Folly

The learned ability of the newborn to flourish in the world’s fields of power is always fragile and risky. There are times when the cries of innocents are extinguished by stupidity, squalor, hunger, violence. Even when they survive the perils of birth, the newborn find their lives complicated by the power dynamics of families, communities, business firms, whole economies, parties, governments, and states. Such organizations are menacing. They tower over them like colossi. Organizations make the innocent look and feel small. The newborn are turned into the playthings of power relations — of which they know little, let alone can understand, or tame or control.

Young Venoušek’s early years were exactly like this. It has often been said — by card-carrying Communists, sceptical conservatives, guilted liberals — that he enjoyed a comfortable ‘bourgeois’ upbringing. The sad truth is that his life as ‘a well-fed piglet’³ began badly within a family whose ideals were smashed up by folly, military occupation, surveillance, air raids, war, and totalitarianism. Venoušek took his first steps in the early autumn of 1937 — at precisely the moment that Czechoslovakia was pushed to its knees by the power-posturing of neighbouring states and alliances. Not everybody saw what was happening. Or they foolishly turned a blind eye, as did the most popular contemporary guide for foreign travellers to Prague.⁴ First published in the month of Venoušek’s birth, the guide conjured his home town into an exotic haven. The guide marvelled over Prague’s green spaces and wooded surroundings; the breathtaking views of the city from the heights of Petříin, Hradčany, and Letná; and the wealth of architectural beauty — Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, rococo, and especially baroque buildings resonating its varied history from the time of the seventh century. Praise was heaped upon the Prague diet of freshwater trout and carp; goose, duck and venison; pilsner, dark beer from Smíchov, fiery plum brandy and agreeable Moravian wine; only a small frown was reserved for the ‘unexpected’ local sandwiches, consisting of topless slices of buttered bread covered in salami, egg, pickled cucumber, fish or ham. The guide noted that central heating of residences was common; that road traffic moved on the left; and that a system of red letter-boxes for the quick delivery of letters franked with 90-heller stamps functioned well. Although sugar was rationed, commodities like soap and matches were plentiful, while the commercial hub in St Wenceslas Square was often thronged with shoppers, said the guide.

The guide admired Prague’s modernist feel. It pointed to the example of ‘a new suburb’ called Barrandov, built on a rock cliff overlooking the River Vltava and offering magnificent views of the city. The text left unmentioned that it was owned by the Havel family; it simply noted that Barrandov had ‘a magnificent restaurant which has become a popular afternoon and evening rendezvous for those wishing to escape from the city for an hour or two. It has a well-equipped bathing pool and numerous tennis courts.’⁵ The guide went on to report the popularity of bookable cinema performances, theatres, music halls, cabarets, low-price symphonies, the opera performances of Smetana’s Libuše, Dvořák’s Rusalka and Janáček’s Jenůfa, and the amusing comedies of Voskovec and Werich. The guide noted the enthusiasm in Prague for public performances by Sokol gymnasts, at which thousands of young women in loose Romanesque dresses and young men dressed in red shirts and feathered caps together performed exercises in lines and patterns designed to highlight the values of self-control, cool courage, and the synchronism of body and mind. The guide reported that in matters of recreation young people were keen on tennis, volleyball, házená (a handball game played by women), football, ice-hockey, skating, skiing, athletics, and (thanks to the local Barrandov studios) the new medium of cinema. The professional classes, the guide reported, seemed unusually knowledgeable about world and current affairs, no doubt because for two or three hours per week on average they frequented cafés well stocked with a wide range of domestic and foreign newspapers and periodicals, both illustrated and literary. The guide reserved a short epilogue for politics and international affairs. It noted that the citizens of Prague had every right to be proud of their country’s achievements. There had been a steady consolidation of its various territorial units. The Czechs and Slovaks were setting an example to other nations by practising tolerance and respect towards the claims of the minority populations of Germans, Hungarians, Poles and others. Czechoslovakia enjoyed warm relations with its neighbours. The country was an ardent supporter of the League of Nations. The recent resignation (on 14 December 1935) for health reasons of the great statesman, eighty-five-year-old President T. G. Masaryk, had changed nothing. ‘At the election held in the Vladislav Hall of the Prague Castle,’ the guide concluded, ‘Dr Edward Beneš was elected to succeed him. Thus, after having been its Foreign Secretary ever since the republic was founded, Dr Beneš became Czechoslovakia’s second President and a continuity of the country’s internal and external policies, with Dr Milan Hodža as Prime Minister, was assured.’⁶

