The subject of Berglund's book is difficult to pin down. The author defines it as “thinking about God” (5), but one might also call it a group portrait of how leading Czech public figures struggled with the role of faith and religion in modern Czech society from around 1900 to 1938. Some of these people, like the Prague-based Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik and the writer Jaroslav Durych, were devoted Catholics, but most of Berglund's protagonists searched for, and tried to express “something higher” in their political, social, or artistic practice outside the established churches.
With a loan from the Czech priest and scholar Tomáš Halík, Berglund introduces the concept of “Somethingism” for a religious belief that is not affiliated with any church or directed towards any institutionally-defined God. The twentieth century decline of the authority of the Catholic Church in Czech society did not necessarily, Berglund shows, lead to an embrace of secular rationalism. In the interwar years, many Czech intellectuals kept searching for “the sacred,” and some tried to put it into their political philosophy, or into stone. Berglund covers a multitude of expressions of this longing, which makes his book a kaleidoscopic mix of biography, intellectual history, histories of architecture, urban planning, religion, and more.
The title's “castle and cathedral” have both concrete and figurative meanings. In 1918, the Prague Castle became the seat of the president of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic. The castle areas were in urgent need of reconstruction, and strongly supported by his daughter Alice, President Tomáš G. Masaryk wanted the new designs to express the ideals of the state and its founder. They chose Plečnik to be in charge of this. Plečnik also designed another significant piece of interwar Prague architecture, the Catholic Church of the Sacred Heart in the Vinohrady district, and the story of these two projects is one of the book's main topics.
“The Castle” was also a common label for an informal group of politicians and intellectuals who supported the president. Masaryk had a strained relationship with Catholicism, and it spilled over into interwar politics. He sought to introduce a “new religion” as the spiritual platform of the new republic, freed from the creedal beliefs of Catholic and eventually also Protestant Christianity. The struggles over religion as Masaryk's supporters and detractors engaged with his religious ideas, is a second major theme.
The book has two parts. The first consists of biographical sketches of Masaryk, Plečnik, and Masaryková with a special focus on their views on religion. The literature on Masaryk is boundless, but Berglund succeeds in casting new light on how strongly the future president (and his American wife Charlotte) believed in his grandiose mission to fuse politics, science, and religion into a synthesis that could regenerate modern society. The account of Plečnik's way to Prague and to a position as a highly respected teacher of Czech architects is also interesting, and Berglund explains well why Plečnik and Masaryk, despite their different views on Catholicism, were such a good match. Plečnik's work on the Church of the Sacred Heart in particular has also been covered in Cynthia Paces’ Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (2009), with which Berglund could have engaged more. But his chapter on Alice Masaryková is highly original and shows convincingly that as a pioneering social activist and promoter of what we now call civil society, she deserves recognition as a central figure in interwar Czech public life.
The four chapters of the second part follow a loose chronological order as they take their reader through the interwar activities of the main protagonists, and the “culture wars” that evolved around them. The plot becomes more fragmented, and readers familiar with Czech interwar politics and literature will be familiar with parts of it. Berglund manages to mostly stay focused on the diverse and ultimately elusive efforts of intellectuals from Karel Čapek to Emanuel Rádl to find a formula for a civic religion that could unite the population of Czechoslovakia.
The conclusion takes the history of “Somethingism” up to Havel and today. Berglund claims at the very end that the reconstructed Prague Castle has come to embody something sacred, an ideal of democracy. This seems too optimistic. Rather than pointing “to Something” (341), Plečnik's obelisk in the Castle courtyard may be seen as sharing the fate of Masaryk, once followers of all persuasions projected their own ideas onto his body of thought: to have become empty signifiers.
