For almost a century now, Tomáš Masaryk has been one of the most famous Czechs in world history. He was nominated at least twice for a Nobel Prize and lionized by noteworthies across the globe. However, that esteem paled when compared to the adoration expressed for him at home. During and after his lifetime, Masaryk was presented as the embodiment of moral rectitude, cosmopolitan erudition, and democratic egalitarianism. By the end of the 1930s, Masaryk's association with the state he had helped found was impressively total. But it was not accidental. Many different groups and factors collaborated to position Masaryk as the only man capable of superseding Czechoslovakia's ethnic and political divisions, a devoted democrat to lead Europe's self-styled ideal new democracy.
In fact, admiration for Masaryk rapidly became a complex, expansive leader cult. The cult, intended to integrate Czechoslovakia's diverse nationalities and to legitimate the young state, also constituted a central element of Czechoslovakia's national myth, crafted by Masaryk; Edvard Beneš, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister and Masaryk's successor as president after 1935; and other personalities within the Castle (Hrad), their powerful, informal political network. The Masaryk cult, like the Castle's version of the “Czechoslovak” national myth, was a useful political tool both at home and abroad. Public devotion to Masaryk strengthened his political position—and that of the Castle—particularly against the leading Czech political parties. Abroad, the cult situated Masaryk as the quintessential representative of his state and the values it supposedly manifested, such as a love of liberty, dedication to truth and justice, and adherence to Wilsonian democratic ideals. His international reputation in turn greatly strengthened his position at home. Many historians have noted the cult's existence, but less is known about its creation and propagation.Footnote 1
Leader cults are ancient, and some scholars argue their origins can be found in sacred myth.Footnote 2 Many religious myths feature a “culture hero,” generally not a god but a human whose brave deeds make the world habitable.Footnote 3 Joseph Campbell's analysis of comparative mythology presents the archetype of a hero “who ventures forth from the common world into a region of supernatural wonder; fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won; the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men,” and to awaken or recreate his society.Footnote 4 Masaryk's writing and political work under the Habsburgs, and especially his wartime activity abroad on behalf of an independent Czechoslovakia, certainly made him a persuasive candidate for drawing on universal symbols and narratives like these.
But Masaryk's cult was predominantly civic rather than sacred, although his ecumenical Christian faith comprised an element of it. The cult's main purpose was to create an emotional bond between the inhabitants of Czechoslovakia's fractious new polity and their new president. The other new postwar East and Central European states faced similar challenges, and similarly tried to persuade their publics to identify with their new leaders and governments, to approve of their regimes' policies and goals, and to take pride in their regimes' achievements. Leader cults were central in almost all cases, most obviously in the elaborately constructed cults of Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.Footnote 5
Leader cults reach beyond simple glorification. Cults require the leader's involvement in public ritual; the use of the leader's image on stamps, coins and everyday objects; the public celebration of dates or events from the leader's life or achievements (birthdays, liberation, etc.); the public display of the leader's image; a leader-sanctioned version of the state's history, presented in text and ritual; and the participation of the state's mass media in helping create, disseminate, and comment on the leader's cult.Footnote 6 Leader cults also manifest the functions of power. Texts and rituals surrounding leaders personalize the state's abstract power, simplifying the inherent complexity of a government and bureaucracy into a mythologized presentation of that government's leader or president.Footnote 7
The organization most responsible for the interwar Czechoslovak Masaryk cult was the Castle, Masaryk and Beneš's extra-constitutional political organization, which encompassed the presidential chancellery, the secretariat of Beneš's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and departments within other ministries, such as the Ministry of the Interior. Masaryk and Beneš drew on discretionary funds awarded them by the parliament and on their own personal wealth. Also of great importance were their long friendships with many influential figures, among them powerful bankers, parliamentary leaders, and cabinet ministers, whom they could trust to defend the Castle's perspective or goals. The Castle's political methods also included publishing articles in loyal newspapers, written by faithful journalists or placed by Castle-friendly editors.Footnote 8 This is not to say that the Castle always operated as a unified bloc. Within the Castle, there were wings to the left and right. Frequently individuals and institutions worked at what seemed like cross-purposes, or remained ignorant of related initiatives.Footnote 9 Nonetheless, as a whole, the Castle comprised an extraordinarily powerful nexus of information-gathering, fund-raising, and direct political influence.Footnote 10
The Castle served many different functions throughout the interwar period. Among the most important was shaping state propaganda and publicity. Masaryk's and Beneš's journalism and propaganda work abroad during World War I had been central to Czechoslovakia's creation. After the war, they remained very concerned with propaganda, the mass media, and other forms of what they viewed as political education. They involved themselves in the affairs of the political press, founding and funding journals, editors, and publishing houses. They cultivated long-standing relationships with important cultural figures, most notably author and playwright Karel Čapek and prominent journalist Ferdinand Peroutka. Many other writers and thinkers supported the Castle, helping disseminate what might be termed a Castle ideology or narrative.
