| Notes |
- The Legacy of TGM
Tomas Garrigue Masaryk - founder and first President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia - is a hero whose world significance and moral authority are unsurpassed among the distinguished figures of his time, a man remarkable not only because of his personal courage and devotion to democracy, but for the harmony between his personality and work - the astonishing unity of his words and deeds.
He was dead before the twin terrors of Nazism and communism took temporary control of his country, and both regimes tried to sweep his memory under the rug. He was ignored at best and vilified at worst during the decades of totalitarian domination.
The communist propaganda machine portrayed him as an enemy of the Soviet Union and of communism, and condemned his leadership in Czechoslovakia. His writings were on the list of forbidden books; his name was removed from streets and monuments in his honor were melted down.
Today, eight years after the fall of communism, Masaryk has become the subject of a modest revival of interest.
Someday the Czech people will realize that Masaryk has surreptitiously exercised a moderating influence upon them because they have lived, so to speak, in his state. For those old enough to remember the first half of this century, or wise enough to have read its history, Masaryk, who founded the republic in 1918, is one of the most important pioneers of what the philosopher Sir Karl Popper called "the open society."
Up from serfdom
His early life would not have hinted that Masaryk was marked to be a world leader. He was born in 1850 in southern Moravia, the son of a Slovak-speaking coachman working on an Imperial estate, and a German-speaking housewife. Encouraged by his parents, Tomas took the long step from his father's illiterate serfdom to becoming a professor of philosophy. After his first term of primary school, he was apprenticed to be a blacksmith. Then he gained an education in the secondary schools in Brno and Vienna. As a high school and university student, he had to seek support from wealthy families by tutoring their children. His studies were finished at the University of Vienna, where he took a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1876. Six years later, he was made professor of philosophy at the Czech university in Prague, and began living in the city for the first time. He taught there until 1914 when war broke out.
Throughout his teaching career, Masaryk thought centered around the crisis of European civilization. He refused to consider its history a play of meaningless, irrational forces, as Leo Tolstoy had argued in War and Peace. Nor did Masaryk embrace a deterministic view of history, explaining everything by economic conditions, technological changes or the class struggle, as Marx did. In fact, Masaryk always maintained--insisted--that history is shaped by ideas in the minds of men and women who can make the future better than the past.
Philosophy and religion
Earlier in his career, Masaryk had diagnosed the crisis of European civilization as the decay of religious beliefs, with the increased incidence of suicide and homicide as its most visible signs. For him, this decline of faith was a sad phenomenon whose explosive social consequences were a serious problem. It appeared to him "as a historical process, as something for which a society is collectively responsible." The remedy offered by Masaryk was simple: people must regain their religious faith, be they Christians, Jews or Muslims.
Masaryk himself was a deeply religious man. His religious feeling was first nurtured by the naive piety of his Catholic mother. Then came school and the intellectual cultivation and justifications produced by contact with his teachers and by his own reflections. He himself joined the protestant church in 1880. To use Max Weber's simile, Masaryk didn't feel himself God's vessel; he rather sensed himself an instrument of God's will, as he drew his moralism from the certainty that he was the God-sent agent of Providence.
A modern view of women
In 1878 Masaryk married Charlotte Garrigue, an American student he had met while at the Leipzig university. After their marriage in New York, he incorporated her maiden name into his own - a radical move even by today's standards, much less those of a century ago. By all accounts, Masaryk loved women, and they, in turn, adored him. But he loved them in a Puritanical way. What he had to say about women in general was often regarded as mildly heretical by some guardians of social mores. Masaryk argued that social development was leading toward democratic equality of opportunity for the sexes.
"The modern woman," Masaryk proclaimed in one of his speeches, "must be active; she must engage herself in public debate while ignoring the old-fashioned mentoring but having, as the French put it, the courage de son opinion. Clearly, such an audacious attitude may be perceived as heresy. But the modern woman must struggle against both prejudice and bluff.
Masaryk is most emphatic and very eloquent on the sexual question, which he sees with the eyes of a firm believer in woman's moral equality with men. In his view, woman as a household drudge or sexual object is destroyed externally and impoverished internally. But Masaryk adds: "I do not preach a sermon about enjoying ascetic life, nor about any act of raping nature or the human body... What I urge is true love between man and woman."
Unmasking Czech anti-Semitism
An intrepid critic who measured the soundness of national life by the criterion of truth, Masaryk's intervention was often without popular backing, especially when he defended the rights of minorities in the Habsburg Empire. For instance, he substantially contributed to the unmasking of Czech anti-Semitism. When an East Bohemian girl was killed in 1899, it revived the superstition of Jewish ritual murders for the purpose of using Christian blood in religious ceremonies. A young Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was arrested and, despite his protestations of innocence, was sentenced to death for committing the crime. In a series of articles, Masaryk refuted the allegation of ritual motives, and urged a revision of the verdict. In a subsequent decision the court dropped the accusation. With unfaltering courage, Masaryk sought justice and to debunk anti-Semitic legends, be they in the minds of the common folk, the schoolmaster or the jingoist, even when going against popular opinion made him a target for the hatred of others.
