner’s tense relationship with his mother, not least because she was particularly warm toward them.
40‘Foreword’ to E. Schmidt-Hartmann’s Thomas G. Masaryk’s Realism: Origins of a Czech Political Concept, Munich, 1984, p. 7.
41Interview with Otto Pick, January 1999. Gellner maintained contact with Pick – as he did with other exiles from Czechoslovakia – in England, inviting him on at least one occasion to a dinner at the LSE. Pick had a distinguished career at the University of Surrey before returning to Prague in 1993 to become Director of the Institute of International Relations. He was later Deputy Foreign Minister.
42There was another English connection. One of Rudolf’s great-uncles settled in England, and one of this relative’s daughters married into the Du Vergier family. This name was later given by Rudolf and Taussig to the firm they established in England. .
43For instance, in a letter to Gellner dated 22 December 1976, Dr. Jan Tumlir, an economist several years his junior, responded, ‘Yes, our paths must have crossed in the Prague English Grammar School’. Gellner also attended a ceremony to mark the reopening of the school after the collapse of communism.
44Stern had a similar background to Gellner’s, although he served in the air force during the war. He became a successful academic, writing powerfully on Kafka, Junger and on Hitler’s relationship with German culture.
45‘Reply to Critics’, pp. 624–5. The friend in question is Eric Hošek. I can attest to the fact that Gellner did sometimes take out a mouth organ and play these songs.
46Gellner enjoyed pointing out with Masaryk’s critics that it was a ‘good job we did indeed lose on the White Mountain, for otherwise the Prussians would have Germanized us in the course of using us as their Protestant allies’ (‘The Price of Velvet: Tomáš Masaryk and Václav Havel’, in Encounters with Nationalism, Oxford, 1994, p. 119).
47It was translated into English as The Making of a State, a more accurate reflection of the bulk of its contents than the original Czech title, but an appalling mistranslation of its central message which was, in Gellner’s view, that the Czech democratic and national revolution was an inevitable part of the wider triumph of the West (‘The Price of Velvet’, p. 117).
48Ibid., p. 122. There are curious echoes of Masaryk in Francis Fukuyama’s thesis in The End of History and the Last Man, London, 1992. Fukuyama argues that we are at the end of history with the triumph of the West, liberalism, and democracy. Gellner had a good deal of sympathy for this book.
49‘Foreword’, p. 7.
50These were the names given by Gellner himself. See Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, p. 32 and passim, on which the rest of this paragraph draws.
51‘Review of Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk’, The Political Quarterly, 1975, pp. 358–9. Interestingly, Gellner’s private papers contain the poet’s family tree – although there is no indication as to the nature of the exact relation to Gellner himself.
52Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, p. 32.
53Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 63.
54When living in Hampshire, Gellner used to play ‘Categories’ with local friends. A list of categories, perhaps ‘painters’ or ‘countries’ or ‘philosophers’ was chosen (one by each contestant). Then a letter of the alphabet was selected at random. Contestants gained points when they gave examples, starting with the given letter. One is more likely to win if one can guess the obvious examples and avoid them. Not content with this, Gellner was famous for the obscurity of the categories which he chose. One of them was ‘political assassinations of the 1930s’. There were many such, and they comprised his earliest political memories – as he made clear at LSE in the 1980s when casual conversation turned to this topic.
55I. Lukes, Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: The Diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s, New York, 1996, p. 200. This remarkable piece of revisionism makes readers appreciate the pressures under which Beneš laboured, even if it does not exonerate him. Gellner himself always considered Beneš a disastrous figure, not least in a late discussion with Popper in which both stated firmly that they believed that Masaryk would have fought rather than capitulated. The conversation is recorded in In Memoriam: Karl Popper in Prague, a booklet prepared and printed by the Central European University in 1994, when Popper received an honorary doctorate at Charles University.
56R. M. Smelser, The Sudeten Problem, 1933–38: Volkstumpolitik and the Formation of Nazi Foreign Policy, Middletown, 1975.
57‘Munich in Prague’, The National Interest, vol. 13, 1988, p. 117. The town in question is Příbram, as mentioned above.
58Ibid., p. 118. A second short piece remembering Munich – ‘Contribution’ to ‘Worin sehen sie den sinn des Gedenkens an die Ereignisse vom September 1938’, Bohemia, vol. 29, 1988 – records both change and constancy in Gellner’s views. He came to feel that British behaviour, given the horrors of the First World War and honourable conduct in the Second World War, was excusable:
My gut reaction to Beneš’s surrender has remained the same over the years. Had Beneš refused to surrender, no doubt that would have been the end of me and my family … All the same I regret that surrender. No doubt it is very easy to make brave recommendations for hypothetical situations … I plead guilty to the charge of such facility, such cheap pseudo-fortitude.
We will see that Gellner felt that Beneš’s surrender established a pattern whereby Czechs would continue to give in, time and again.
59‘Munich in Prague’, p. 118.