The Castle narrative's tenets were borrowed in part from the romantic Czech nationalism of the nineteenth century, but were rewritten to suit a new era. Its main postulates were: Throughout history, the Czechs (and Slovaks, in this story a less sophisticated “brother people” to the Czechs) had proven themselves to be natively democratic, tolerant, peace-loving, and otherwise more Western than the West that Czechoslovakia hoped to join. The enlightened, cosmopolitan professors Masaryk and Beneš had single-handedly created Czechoslovakia during the Great War, thanks to their wise alliance with the West European great powers. Czechoslovakia, the myth continued, thus needed to remain close to the West for reasons of national security as well as cultural politics. “Czechoslovaks” needed to learn Western European languages and culture and remain true to the enlightened virtues of their heritage, while the West needed to be taught about this new democracy at Europe's heart. The ideal leaders to bring about this dual pedagogical transformation were, of course, Masaryk and Beneš. The Castle's domestic political opponents challenged the Castle myth and the policies derived from it—specifically, what they viewed as the Castle's excessive reliance on the West and on Beneš's designated place as Masaryk's successor.
Masaryk's leader cult most frequently presented the president in a role alluded to in this essay's title, taken from a poem by Vitězslav Nezval: the “husbandman” of a grateful nation. That term lends itself to multiple interpretations: master of the estate, father of the family, and caretaker of the nation. In fact, Masaryk was frequently referred to as “Tatíček,” for which the closest English translation is “Daddy.” Within the Czech political context, Masaryk's cult extended that of historian and “Father of the Nation” František Palacký and paralleled the cult of Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph. Like these other cults, Masaryk's cult contained biblical or religious references and historical allusions to previous great Czechs as well as to early modern folk beliefs about kingship. At the same time, much about the Masaryk cult—above all its equating Masaryk with democracy—was unique to the First Republic.
Likenesses between the Masaryk cult and that of Emperor Francis Joseph in the waning years of the Habsburg Empire helped maintain a sense of continuity between the old empire and the new state. Echoes of Francis Joseph were probably not deliberate. The Castle viewed Czechoslovak democracy as entirely displacing, not replicating, the imperial order. Nevertheless, the two men possessed common habits and personalities, and the cults featured these characteristics in similar ways. For example, the emperor was always depicted in military uniform even when at home in the imperial palace. Masaryk's “uniform” was the stylized garb of the country gentleman: riding jodhpurs, a plain fully-buttoned equestrian-style jacket, and a peaked hunting cap, black in winter, white in summer.Footnote 11 Masaryk's fondness for military parades and his frequent public appearances on horseback at an advanced age echoed the imagery of the emperor in his last years. Also like the emperor, Masaryk was famed for his ascetic lifestyle, rising early to work for the good of the people, practicing regular physical exercise, and abstaining from rich food and alcohol.Footnote 12 Souvenir photograph books of both men posed them at their writing desks (the emperor's a baroque glory of gilt, beveled edging, and black lacquer, Masaryk's of simple wood) and holding lovable grandchildren, thereby crafting images of servants to the state as well as of devoted family men.Footnote 13
Public expectations and governing style also linked Masaryk to the emperor. One Prague newspaper characterized Masaryk's elaborate welcome, when he returned to Prague in December 1918, as “a royal welcome for our first president.”Footnote 14 In 1919 prominent National Socialist Emil Franke criticized the National Democrats, who then led the parliament, for refusing to treat Masaryk as a “son of the people” upon his return. Rather than inviting the president to the parliament, to be welcomed by the people's representatives, Franke complained, “we all had to go to the Castle, as if to [visit the] monarch.”Footnote 15 This effect was enhanced by the complex, minutely articulated interwar presidential ritual crafted by the staff of Masaryk's presidential chancellery. For example, the members of Masaryk's entourage were directed how to respond if, when leaving the Castle, they might encounter a working-class family, whose small child might happen to run toward the president.Footnote 16
But Masaryk's civic apotheosis was initially a collective effort, not just the work of the Castle. At the end of the Great War, the new Czechoslovak state was internally divided and recovering from the war's ravages. Prague political leaders thought Masaryk the wartime hero might prove extremely useful and begged Beneš to ensure he returned home quickly.Footnote 17 The cult also built on a largely spontaneous popular outpouring of jubilation and gratitude at the end of the war. Those who had admired Masaryk before the war were still more inclined to salute him after it, as in these verses from a Karel Čapek poem in the magazine Nebojsa on 2 January 1919, comparing Masaryk to Saint Nicholas, who brings Czech children their Christmas presents. In this case, Masaryk had brought his people national independence: “Thomas's blessed day / Merrier than Christmas / What you wanted, what you prayed for, / nation mine, you have it here! / Thomas here! Four years gone / Now come from apostolic paths / bringing in your (yellow) bag / a new blessedness.”Footnote 18 In 1919 Čapek was a noted young journalist and author, not yet the Castle intimate he would become by 1926. The themes of this poem, linking Masaryk to Saint Nicholas and to other saints (“apostolic paths”), were common.