The words harboured foolish thinking, proving yet again that fools enjoy serenity in the company of knaves. The unpleasant fact was that Havel’s country of birth was about to be strangled alive by a Nazi Germany on the loose in central Europe. Ever since late 1933, when Hitler had pulled Germany out of the League of Nations, the tiny middle-European state of Czechoslovakia had begun to look and feel ever smaller. During the summer of 1934, in clear defiance of the Versailles settlement, the Nazis had managed’a coup in Austria by murdering its Chancellor, Dr Engelbert Dolfuss, who favoured a one-party dictatorship but anti-Nazi state. In 1935, by means of a plebiscite envisaged in the Versailles Treaty, the Saarland had been incorporated within the Reich. Hitler promptly compounded the victory by reconstituting the Luftwaffe, reintroducing conscription, and renouncing any commitment to disarmament. In the spring of 1936, in open defiance of the Treaty, the Nazis marched into the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland, and during the course of the next year they signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Mussolini’s Italy and withdrew from the British-backed Non-Intervention Committee that was aiming to shield Spain from foreign armies. Then in March 1938 — Havel was eighteen months old, still in nappies but mincing his first words — the Nazis tasted their greatest triumph yet: the engineered Anschluss or ‘annexation’ of Austria, the proclamation of a Greater German Reich, and the welcoming of Hitler’s splendid cavalcade in Vienna by flag-waving, cheering crowds kept orderly by Austrian police proudly wearing Nazi insignia.

The Western powers reacted to expansionism with foolish fumblings. Especially given that Hitler had no prepared timetable for his forays, and that his so-called policy of ‘peaceful aggression’ relied at this stage mainly on huffing and puffing, big-mouthed bluffing and local cuffing — he judged that he could get his way mainly by localized conflict that fell short of war — the reactions of states like Britain appear in retrospect to be nothing short of political lunacy. It seemed obvious to the British in particular that the best antidote to Hitler was on the one hand to recruit France and the Soviet Union as counterweights to Nazism, thereby re-creating the security triangle of the Great War, meanwhile hoping that Germany could be lured into playing the role of anchor state in a new European security zone. This episode of balance-of-power politics produced perverse results.

For many contemporary observers, the specifically modern principle of the balance of power among territorial states — a power-sharing arrangement that ensures that ‘a tiny republic is no less a sovereign state than the most powerful kingdom’⁷ — was the dominant principle, the fundamental law of interstate relations in the European region. It had indeed been so since the emergence, during the Renaissance, of a system of armed territorial states. British foreign policy supposed that the principle was still operative, but the commitment produced evil contradictions. Quite apart from the problem of complicity with the most horrendous programme of organized murder that Europe had ever seen — Stalin was in the middle of liquidating more Communists than any despot of the twentieth century — the British vision required giving the Nazis precisely what they wanted: more room in middle Europe to secure and expand the Volksmasse, the racial community of Germans not yet united under one state.⁸ For various reasons, the requirement came easily to the British. Influential conservatives in that country considered that Germany had suffered unjustly at the hands of the victors at Versailles while British policy-makers, too ignorant about German politics to grasp the novelty of totalitarianism, took Hitler at his word in presuming that Nazi ambitions were strictly limited to areas inhabited by Germans. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain even hoped that Hitler would turn out to be another Bismarck. If Germany were satisfied by concessions, he supposed, it would prove to be a safeguard of European security — thereby overcoming the instability caused by France’s little ally Czechoslovakia, and all the other weakling states of central-eastern Europe created by the controversial Versailles settlement.

It followed from this view of Germany as a steadying force that Prague would need to be pressed into concessions to Berlin. Czechoslovakia, the most resilient parliamentary republic of central Europe, was to be turned into a devil’s playground. It did not follow automatically that Czechoslovakia had to be sacrificed without any tangible security guarantees from the Nazis, but that was to be the tragic outcome. During the second half of September 1938, Chamberlain met thrice with Hitler. ‘In spite of the hardness and ruthlessness of his face,’ the Prime Minister mused of the ex-Austrian ex-corporal, ‘I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon.’⁹ At their meeting at Berchtesgaden on 15 September, Hitler insisted on the right of ‘Sudetenland’ to secede from Czechoslovakia. He added positively that this was ‘the Führer’s last demand’.