60Ibid., p. 119. The same teacher once asked the class to remember important sayings of Masaryk. Gellner suggested to his neighbour ‘a state which betrays the ideas on which it is founded will perish’. The neighbour understood his meaning, but the teacher found the saying – in fact Roman, although attributed to Masaryk – to be of little interest (‘Contribution’).
61A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austro-Hungary, Chicago, 1976, p. 255.
62See L. C. Skalnik, National Conflict in Czechoslovakia, Princeton, 1968; and A. Innes, Czechoslovakia: The Short Good-Bye, New Haven, 2001.
63E. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe Between the World Wars, Bloomington, 1983, p. 149.
64The mistake was theirs, for they died in the Holocaust. However, Ida’s son Karel survived the camps, and Gellner would later visit Karel’s son Pavel who became a surgeon, and had two children of his own. These were Gellner’s only relations remaining in Czechoslovakia.
65Julius’s ordeals and escape were as dramatic as Rudolf’s. He was robbed three times, duped by a young innocent-eyed girl, and betrayed by both Czechs and Poles. He nevertheless talked his way out of an SS arrest on one occasion, demonstrating his acting skills in a life-threatening encounter (‘England Receives Me as a Human Being’, pp. 7–17).
66When David Gellner visited the firm in the early 1980s there was evidence also of some moulding, of toilet seats and other bathroom fittings.
67Interview with Michael McMullen, February 2003. Gellner never received a formal allowance, although Susan Gellner remembers that he did occasionally receive envelopes containing as much as a thousand pounds.
68‘My first trip [to the High Atlas] was possible thanks mainly to my father, and in this respect at any rate this study belongs to the nineteenth-century tradition of middle-class scholarship’ (‘Acknowledgements’, Saints of the Atlas, London, 1969, p. xii).
69Interview with Marianne Sigmon, February 2003.
70Her first husband was the paternal uncle of Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State. Members of the Gellner family had difficulty believing Albright’s claim that she had been unaware of her Jewish background. The Gellners’ relations with Taussig did not survive Rudolf’s second marriage. From 1985 Ernest was heavily involved in the firm’s business, first in mediating difficulties between the partners (Taussig came to feel that he was doing all the work and suggested lesser remuneration for Rudolf, a position rejected by Rudolf on the grounds that both partners had built the firm) and then in selling it – or rather in selling parts of it to different companies. Some of the monies from these sales came to Ernest and Marianne. This certainly made life easier for the Gellner family in the last decade of his life, not least by allowing him to keep the Hampshire and London houses while buying new ones in Cambridge.
71Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 64. He seems to have lived in St Alban’s, though not at the school, probably from 1940–41.
72The point of the story was rather different, namely that close familiarity with the text did not lead to any clear understanding of the book’s theses. Though the joke was a good one, Gellner had by this time been speaking French quite regularly in Morocco and became comfortable in his use of that language.
73Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 64.
74T. Balogh would later author an astringent criticism of the UK’s civil service, The Apotheosis of the Dilettante, and argue that the civil service required training in something like PPE (Philosophy, Politics, Economics). He was an advisor to Harold Wilson’s first two Labour governments (1964–70).
75A. D. Lindsay, later Lord Lindsay of Birker, political philosopher and academician, was the first socialist to head an Oxbridge college. As the Master of Balliol College Lindsay ran in a famous local by-election in 1938 against Quentin Hogg, a Conservative and Unionist, and later Lord Hailsham. Lindsay ran as a ‘popular front’ candidate of the broad centre-left on a ticket opposing appeasement. He lost. Frank Pakenham’s Peace by Ordeal: The Making of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, London, 1935, is still regarded as definitive. Pakenham would later author a quasi-official biography of Eamon de Valera, but was best known in public life for his campaign to release the ‘Moors murderer’ Myra Hindley.
76Interview with Michael McMullen, February 2003. Gellner took McMullen canoeing, and himself learnt to sail while at Oxford.
77Interview with John Hajnal, June 1998 at LSE. In follow-up correspondence, 16 October 1998, Hajnal elaborated:
I had many conversations with Ernest in 1943–4 about his (and my) Jewish ancestry. It is not a matter of remembering a particular phrase he used. Ernest at that stage habitually expressed resentment about being Jewish. At any rate that is how I now remember it. I know my memory is fallible. Ernest’s attitude was not uncommon among assimilated middle-class Jews of the capital cities of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.
I do not dispute John Hajnal’s memory, but no other interviewees reported, prompted or unprompted, similar assessments. This issue may have been a private one between the two young men.
78Information provided by Susan Gellner, who was careful to say however that this is best interpreted in terms of the mother’s feelings and attitudes, rather than as an accurate guide to the psychology of her son.
79He wrote to his mother, addressing her as ‘Dear Anny’, on 26 November 1944, in a tone of some irritation: ‘I don’t see what “to have left Balliol was a mistake” means, as I had no choice being called up; whatever other reasons I might have had are no one’s business’.
80Apparently an alternative was to serve on the Arctic convoys taking war materiel to the Soviet Union.
81Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 64.
82‘Return of a Native’, Political Quarterly, vol. 67, 1996, p. 4.
83Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 64.
84‘Foreword’ to Schmidt-Hartmann, p. 7.