Masaryk was frequently portrayed as the culmination of Czech history, and a means of linking that history to biblical or European greatness. For example, in the 1920 poem President Masaryk: Song for His Seventieth Birthday, Jan Rokyta compared Masaryk to Moses (and not coincidentally, the Czechs to the Jews, the ultimate martyred people), fifteenth-century religious reformer Jan Hus, Hussite warrior Jan Žižka, fifteenth-century king of Bohemia Jiří z Poděbrad (George of Podebrady), and seventeenth-century Czech philosopher John Comenius (Jan Amos Komenský). In Rokyta's poem, Masaryk “enters the castle of Czech kings as if it were his home.”Footnote 19 Other contributors to the cult invoked the nineteenth century, while still others drew on the Bible. In 1926, a self-identified worker from Osíku u Litomyšle sent a poem, titled “To Our Dear President,” to the presidential chancellery; all six verses begin with “Our Tatíček, Mr. President,” and compare Masaryk to Christ.Footnote 20
However great his predecessors, the cult presented Masaryk as the greatest of all. Many of these comparisons, after the early years of the Republic, were made by Castle adherents in Castle-loyal journals. For example, in a 1930 article for Národní osvobozeni (National Liberation), Castle intellectual František Kubka imagined a future Czechoslovak president addressing schoolchildren in an assembly at the Castle in the year 2000. Kubka's imaginary future president recalled, as a schoolchild himself, seeing Masaryk speak at the Castle: “he was as simple and kind as one's own grandfather, but at the same time he was a hero from a real-life fairy tale about the miraculous resurrection of the nation.… After Jan Hus and Komenský he was the greatest man of our history. And indeed he was greater than those two martyrs, because he had luck and success. Jan Hus only hoped that the truth would prevail; Masaryk's truth prevailed!”Footnote 21
Masaryk's cult emphasized his humble origins—his mother was a cook for a wealthy family, his father a former serf and coachman—and his connections to the lid, or people, thus drawing on a powerful element of Czech romantic nationalism dating back to the nineteenth century. The cult also tried to establish Masaryk, with a Slovak father and Moravian, German-speaking mother, as the literal embodiment of “Czechoslovakism.” Masaryk's souvenir photograph books always included pictures of him in discussion with timid, smiling Moravian or Slovak peasants, often in folk costume. His many biographers dwelt on his humble childhood home and his youthful apprenticeship as a blacksmith.
Masaryk's cult always had detractors and competitors. The National Democrats, for example, tried to promote a similar cult for their leader, Karel Kramář.Footnote 22 The Czech Populists, a Catholic party, tried to substitute Czech Catholic tradition, and the medieval missionaries Cyril and Methodius and Saint Václav/Wenceslas, for Masaryk's preferred ecumenical Protestantism and celebration of the “national” religious martyr Jan Hus.Footnote 23 His focus on Hus alienated many Slovaks, and Germans viewed Hus as anti-German.Footnote 24 German-Castle disputes continued throughout the interwar years, within society, high politics, and in the international arena.Footnote 25 Slovaks voted consistently throughout the interwar period for the autonomist Slovak People's Party (SPP), led by outspoken Castle critic Father Andrej Hlinka. The SPP criticized Masaryk for supposedly promising Slovaks autonomy in the Pittsburgh Agreement of May 1918 and then reneging on that promise when he returned to Czechoslovakia. They also disagreed with Beneš's reliance on the West and his hostility to right-wing but Catholic states like Poland and Austria.Footnote 26 The SPP occasionally sparred directly with the Castle throughout the interwar period, for example in 1925, when Hlinka was sentenced to eight days in jail for insulting the president.Footnote 27 In short, the Castle myth's reference to “Czechoslovaks” did little to heal the very real national divisions that continued to characterize public life in the new republic.
Resistance notwithstanding, the esteem that was granted to the office of the presidency anchored and magnified Masaryk's leader cult. Just as the emperor's image had adorned public institutions and private homes, Masaryk's visage gazed benevolently throughout the new republic. His image adorned stores, homes, schools, and government buildings. On state holidays, “[Masaryk's] busts and portraits … somewhat kitschily looked out from between goods in shop windows at the customers and grocers.”Footnote 28 Even emigré Czechs displayed Masaryk's image. Religious historian Jaroslav Pelikan, whose parents left for the United States in 1923, recalled that “we used to observe two Independence Days in our home, the Fourth of July and the twenty-eighth of October; and the photograph of Masaryk hung like an icon alongside the usual Christian images.”Footnote 29 The president's public presence involved his name, not just his august personage. “Military troop units, streets, squares, the largest Czech battleship, public institutions, but also for example the wheezing paddle-wheel tourist steamship on the Vltava … were all named after him.”Footnote 30 Even Brno's university renamed itself Masaryk University—while Masaryk was still in office—as did many other schools, ranging from elementary to high schools, all over the republic.