War, exile and culture
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip shot and killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, an act that set off World War I. Shortly afterward, Masaryk, aged 64, went into exile. He became the leading opposition figure abroad, where he strove for the liberation of the Czechoslovak people from Austrian shackles. During the war, he was made the commander in chief of the Czechoslovak Legion, troops assembled from Czechs living abroad--particularly in France, England and America--who were joined by Czech and Slovak conscripts who had become prisoners of war in Russia or who had defected from the Austrian army. These armies fought fierce battles against Austria and Germany on various European battlefronts.
Today, one may be amazed at the fact that these stateless soldiers summoned the will, marshaled the resources, made the sacrifices and rebounded from their blunders in order to fight for their cause under Masaryk's leadership. After the Allied victory in 1918, Masaryk brought his valiant soldiers--an army of 80,000 men--home on an arduous path made necessary by the civil war raging throughout Russia: through Siberia to Vladivostok, and across the Pacific Ocean and the United States. They finally returned to a European homeland where the many deaths caused by the war had given birth to a new republic.
To be sure, the triumph of the Czechoslovak nation was the result not only of Masaryk's leadership but also of Allied support. Toward the war's end, Masaryk had visited Woodrow Wilson in the White House and convinced him that it would be in the interest of the United States to help liberate the Central European nations from the debilitating climate of the Habsburg Empire.
Unlike other European leaders, Masaryk had an advantage in his links to the United States. Not only had he visited there several times and taken an American wife, but he felt at home in the culture and admired what he called American pragmatism.
Masaryk also loved Russian culture, yet there he did have an ax to grind. He was highly critical of the oppressive Czarist regime, the Orthodox Church, mystical Slavophilism, atheistic radicalism and the Marxist quest for power. On cultural matters he was critical but scrupulously fair, the result being an evenhanded evaluation of the interplay of Russian and West European artists and thinkers.
In three volumes titled Russia and Europe, written in German before World War I, he analyzed, with what seems today a remarkable clairvoyance, those various demons of Russian history. In his view, Russia missed the advent of the modern nation-state in the 17th century, bypassing the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Those blank spots in its history set the stage for the tragedy to come: The Bolshevik coup that plunged Russia into misery, brutality, isolation and confrontation with the outside world. Masaryk was most insightful when he defended the European interest in his charming and moving book World Revolution (1925), in which he argued that Europeans wished to see the ascendancy of those Russian adherents of democracy who sought the signposts of national revival by looking outward and forward, rather than inward and backward.
The legacy of TGM
After founding democratic Czechoslovakia, Masaryk set about implementing his lofty and guiding principles on the multiethnic and multicultural European continent. During his presidency (1918-1935), Czechoslovakia became an island of democracy, a great educational workshop and a powerful industrial country. It developed a political system marked not only by free and fair elections but also by the rule of law, separation of powers, and the protection of fundamental liberties of speech, assembly, religion and property. In spite of shortcomings and problems, the country gave asylum to many who faced persecution elsewhere, namely in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, because of their political, national, religious or cultural allegiances. The collaboration among Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians and Jews, who had lived in the Central European region from the Middle Ages, produced at that time a uniquely free society with a cosmopolitan culture, one which was tolerant and nearly untouched by the nationalism and xenophobia that mark many multiethnic societies today.
As Sir Karl Popper put it, "Masaryk's Czechoslovakia was the most open of all societies ever to develop in Europe. It lasted for only 20 years. But what difficult and marvelous years! In the shortest time, this open society had built a solid economy and the most solid military defence system in Europe."
In 1938 Britain and France, under the governments of the appeasers, cooperated with Hitler in destroying Czechoslovakia with the notorious Munich Agreements. Masaryk, who had been in poor health for a few years, did not live to see his life's work crushed under the enormous impact of Nazi forces. Nevertheless, his spirit lived on in thousands of quiet "Masarykian" heroes who risked everything to help rescue the lives of persecuted Jews or who struggled against the enemy. The struggle continued until 1989 and the re-establishment of the independent state of Czechoslovakia, with Vaclav Havel as its president.
What, then, is the most significant element of Masaryk's message today, when European history provides no indication that the incredibly diverse peoples of this continent will be able to merge peacefully and voluntarily into a single polity?
Without pretending to be a prophet, Masaryk offered--and still offers--to Europeans a brighter future in terms of his moral insight and universal ethos, one which is the very opposite of the current, dominant secular-hedonistic and nationalist trends. Masaryk calls for a concern for truth and authenticity; a concern for our fellow man and woman; and a passion for justice and freedom and thus for democracy, conceived as a tolerant, open society with equal rights and duties for all citizens, regardless of sex, colour, religion or cultural background.
The creation of a united and prosperous Czech Republic as a multiethnic model in Europe is as central to the policies of Vaclav Havel as it was to those of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. Both presidents put their faith in democracy, diversity and multiculturalism. This is and will be their lasting legacy.
© Josef Novak
|
.jpg)
1850 - 1937 (87 years)