Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century

Chapter 1. Preserving the National Past for the Future

Toppling Columns, Building a Capital in Revolutionary Prague w 1 Chapter  Preserving the National Past for the Future In Slavic Prague a dignified monument will be built to one of the foremost sons of our dear country, and this monument will be built by the Czech people! Jan Podlipný, Young Czech Party politician I n November 1889, Prince Karl IV Schwarzenberg stood on the floor of the Bohemian Diet and exclaimed, “We see in the Hussites not celebrated heroes, but a band of bandits and arsonists. Communists from the fifteenth century!”1 A leading member of the nobility, a conservative Catholic, and a wealthy landowner from Southern Bohemia, Schwarzenberg angrily decried a decision to place a plaque to the memory of Hus in the entryway of the National Museum in Prague. Representing the pro-Habsburg elite in the Austrian region of Bohemia, Schwarzenberg found the culture of local Czech nationalists distasteful and disrespectful.2 Days later, Czech nationalists fought back. At a Prague municipal government meeting, Jan Podlipný, an influential Prague lawyer and nationalist politician , declared the dream of Prague’s Czech-speaking bourgeoisie: to build a great memorial to Jan Hus. Middle-class intellectuals and Czech nationalists believed a national memorial could evoke nationalist passion among Bohemia’s Czech speakers. No longer would their movement be satisfied with a plaque in the museum; a grand monument to Jan Hus would stand in the Czech capital. A Changing City The conflict over representing Jan Hus’s memory reflected demographic and political changes in Prague during the nineteenth century. Czech nationalists began to dominate Prague’s political and economic institutions, but conser17 w 18 vative landowners, like Schwarzenberg, led the Bohemian Diet, which oversaw regional affairs. Czech-speaking liberals had only entered the Diet in 188. The restrictive curial system during the monarchy assured that the conservative landowners retained control of the Bohemian Diet and Austrian Reichsrat. By 1889, seats in the Diet were fairly evenly divided between Czechs and Germans, but German alliances with landowners and political Catholics stifled Czech influence . Yet a growing Czech elite had, in the preceding decades, asserted their political will in the capital city. Leaders of the expanding Czech national movement sought to broaden the appeal of nationalism by financing public artworks to arouse national zeal and mark Prague with symbols of modernity. This phenomenon was, of course, not unique to Prague. Alois Riegl, the prominent Viennese art historian, wrote in the 1890s of the “modern cult of monuments,” and Stanislav Sucharda, a Prague sculptor, insisted that, to maintain a “full life in art,” the Czechs should emulate the French, Germans, and Italians by building great monuments.3 Much of belle époque Europe experienced an outpouring of nationalist fervor that had been quieted after 188 and rose again following Italian and German unification and the French loss and German victory in the Franco-Prussian war. By the late nineteenth century, the demographic and political shifts in the Bohemian Lands divided the capital among those claiming Czech heritage and those claiming German heritage. A Jewish population, heavily Germanized but with pockets of Czech-identified Jews, represented  percent of Prague residents . The Christian population was 95 percent Roman Catholic.4 During the second half of the nineteenth century, Czech nationalists sought to make Prague “Czech.” Until the political upheavals throughout Europe in 188, most residents of Prague considered themselves Bohemian, using regional , not national, designations. The Germanization of the Austrian bureaucracy began in the late-eighteenth-century reign of Joseph II; from that point, government and commercial business was conducted primarily in German, and higher education took place almost exclusively in German. However, Czech was also commonly spoken on the streets of Prague. Even though Prague’s elite (aristocrats, state officials, army officers, higher clergy, professionals, wealthy merchants, and manufacturers) were overwhelmingly German-speaking, only the very highest social strata of German speakers learned no Czech at all.5 The political and economic tensions that rose after Austria’s quick defeat of the 188 uprising in Prague led many Czech speakers to strengthen the position of their people in the city. Czech-speaking artisans, for example, tended to be poorer than their German-speaking counterparts, since those who could use German most fluently could conduct trade throughout Central Europe, Preserving the National Past for the Future w 19 not only locally. In the 1850s and 1860s, therefore, Czech nationalists founded chambers...