The presidency helped maintain another aspect of the Masaryk cult. Peter Heumos has written that interwar workers viewed Masaryk as the “good king” who would enact justice. This understanding of Masaryk was widespread, as the interwar Czechoslovak presidency maintained imperial traditions regarding personal appeals to the state's highest authority. Ordinary citizens could walk into the Castle and ask to see the president; they also wrote him asking for help, such as for financial assistance or judicial clemency. Workers sent a steady stream of “petitions, appeals, and memoranda,” not to mention workers' delegations, into the presidential chancellery, requesting help with various kinds of conflicts.Footnote 31 But the vast majority of letters entering the Castle chancellery requested financial support. Petitioners ranged from the indigent to former Legionnaires (Czech Great War veterans) and even former senators.Footnote 32 The Castle chancellery seems to have written to regional police and social organizations to verify claims, as a basis for awarding financial assistance.Footnote 33
Both the Castle and private citizens promoted and produced Masarykiana. Czechs could buy books, pamphlets, brochures, commemorative plates, cups, and ashtrays bearing the president's likeness, and of course portraits abounded. Many publishers hastened to produce short, cheap works on the president for a mass public. One such piece was Arnošt Caha's 1921 brochure Tatíček Masaryk—Osvoboditel (Daddy Masaryk—Liberator), part of a series titled S vědomím českých dějin: Sbírka rozprav pro nejširší vrstvy lidové (With an Awareness of Czech History: A Collection of Treatises for People from All Walks of Life). Printed quickly on a low-quality printing machine (many letters are unclear or almost doubled), the pamphlet provides many pictures of Masaryk from his early years as well as Moravské Slovacko, the region where he grew up. Words of Western derivation are defined in the margins—for example, akademický as opposed to vysokoškolský.Footnote 34 Also, ordinary citizens crafted presidential folk art for Masaryk's birthday or for other symbolic occasions. Journalist Ivan Herben recounted an outpouring of such goods for Masaryk's eightieth birthday in 1930:
Along the wall stand countless presidential pictures and … portraits.… In one, painted by a simple worker, the president stands holding his grandson on his shoulders, exactly as in the famous photograph (taken at the family villa in) Topol'čianky. But behind the president stands not the Topol'čianky villa, but the Alps. Beneath it is the symbolic caption: the great one among the great ones. A barber with artistic inclinations sent … a portrait of the president created out of hair of all colors.… A bakery worker managed to place in a bottle … a tiny cake with eighty candles surrounding a bust of the president in the center.Footnote 35
So much of this folk art poured into the presidential chancellery that the Masaryk Institute, founded in the early 1930s, opened a Museum of Gifts. This collection was divided in the 1950s, and most of it was destroyed. The few photographs that remain show rooms overflowing with busts, portraits, collages, watercolors, and other artistic representations of the president, among gifts as varied as embroidered textiles and violins.Footnote 36
A version of the Masaryk cult was directed at children, in the spirit of Mircea Eliade's “exemplar history,” in which a myth and its main protagonists are paradigms, “both a model of and a model for reality.”Footnote 37 Masaryk's portrait adorned each school and sometimes individual classrooms. Classes put on patriotic tableaux to celebrate state holidays, with Masaryk prominently featured. Typical is Josef Koudelák's juvenile patriotic drama T. G. Masaryk, which portrays a hungry family with two young children at the end of the Great War. The father, a Czech Legionnaire and survivor of the Battle of Zborov, comes home, and the happy children are chosen to welcome President Masaryk as he visits their village on his way back to Prague.Footnote 38 Schoolchildren could also read juvenile fiction about Masaryk—lightly “improved” historical depictions of his boyhood—as well as accounts of Masaryk's growth from boy to man, emphasizing his morally superior qualities and his devotion to family and country.Footnote 39
Schoolbooks often presented Castle ideology as history. The most popular text used to teach high school history was written by Josef Pekář, known for publicly challenging Masaryk's romantic-nationalist interpretation of Czech history. Yet Pekář's book combines romantic Czech nationalism with the Castle narrative. Its 1921 edition described the medieval German colonization of Bohemia as an “especially great danger for the Czech future.”Footnote 40 Pekář's depiction of the Great War emphasized Masaryk's and Beneš's importance for Czechoslovak independence. Masaryk and Beneš—and their allies and colleagues abroad—are almost the only independent actors discussed in Pekář's text until the fall of 1917. The Czech politicians who remained home hardly appear in the book. Pekář disingenuously described all Czechs of the time as “almost without exception [being] aware that a German-Hungarian victory would without question make their lives more difficult and extinguish all hopes for achieving their national goals,” an obvious recasting of the Castle's present back into the nation's past.Footnote 41
The president energetically helped create the visual imagery presented to the public. Masaryk never refused artists' requests and posed for at least sixty-four different artists; the president sat for the artist V. Hynais ninety-four times. He did not object to film or to “acting” in repeated takes; “in the archives of the Plzeň firm Škoda, there are clips of Masaryk posing in a Škoda-Hispano-Suiza car the firm had given him.… The president was aware … of the effect of his person, and he had no inhibitions about using it.”Footnote 42 Among the books Masaryk crafted with Karel Čapek was a souvenir book of presidential photographs, Masaryk ve fotografii. The book presents Masaryk in various mythologized guises: as a man of the people, marching through fields of wheat in his customary black suit and speaking with a kind smile to the usual Slovak and Moravian peasants; deep in thought in his libraries at Lány and in the Castle; the great statesman, meeting with foreign leaders and diplomats; the family man, hoisting laughing, naked grandchildren on his shoulders. In every setting Masaryk is uniformly dapper, dignified, kind, and reserved. One theme is strikingly absent from the book: there are no pictures of Masaryk on the floor of parliament, none of him voting, and relatively few pictures of him with Czech politicians other than Beneš.Footnote 43
Masaryk's visual iconography was often deliberately militarized, thus visually linking him to the Czechoslovak Legions, the veterans of the Czechoslovak military effort during the Great War who played a relatively significant role in interwar Czechoslovak political culture.Footnote 44 In fact, the Masaryk cult rested at least in part on the correlated cult of the Legionnaires and their brave national service during the Great War. Masaryk and the Castle drew on Legionnaire support to buttress the presentation of Masaryk as military hero, adored by all soldiers who served him. (The postwar Legionnaire organizations were internally divided according to political predilection. The moderate Legionnaires were closest to the Castle, which financially supported their publishing house, Čin [Deed], and moved professionally with relative ease between Čin and official government institutions such as Edvard Beneš's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Footnote 45) Meanwhile, the Legionnaires energetically crafted and promoted their own cult, abetted by the president in his writings, in public rituals, and in novels, films, and memorials written, designed, and planned by Legionnaires and supported by the Castle.Footnote 46 Legionnaires published popularizing pamphlets and photograph books about their wartime exploits.Footnote 47 Many souvenir picture books of the president, including Masaryk ve fotografii, include photographs of Masaryk participating in military parades or smilingly shaking soldiers' hands.Footnote 48 Castle promotion of the Legionnaire cult and the Masaryk cult went hand in hand, reminding “Czechoslovaks” at regular and public intervals of the basis of Castle power and the importance of continued Castle predominance within Czechoslovak politics.
