Modern history
First Republic, interwar Prague, the Czech-Slovak experiment. Masaryk era.
Part of Prague's story
15 moments in this segment.
- — The Golden Bull of 1356. Detail of the original Golden Bull of 1356, the constitutional charter of the Holy Roman Empire for the next 450 years. Place: Promulgated in two parts: at the Diet of Nuremberg (10 January 1356) and the Diet of Metz (25 December 1356) Figures: Charles IV · the seven prince-electors (the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier; the count palatine of the Rhine; the duke of Saxony; the margrave of Brandenburg; the king of Bohemia, who is Charles himself) For two and a half centuries the German throne has been contested by ambiguous procedures and double elections. There is no settled list of electors, no settled majority rule, no settled procedure for what happens when a candidate wins narrowly. Charles, who came to his own throne through such a disputed election, intends to close the question forever. The Diet of Nuremberg in January 1356 passes the first twenty-three chapters; the Diet of Metz the following Christmas adds the last eight. The whole is sealed with the imperial golden bulla from which the document takes its name. The seven electors are fixed: three ecclesiastical (Mainz, Cologne, Trier) and four lay (Bohemia, the Rhenish Palatinate, Saxony-Wittenberg, Brandenburg). The election shall be by majority. The electors' territories are made indivisible by inheritance, immune from imperial jurisdiction, possessed of regalian rights to mint coin and try capital cases. The King of Bohemia is named the senior lay elector, with the office of imperial cupbearer and precedence at every diet.
- — The Marian Column Erected. The Marian Column on Old Town Square, raised in 1650 as a Habsburg-Catholic thank-offering for the city's deliverance from the Swedish siege, torn down in November 1918, and restored 2020. Place: Old Town Square Figures: Ferdinand III, who vowed it · Johann Georg Bendl, sculptor · Franz Anton Lothar Pikl, who toppled it in 1918 Ferdinand III, present in Prague during the Swedish siege of 1648, vowed a column to the Immaculate Conception if the right bank held. It held. The column is consecrated on 13 July 1650, in the Old Town Square, fifteen meters from the spot where Mydlář had set up his scaffold twenty-nine years earlier. The Virgin in gilt bronze stands atop a sandstone column; four angels at the base spear demons named for plague, war, hunger, and heresy. It becomes the centerpiece of Counter-Reformation public ritual in Prague. The Corpus Christi procession passes it; the bishop blesses it annually; in famine years children are paraded around its base. It is also a meridian: the noon shadow on its plinth marked the city's true south until the eighteenth century.
- — Hašek's first Švejk sketches. Jaroslav Hašek, photographic portrait Place: Editorial offices of Karikatury magazine, Prague Figures: Jaroslav Hašek, satirist, anarchist, bohemian regular of U Kalicha · Josef Lada, illustrator (later) · the unnamed soldier Švejk, in his first appearance On May 22, 1911, the satirical magazine Karikatury publishes the first of a series of short pieces by Jaroslav Hašek featuring a guileless or guile-disguising Czech soldier named Švejk. There are five sketches in the cycle, more in subsequent magazines through 1912. The character is broadly drawn: he agrees with everything, salutes everyone, executes orders with such pedantic literalism that the chain of command breaks under him. Hašek at twenty-eight is a published satirist of some four hundred short pieces, a former anarchist, a former founder of the satirical Party of Moderate Progress within the Bounds of the Law, and an alcoholic. He writes in cafés, often U Kalicha at the corner of Na Bojišti, where Švejk in the eventual novel also drinks.
- — The Republic is Declared. Prague, 28 October 1918. The news of Habsburg collapse reaches the streets and the Czechoslovak state enters into life by acclamation. Place: Municipal House (Obecní dům), náměstí Republiky Figures: Antonín Švehla · Alois Rašín · František Soukup · Jiří Stříbrný · Vavro Šrobár (the Men of October) · Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, in absentia The Municipal House has been open since 1912, an Art Nouveau confection wedged against the Powder Gate where the royal route once began. On the morning of October 28, 1918, news reaches Prague that Vienna has accepted the Fourteen Points; the Habsburg monarchy is, in writing, prepared to grant autonomy to its peoples. The crowd reads acceptance as collapse and acts accordingly. By afternoon, the five members of the National Committee available in Prague (Švehla, Rašín, Soukup, Stříbrný, and the Slovak Šrobár, who happens to be in town) draft and sign the first law of the new state. It begins: Samostatný stát československý vstoupil v život. The independent Czechoslovak state has entered into life. They sign on Municipal House letterhead. There is, as yet, no other.