Like a dog returning to its vomit, the fool Chamberlain returned to his folly. The fools listened. Chamberlain agreed to give Hitler’s demand careful consideration, but he did not expect Hitler to move so swiftly, as he did on 23 September at Godesberg by demanding the evacuation and annexation of the Sudetenland within five days. While the British cabinet initially rejected the ultimatum, France and Germany began to mobilize their armies, and at Munich on 29—30 September, in the presence of the Führer, Mussolini and the socialist Edouard Daladier, the spineless and clueless Chamberlain willingly caved in.¹⁰ The British in effect did the work of the Nazis. Chamberlain, who said he was pleasantly tired after nine long hours with Hitler, was certain that there would now be no war. He immediately issued an ultimatum to the Czechoslovak delegation, huddled in an adjoining room, that they should accept the amputation of their state or else suffer more dramatic consequences, like the death of their body politic. Between yawns, Chamberlain spoke fine words about how the big powers would protect the rump Czechoslovak state. The Czechoslovak delegates were told that their response was not required, and that they should leave. In the same spirit as the Nazi-saluting English football team playing against Germany earlier that year in Berlin, Chamberlain then proceeded to put his hopes in a draft declaration on Anglo—German friendship, some version of which was waved in the air as he stepped from his plane in London, announcing with a triumphant smile the outbreak of ‘Peace in our time’.

These foolish words of a man who thought himself wise but made his folly sovereign turned out to be the elixir of Hitlerite power. In this fools’ paradise called Europe, foul-tempered Hitler — nicknamed the Teppichfresser (carpet-eater) by some diplomats — drank delight. Folly nourished his worst qualities. He shouted, threatened violence, grudgingly promised to keep the dogs of war leashed for a while, then shouted and threatened violence again. ‘Es hat keinen Sinn weiter zu verhandeln [There’s no sense at all in negotiating further],’ he bellowed to Chamberlain’s emissary. ‘Germans are being treated like niggers,’ he screamed. ‘No one would dare to treat even the Turks like that.’ Like a rapist, he then lowered his voice, and growled, ‘On 1 October [1938] I shall have Czechoslovakia where I want her. If France and England decide to strike, let them strike.’¹¹

This kind of behaviour, succoured by Chamberlain’s foolishness, disgraced the art of negotiation, undermined Western support for further talks with Hitler, and convinced him, and probably Stalin and Mussolini as well, that further ‘peaceful aggression’ elsewhere in Europe would reap easy dividends. The policy of appeasement spelled immediate disaster for the rump Czechoslovak polity, which under the initial leadership of President Beneš was forced to suffer textbook lessons in the art of destroying a state by stages.¹² Verbal threats followed by confusion; the confiscation of land; the spreading fever of fear; growing military pressures from without: all this served within the republic to create power vacuums within which politicians and other actors seemed to float helplessly.

The immediate effect of the Munich appeasement was to intensify the powerlessness of the state authorities. In matters of foreign policy, Czechoslovakia slipped to the status of a mere satellite state. At home, its parliamentary republican institutions suffered paralysis. Indistinct leadership, directionless policy-making, the open flouting of laws began to pave the way for a peaceful transition from democracy to dictatorship. As if hypnotized by their Nazi neighbours, the Czechoslovak political class tried desperately to forestall German interference in their affairs and to promote political recovery by emulating certain key features, but not the excesses, of Nazi rule. Within a few months of the Munich fiasco — young Venoušek was now just over two years old — pre-publication press censorship was introduced. Political exiles from Germany were extradited into the hands of the Gestapo without any vocal opposition. The National Assembly authorized the executive to legislate by decree in cases of emergency. The Communist Party was abolished and trade unions were merged into a single organization dominated by the right-wing social-democratic National Labour Party. Jews were encouraged to emigrate and many of them encountered growing discrimination by the authorities in both the private professions and state-sector employment. The election, on 30 November 1938 by the National Assembly, of Emil Hácha as third President of the country (which was soon to be renamed ‘The Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’) symbolized all these developments. So did his foolish cabinet address shortly after his election. Formulated in the rear-view mirror of time, it perfectly reflected the new-fangled policy of appeasement. ‘Czechoslovak statesmen should take the national saint, Prince Wenceslas, as their model,’ he told his ministers. ‘Prince Wenceslas fought for German-Czech understanding, although initially he did not find understanding with his own people.’¹³