The cult also relied on words, not just images: its basis in the 1930s was various longer, more deliberately publicistic prose works. Masaryk himself was one of the most important propagators of his own textual cult, through his postwar treatise The New Europe; his 1925 war memoir World Revolution; the 1933–36 The Path of Democracy series, a collection of his writings and speeches; and his considerable body of anonymous journalism.Footnote 49 All communicated the cult's main ideological outlines: its triumphalist vision of Czech history and politics, its blithely “Czechoslovak” vision of the postwar state, its insistence on Czech dependence on France and Great Britain; and Masaryk's lauding himself and Edvard Beneš.
Also important to the cult were the many Masaryk biographies, which tended to bathe the Czechoslovak state and its leaders in a rosy light. Masaryk biographies, whether in Czech or in other languages, were often published by the Foreign Ministry firm Orbis, the Legionnaire publisher Čin, and other Castle-friendly publishing houses. The Castle-sponsored Social Club frequently hosted foreigners during research sojourns in Prague, and gave them translated copies of Czech-language Masaryk biographies. Hence a certain uniformity of presentation and information prevails in these texts, from Jan Herben's 1926 three-volume T. G. Masaryk to British propagandist Cecil J. C. Street's 1930 Thomas Masaryk of Czechoslovakia to German journalist Emil Ludwig's slightly more critical 1936 Defender of Democracy: Masaryk of Czechoslovakia.
Conversations with Masaryk and Building the State
Of all the Masaryk biographies, the most famous is Karel Čapek's Conversations with T. G. Masaryk (Hovory s T. G. Masarykem), published in installments from 1927 to 1935. Tremendously popular inside Czechoslovakia and abroad, still in print today, the book went through many editions in Czech and other European languages.Footnote 50 The Conversations were conceived as propaganda to secure Masaryk's place as founder and symbol of the state. During a 1927 visit with Masaryk at Topoľčiánky, his villa in Slovakia, Čapek wrote his companion Olga Scheinpflugová that the book would be both “a rare human document, of which there are few in the world,” and, a few days later, “a politically good thing, … tremendously valuable: I'd like to have it finished as a gift for the republic's tenth anniversary.”Footnote 51
Other Castle figures agreed on the book's potential political value and involved themselves in the process of its creation. After the initial conversations for each section, Čapek would write a first draft and send manuscript pages to the president, leaving a wide left margin in which Masaryk made comments or suggested changes.Footnote 52 In addition to Masaryk, Masaryk's daughter Alice, with the help of family archivist Anna Gašpariková and Masaryk's personal assistant Antonín Schenk, edited the manuscript, as did Edvard Beneš, to Čapek's great frustration.Footnote 53 Masaryk and his family were also sometimes irked by the process or by the finished product. After reading the draft of the second volume, Život a práce (Life and Work), the president noted, “Often it is him [Čapek] in there and not me.”Footnote 54
Still, the Conversations present a fascinating portrait. Most of the book's three sections retell the story of Masaryk's life in a charmingly old-fashioned, self-deprecating tone, purporting to be Masaryk's own. Čapek's depiction makes much of Masaryk's peasant childhood in a Slovak village, his moves to Brno, Vienna, and Prague to pursue schooling, his career as an outspoken university professor, his bravery during World War I, and his fatherly concern for the young Czechoslovak democracy. Čapek also notes admiringly Masaryk's personal virtues, such as his teetotaling and his adoration for his American wife. In the Conversations, as in the other presidential biographies, Masaryk frequently departs from the story of his life to issue high-minded declarations about social issues.Footnote 55 Czechoslovak political life appeared infrequently in the Conversations, and generally presented the standard Castle narrative. For example: “Our politics are … essentially rationalistic, enlightened. In this, we are like France—hence those national sympathies with her.” Or, underscoring the link between Czechoslovakia and democracy: “In virtue of our history and nature, we are destined for democracy.… We are a nation democratic in body and soul.”Footnote 56
Most important to the Conversations' overall effect is the portrayal of the president as a courtly philosopher-king. Rather than the canny, frequently aggressive politician contemporaries knew him to be, Čapek's Masaryk represents an ideal of gentlemanly masculinity: reserved, kind and paternalistic, willing to move boldly when the situation demands it but preferring a contemplative life. The Conversations' Masaryk is an understated hero who practically has to be forced even to describe his glorious deeds to the public, let alone to explain their significance or extol his own bravery. Čapek in fact complained in the foreword to the fourth edition of Life and Work that keeping the president's voice clear was no easy task, due in part to the modesty of his subject. “Press questions on him, how it was then, what he did, how it was for him in this or that difficult moment. He barely waves a hand and says: ‘Yes, well, that's long past. …’ It would be difficult for you to find another man who is so reluctant to speak about himself…”Footnote 57 The sheer number of Masaryk biographies written during the interwar period, many of them based on interviews with Masaryk himself, belies this comment. Nevertheless, Čapek's characterization is compelling.