- — Masaryk Returns to Prague. Czechoslovak legionnaires escort President Masaryk through Prague on 21 December 1918, his first day in the capital after four years in exile. Place: Wilson Station (Wilsonovo nádraží), Vinohrady · Prague Castle Figures: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, first president · Charlotte Garrigue Masaryková · Karel Kramář, prime minister · the welcoming crowd Masaryk left Prague in December 1914, a 64-year-old professor of philosophy with a notebook and a small fund of émigré money. He has spent the war in Geneva, Paris, London, Petrograd, Tokyo, and Washington, organizing legions out of Czech prisoners of war and lobbying Allied governments for a state that did not yet exist. The Czechoslovak Legion in Siberia, 50,000 strong, has been his improbable diplomatic instrument; he leaves Vladivostok in April 1918, crosses the Pacific, the United States, the Atlantic, Italy, and finally enters the new Republic by train through Slovakia. On December 20 he reaches Břeclav, on the Moravian border. The route to Prague is lined with crowds at every station. He is 68 years old. He has not seen his city for four years and one week.
- — Rašín's Currency Reform. Alois Rašín, Minister of Finance, who in February 1919 sealed the borders, stamped the kronen, and built the koruna in a single week. Place: Ministry of Finance, Letenská street · the closed borders Figures: Alois Rašín, Minister of Finance · Vilém Pospíšil, head of the Banking Office · the customs and border guards By February 1919 the Austro-Hungarian crown is dying in real time. Currency is fleeing the rump Austrian state into the new successor countries, who are flooded with paper they cannot back. Rašín, finance minister and one of the Men of October, decides on a sealed operation. The cabinet authorizes him on February 25. At midnight on February 26, the borders close for ten days. Mail, telegraphs, and rail traffic in foreign currency are suspended. Within Czechoslovakia, citizens must present all Austro-Hungarian banknotes to a state office; half the value is exchanged for stamped notes, the other half retained as a forced loan. Stamps are paper adhesive labels, glued to each banknote and franked. Only stamped notes will remain legal tender. The work proceeds in post offices, schoolrooms, and town halls across the country, simultaneously.
- — The February Constitution. The opening of the first elected Czechoslovak parliament, the institutional successor to the Revolutionary National Assembly that ratified the constitution on 29 February 1920. Place: Revolutionary National Assembly, Rudolfinum Figures: Alfréd Meissner, drafter · Jiří Hoetzel, drafter · Antonín Švehla · the Revolutionary Assembly (256 deputies, no Germans or Magyars seated) The Revolutionary National Assembly, seated in the Rudolfinum on the Vltava embankment (its concert hall converted for the purpose), has been working since November 1918 with a provisional constitution of fourteen articles. By February 1920 a permanent text is ready. The drafting is led by Jiří Hoetzel of the Charles University law faculty, with revisions by the Social Democrat Alfréd Meissner. They borrow from the French Third Republic, the American federal system, and the Weimar draft then nearing completion in Germany. The vote is taken on February 29, a leap day, a date that will not recur for four years. Some deputies note this aloud; nobody changes their vote because of it.
- — Devětsil Dissolves. Toyen (Marie Čermínová) and Karel Teige in 1925, at the height of the Devětsil years, before Poetism gave way to Surrealism and the group disbanded. Place: Mánes Union of Fine Arts, Smíchov embankment · the magazine ReD Figures: Karel Teige, theorist · Vítězslav Nezval, poet · Jaroslav Seifert, poet · Toyen (Marie Čermínová) · Jindřich Štyrský · Konstantin Biebl · Vladislav Vančura Devětsil (the name a plant, butterbur, but read by the founders as nine forces) is founded in October 1920 in the Union café on Perštýn by a group of writers and painters aged between 17 and 24. Their first manifesto demands proletarian art; within two years they have inverted themselves into Poetism, an aesthetic of joy, circus, jazz, neon, and the picture-poem. Karel Teige is the theorist; Nezval, Seifert, and Biebl are the poets; Toyen and Štyrský are the painters; the architecture wing includes Jaromír Krejcar and Bedřich Feuerstein. Through the 1920s they publish Disk, Pásmo, and from 1927 ReD (Revue Devětsilu), in which Czech avant-garde meets the Bauhaus, the Soviet Constructivists, the French Surrealists. Le Corbusier prints in ReD; so do El Lissitzky, Hannes Meyer, and Walter Gropius.