85Gellner cites the books in ‘Return of a Native’, p. 4, noting proudly that the books were left behind, as pioneering pinpricks in the Iron Curtain. There is probably something wrong with Gellner’s memory here. Animal Farm was only published on 17 August 1945, so it could not have been with him in May unless he had access to a manuscript copy, a possibility since Orwell took some time to find a publisher. He returned to England on short leaves in April and September 1945, the second time using a new Czechoslovak passport, and could also have brought the newly published Animal Farm back to Prague on the latter occasion.
86H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, ‘A Marx for the Managers’, Ethics, vol. 52, 1942.
87See J. Burnham, The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom. A Defence of Political Truth against Wishful Thinking, Washington, 1943; B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life, London, 1981; M. Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, New York, 2009.
88‘Return of a Native’, op. cit., p. 4. The Unquiet Grave is in fact a very personal, poetic and melancholic lament for Palinurus’s (Connolly’s) collapsed marriage. It is an affirmation of thinking for oneself, and promotes drawing upon the resources of past thinkers and poets to do so. Its confessional style and its aesthetic detachment from the war made it resonate with Connolly’s contemporaries. See M. Shelden, Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon, London, 1990, pp. 96–121.
89Ibid., p. 4.
90J. Gellner, ‘England Receives Me as a Human Being’, p. 45.
91‘Period Piece’, in his Spectacles and Predicaments: Essays in Social Theory, Cambridge, 1979, p. 102.
92The German university closed at this time, its books left in the street for whomsoever wished to take them.
93‘Reborn from Below: The Forgotten Beginnings of the Czech National Revival’ in Encounters with Nationalism. Patočka argued that the Czechs were the first nation to be successfully born from below, i.e. without ruling-class leadership, but because they had not liberated themselves they had the psychic pettiness of ‘liberated servants’.
94See the sympathetic treatment of the fate of the Sudeten Germans in A. M. De Zayas, A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, 1944–50, New York, 1994. Gellner’s language was unambiguous: ‘After the war, the Sudeten Germans were ruthlessly and brutally expelled in an act of collective and indiscriminate reprisal, though not without apprehension of an eventual German revenge’ (‘Munich in Prague’, pp. 120–1).
95‘No Winter’s Tale’, Gellner Archive. This must have been written in 1945–6. The title of the article plays on the fact that Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale makes reference to Bohemia, with one character speaking of a coastline that it does not of course possess.
96Ibid., p. 4.
97Ibid., p. 5.
98Ibid.
99Ibid.
100Ibid., p. 9.
101Ibid., p. 12. B. Frommer, National Cleansing: Retribution Against Nazi Collaborators in Postwar Czechoslovakia, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 97–9, describes the trial and execution in some detail, demonstrating the accuracy of Gellner’s account.
102‘Return of the Native’, pp. 4–5. Gellner’s memory was consistent: he uses almost the same words in ‘No Winter’s Tale’, p. 13.
103‘The Price of Velvet’, p. 123.
104He recommended reading V. Mastny’s The Czechs Under Nazi Rule: The Failure of National Resistance 1939–1942, New York, 1971, alongside Gordon Skilling’s Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution as proof of this pattern of consensual collaboration amongst his conationals (‘Gone and Gone Forever [Review of Gordon Skilling’s Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution]’, Government and Opposition, vol. 12, 1977).
105Gellner sent most of his books to Hošek. Many had inscriptions in Czech, which Hošek translated as ‘Il n’y a que des bêtises dedans’.
106Hošek stayed for another decade before moving to France. Relations between the two friends were then restored. In ‘No Winter’s Tale’, p. 5, Gellner wrote that ‘the sense that the time between Munich and May ’45 had not happened at all [for Czechs] was expressed to me by an old school friend who enviously remarked that I, abroad, had “lived” and experienced the six years, but to him they were a complete blank, remembered with no emotional colouring: he felt he was starting in ’45 where he had left off in ’39’. This old friend was certainly Hošek. Hošek did indeed live a life of internal exile during the war, spending the time learning Italian. The fact that he was not Jewish was of course key to this.
107Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 64.
108Ibid, p. 63
109I heard this story many years ago from Gellner himself. Without prompting, Eric Hobsbawm mentioned (in an interview in March 2008 which stressed how very witty and intelligent he had found Gellner) that he had been told much the same story, though he thought that four rather than five passages had been mentioned.
110Musil, ‘The Prague Roots’, pp. 42–3. The relations between Musil and Gellner are described below.
111Curiously, his theory of nationalism suggests that muti-national states are doomed because of the internal contradiction of inequality combined with ethnic difference. But Czechoslovakia more or less worked, as did Austro-Hungary, until war destroyed social relations. Czechoslovakia did not really fall apart: it was assassinated from the outside.
112This view was sometimes expressed verbally. It appears in the preface to the Polish edition of Nations and Nationalism. The Poles initially objected to the preface, but less because of this comment than his quip that ‘thanks to Hitler and Stalin’ Polish life could now proceed more smoothly.
113Davis, ‘An Interview with Ernest Gellner’, p. 71.