This combination of heroism and courteous reserve is perhaps best expressed in Masaryk's reminiscences of his time in revolutionary Moscow. The Legionnaires had advised Masaryk to leave Petrograd for Moscow. But within moments of his arrival, he heard gunshots. Masaryk left his Legionnaire-assigned bodyguard at the train station to collect the baggage and went off alone to the Hotel National on foot. Finding his way blocked by a row of soldiers, Masaryk asked to pass and was told (and saw) that the Bolsheviks and Kerensky's forces were exchanging gunfire in the streets. Masaryk went instead to the Hotel Metropol, where the gate was shut in his face. He banged on it. “‘Are you a guest?’ the porter called back. ‘We can't let you if you're not; we're full up.’ I didn't want to lie, so I yelled out to him, ‘Don't be an idiot and let me in!’” The hotel came under fire: the guests and Masaryk were trapped inside for a week. But Masaryk recalled, “…I wasn't afraid, and if I was, I didn't let myself know it, because of our boys. How on earth could I have commanded them if they'd seen that I was afraid?”Footnote 58 This anecdote is clearly intended to convey the mythic Masaryk's greatest qualities: his refusal to lie, even to protect his own life; calm in the face of imminent danger; and a constant attention to the larger concern of being a good and respected leader. Masaryk's depiction as the personification of honesty itself, along with the comment “I didn't want to lie,” is echoed in many of his other biographies and memoirs.Footnote 59
Čapek and Masaryk worked closely together from 1926 through 1932, the years when Čapek became one of the Castle's most important popularizers. Even after his personal friendship with Masaryk waned in the early thirties, he continued to write the Conversations and a great number of Castle-friendly articles and interviews with the president, some of which he allowed Masaryk to edit, as the Prague archives demonstrate.Footnote 60 His journalistic work was an important source for Masaryk's cult, as exemplified in the 1932 essay “Your Masaryk.” Čapek explained to his readers that “any educated foreigner,” even one who knew little about Czechoslovakia, knew about Masaryk: “your Masaryk,” they allegedly said, “you're lucky!” This was true, Čapek avowed, even though the world press wrote little about Masaryk or, by extension, Czechoslovakia. This worrisome development—that Czech propaganda efforts to attract the world's attention were unsuccessful—was in fact a sign of good fortune and lasting fame, Čapek insisted: “our public and state life … never appears … in a sensational light … Masaryk's world popularity is not current, because it is permanent … That same foreigner who says to us ‘your Masaryk’ knows factually little about him, just as he knows little about George Washington.”Footnote 61
After Masaryk's final, unanimous reelection to the presidency in 1934, Čapek concluded that Masaryk was more than a human being: “Masaryk is a principle. Masaryk is for us and for the entire educated world the embodiment of certain moral and political ideals, which can be called democracy.” Čapek argued that the election demonstrated that the Czechs, Slovaks, and the country's national minorities had chosen Masaryk, and democracy, at a moment when Europe was abandoning it. His language here directly echoes Castle mythology: “… In Germany, in Austria, in Bulgaria. Everywhere around us.… [We are] a little island in the center of Europe. Or perhaps God's soldiers, strengthened by their faith rather than by power…. As [longtime Czech prime minister] Antonín Švehla said just before he died, ‘We are clearly the bastion of Western democracy; that means that we must hold on….’ Call it our fate … or the meaning of history…”Footnote 62
In the weeks after Masaryk's death in mid-September 1937, Čapek wrote long articles every few days about Masaryk's funeral arrangements, the country's respectful mourning for its leader, and Masaryk's meaning for the country. “T. G. MASARYK STILL WATCHES OVER US,” Čapek emphasized; at the foundation of the state, as built by Masaryk, was God himself.Footnote 63
Another important element of Masaryk's cult was provided by journalist Ferdinand Peroutka's four-volume history of Czechoslovakia's early years, Budování státu (Building the State). This work never attained quite the level of acclaim that Čapek's work garnered, nor did its depictions enter conventional wisdom in quite the same way. Due in part to its genre, in part to its author, Budování státu is more subtle, less sentimental, with more of a pretense of objectivity. Nonetheless, it is equally a Castle text. Masaryk encouraged Peroutka to write the book, inviting him to Topoľčiánky in 1930 to review Masaryk's personal archive and the early history of the republic; the two men met repeatedly thereafter. Beneš also contributed memories and documents to Peroutka's project. Peroutka recalled that “…the meetings with Beneš lasted until three, four in the morning. He was indefatigable…”Footnote 64
Peroutka had long been an authoritative figure in Czech political journalism and a problematic Castle intellectual. In 1921–22, as an unknown young journalist, he notoriously challenged the president's romantic view of Czech history in an essay series, titled “Jáci jsme” (What We Are Like), in the journal Tribuna. Masaryk asked to meet Peroutka, and in 1924 chose him to edit a new journal, Přítomnost (The Present/Presence), an immediate critical and intellectual success. But Peroutka refused to create a weekly review journal as Masaryk had desired, and assailed sacred Castle tenets. In January 1930, for example, Peroutka wrote that Beneš ought not to follow Masaryk as president, due to the country's polarized politics and Beneš's long history of conflict with party leaders.Footnote 65 Peroutka was aware that the journal “vexed” the president.Footnote 66 Masaryk sent his anonymous editorials to Přítomnost often, but a certain degree of distance continued. In 1932, even as Peroutka was drafting the early chapters of Budování státu, Masaryk complained that Peroutka “is lazy and has lost his touch; he is uninformed and subject to moods.… I don't like how he twists things in Přítomnost these days … I don't expect much from that book of his, either.”Footnote 67
Masaryk's judgment was premature. While Peroutka allowed other Czech political leaders their moments in the sun, drawing on their memoirs and parliamentary records in addition to the Castle materials, the most creative and powerful protagonists of his story are Masaryk and Beneš.Footnote 68 Themes from the Masaryk cult appear throughout; for example, Peroutka compares Masaryk to Jan Amos Komenský, Frantíšek Palacký, and crusading Czech journalist Karel Havlíček Borovský. Yet like Čapek's book, Budování státu rendered Masaryk not as a bloodless hero but as a human being with concerns and doubts, as in this passage where Peroutka reproduced Masaryk's thoughts during the war: “Palacký … did not believe in the possibility of independence.… Is Palacký right, or am I?”Footnote 69
Peroutka's depiction of Czech politics criticized the parties and parliament, as opposed to the Castle. Peroutka claimed that parliament's fundamental passivity and inaction in the realm of foreign affairs “forced Dr. Beneš to take all the weight of decision-making on himself ” and noted that as early as 1920, parliamentary leaders were already beginning to oppose Beneš and Masaryk—mainly, Peroutka implied, out of jealousy.Footnote 70 In Budování státu's second volume, a chapter titled “Nervous Nation” contains letters and commentary from many Castle figures about the shockingly low level of Czechoslovak parliamentary life and its effect on the country as a whole. Vojta Beneš, brother of Edvard Beneš and leader of American Czech exile groups during the war, is quoted despairingly about his observations during a visit home: “A general thoughtlessness and decrepitude, terrible striving after sinecures,… not just a mere distaste for work but something far worse, an incapacity for constructive, creative work, a genuine moral [characterový] decline … political partisanship at home has changed into political loathing [nenávist] … It will be a national calamity.”Footnote 71
In contrast, Peroutka's Masaryk was the country's savior, not just a high-minded professor but a tough commander in chief and apt leader of the Legionnaires: “He who had spoken of nothing so frequently as of humanity and love for one's neighbor became the leader of revolutionaries not just with his heart and head, but with rifles and grenades. When imprisoned Legionnaires were executed, he spoke in hard tones: ‘We will have the opportunity and the power to revenge ourselves on those who fall into our hands, and I hope that many such Germans and Hungarians will. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’”Footnote 72
Masaryk's leadership was necessary after the war as well, Peroutka explained. “The people's vision picked out Masaryk as the strongest, most sensitive and wisest man [in the chaotic situation of 1919].” But Peroutka's Masaryk refused to serve as absolute ruler, preferring to be his country's wise father. “The people who offered Masaryk dictator[ial powers] did not understand that they offered him that which he could never accept if he wished to remain who he was.… He believed that the people must teach themselves how to govern … he did not conceal from himself that not much was agreeable in the portrait of the era's democracy; but he was convinced that these were childhood illnesses, through which it was best to move without stopping [along the way]…”Footnote 73
With Masaryk's death in 1937, followed by Čapek's death and the end of the First Czechoslovak Republic in 1938, the Masaryk cult briefly grew to enormous proportions. Masaryk was often simply deified, as in the excerpt already cited by Vitězslav Nezval: “Never will a quieter sob issue from our lips than: / The Husbandman is dead. Our Masaryk has died. / He has not died. He only sleeps. No, he's no longer asleep. He's abandoned his bed.”Footnote 74
Conversations and Budování státu were more secular in tone but no less convinced of their theme: Masaryk had earned an eternal place in Czech history by helping Czechoslovakia emerge victorious from the chaos of the war, and ensuring the country took its rightful place among the nations of Europe, with the blessing of the civilized West. Čapek and Peroutka created a narrative of Czechoslovakia through their work, a Czechoslovakia that had Masaryk and Beneš to thank for its very existence, which rested on tolerant and inclusive multiethnicity, democracy, and the support of the West.
Between 1938 and 1948, both Masaryk and his republic underwent thorough scrutiny and reevaluation, even as Masaryk's cult remained seemingly untouched—if anything, embellished. During World War II, Edvard Beneš and the rest of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile in London routinely evoked Masaryk, as did resistance groups under Nazi occupation. The Republic was, for the most part, condemned for its imperfections and for not living up to its founder's greatness. Between 1945 and 1948, discussion and adulation of Masaryk continued, along with attempts to claim his mantle; this discourse would reemerge after 1989. But Masaryk's reputation and glory survived. His legacy was bent to seemingly odd purposes. He was invoked to defend almost every aspect of the social and economic restructuring that had altered his country after 1945, as well as opposition to that restructuring. Those who opposed Communism lauded Masaryk as an ideal democrat, conveniently eclipsing his actual tendencies to advocate technocratic rule and to outmaneuver parliament. He was celebrated by both Communists and democrats as the founder of their philosophical tradition—again, despite Masaryk's public opposition to Marxism. Soviet pressure and Czechoslovak Communist momentum and popularity might be expected to have rendered Masaryk irrelevant, but in fact the opposite became true. Masaryk had come to symbolize Czechness itself—its noble past, its heroic future.Footnote 75
Conclusion
The Masaryk cult's evidentiary remains are ubiquitous; this article has discussed only a fraction of the available materials, translated into at least eight languages. But while we know much about the cult's production, we know relatively little about its reception or public function. Public opinion polling in Czechoslovakia only began in 1946 and was swiftly curtailed thereafter. Historians of the interwar years are thus left to speculate about the myth's effect on Czechoslovak society and about how the Castle hoped the myth might work. On these issues, the sources are silent.
Some speculation, then. Cults, like political myths, “offer charters, warrants, validations, legitimations, and authoritative precedents for beliefs, attitudes, and practices.” Thus the Masaryk cult can be understood as an attempt to legitimate the Czech-led government and its interpretation of the country's history.Footnote 76 Similar to leader cults elsewhere in Eastern Europe, Masaryk's cult was “intended as cement, to cover over … divisions, to reinforce a sense of purpose and unity.” Also, Masaryk was deliberately held up as a symbol of the state itself and of democracy to boot: “The leader had to symbolise something greater than himself.”Footnote 77
But the myth, while powerful, was not equivalent to leader cults in totalitarian states, buttressed by censorship and an obedient mass media.Footnote 78 Masaryk's image was deliberately glorified, but his cult was also publicly criticized; various groups within the state completely ignored or openly mocked it. In certain areas of society, the cult's effect seems to have been very strong—for example, among Czech Protestants or among schoolchildren. In others, its effect was limited and contested. We know that the myth was rejected by groups within Czechoslovakia's national minorities and some Czechs as well, particularly Catholics, National Democrats, and Communists. From the moment the cult began, Masaryk and the Castle's voice was never the only one speaking.
Masaryk's cult presented him in predictable mythologized roles: the “husbandman,” the father of the nation and state; the man of the people; the man of ideas; the great statesman; the family man; the military leader; the embodiment of Czechness and the Czech nation. This last element helps emphasize the extent to which the cult was Czech first and foremost, implicitly equating the Czech national legacy with Czechoslovak citizenship. But unique to Masaryk's cult is another role, that of the ideal democrat. Through Masaryk's cult, Czech leadership of the Czechoslovak state and a supposedly ideal democracy were symbolically joined. As Peter Bugge has noted, this twinning might well have contributed symbolically to the dismantling of the remnants of the First Republic's democratic structure in 1938–39.Footnote 79
Masaryk's cult was part of the Castle's engagement in what could be termed “mythic politics,” a contest among Czech parties and politicians for the high ground of moral value, linking the Castle, its leaders, and its ideas to the best in the Czech and European traditions. Despite being constructed as a set of symbols, the Masaryk cult and Castle mythic politics more generally were always related to the direct exercise of real political power. But mythic politics and leader cults are to be found in all states, whether dictatorial or democratic. The existence of a Masaryk cult in the interwar republic did not make the state less democratic; the cult's insistence on the primacy of democracy did not make the state more so.
The Masaryk cult shifted over time, reaching out to different groups within Czechoslovak society (including emigrés) during and after the interwar period. This ability to appeal to all onlookers, to speak to disparate groups, is a characteristic of the most successful leader cults, which embody elements of different national or popular traditions. E. A. Rees notes that the Stalin cult in the Soviet Union “drew on Russian traditions, the tradition of authoritarian leadership, a deep étatist tradition with its own bureaucratic culture, and even a tradition of popular monarchism … it may also have drawn on the strong patriarchal peasant culture with its respect for the elder [starosta].… [The cult also] sought to link itself with the popular classes…. For the elite it could be seen as a guarantee of their power. For the disadvantaged the Stalin cult offered the hope of redress.… The cult came to symbolize the new social order that had been created.…”Footnote 80
The parallels with the Masaryk cult are by now clear. Most especially, in all cases, Masaryk was described as an embodiment of Czech or “Czechoslovak” virtue, truth, and national identity, not just within a particular historical moment but for the ages. Like most leader cults, Masaryk's portrayed himself as “trans-national and transhistorical … a benign and universal genius.” This depiction reached a climax in Karel Čapek's passionate journalism, one of the purest and most influential representations of the cult. After Masaryk died in 1937, Čapek called on his readers to remember their former president as an embodiment of “courage and wisdom, beauty and greatness, a classical model of man and spirit, … an instrument in the hand of God.” The article was titled “Eternal Masaryk.”Footnote 81
AndreaOrzoff is Assistant Professor of History at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003. I am very grateful to the two anonymous readers for the Austrian History Yearbook for their insightful critique. I presented an earlier version of this paper at the 2006 conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, and I thank the audience and our discussant, Norman Naimark, for their comments. I am also grateful to the organizers and presenters at the Marburg Herder-Institut's Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts: Forschungen zu Kult und Herrschaft der Führer-Regime in Mittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa. Analysen, Konzepte, und Vergleiche, October 2007.