- — The Death of Masaryk. From the memorial volume Památce presidenta Osvoboditele, published on the death of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 14 September 1937. Place: Lány Castle, Central Bohemia · Vladislav Hall, Prague Castle Figures: Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, 87 · Edvard Beneš, his successor · Alice Masaryková · Jan Masaryk Masaryk has lived at Lány, the country residence west of Prague, since his stroke in May 1934. He resigned the presidency in December 1935 and named Beneš his successor in a public letter: he knows the world, and the world knows him. Through 1936 he reads, dictates to his daughter Alice, receives a small circle (Čapek, Beneš, the Slovak philosopher Štefan Osuský). He is 87 and frail and clear. On the night of September 13–14, 1937, he develops pneumonia. He dies at 3:29 a.m. on September 14, with Alice and Jan at the bedside. The news goes out at 5 a.m. The radio announcers cannot finish reading it.
- — The May Mobilization. Czechoslovak troops at the Sudeten border during the partial mobilization of May 1938, the army the country built and then was not allowed to use. Place: the Sudeten border districts · General Staff, Prague Figures: Edvard Beneš, President · Ludvík Krejčí, Chief of the General Staff · Konrad Henlein, leader of the Sudetendeutsche Partei · Lord Runciman, British mediator (arrives August) On the evening of May 20, 1938, Czechoslovak military intelligence reports unusual Wehrmacht movements near the Saxon border. The reports turn out to be wrong, or at least exaggerated; the German formations are exercise concentrations, not invasion preparations. The cabinet does not wait to find out. By midnight the general staff has issued partial mobilization orders. Through the night and the following day, 174,000 reservists report to their units. The Czechoslovak army, the eighth-largest in Europe in 1938, occupies its prepared border fortifications: a continuous concrete line from the Ore Mountains to the Carpathians. The diplomatic effect is immediate. Berlin denies any intention to invade. London and Paris pat themselves on the back for having prevented a war. The Czechoslovak public, briefed by radio through the morning of the 21st, mobilizes too: queues at recruiting offices, blackouts, a sense (briefly) that the army would hold.
- — The Munich Agreement. Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini at the Führerbau in Munich, 29 September 1938. Czechoslovakia had no seat at the table. Place: Führerbau, Munich · Czernin Palace, Prague Figures: Neville Chamberlain · Édouard Daladier · Adolf Hitler · Benito Mussolini · Edvard Beneš, in Prague · Vojtěch Mastný and Hubert Masařík, Czechoslovak observers Chamberlain arrives in Munich on the morning of September 29 in his third visit to Hitler in fifteen days. Daladier comes from Paris, Mussolini from Rome with a draft text prepared by the German Foreign Ministry the night before. The four leaders convene at the Führerbau on Königsplatz at 12:45 p.m. The Czechoslovak observers Mastný and Masařík are not admitted to the meeting. They are kept in a hotel, then in an adjacent room, briefed only on the outcome. Negotiations break for dinner, resume, break again. At 1:30 a.m. on September 30 the four leaders sign. The Sudetenland passes to Germany: 11,000 square miles, 28 percent of Czechoslovak territory, 3.5 million inhabitants (of whom 700,000 are Czech-speaking), most of the country's coal, most of its border fortifications, the Škoda works at Plzeň within easy striking distance of the new frontier.
- — Soviet tanks down Letná. Red Army T-34 tanks of Konev's 1st Ukrainian Front in Prague, 9 May 1945. Place: Letná plain; Czech Bridge; Old Town Square; the suburbs Figures: Marshal Ivan Konev, 1st Ukrainian Front · Lieutenant Ivan Goncharenko, first tank into the centre (killed at Manesův most) · Andrei Vlasov, captured 12 May · Edvard Beneš, returning from London via Moscow on 16 May Konev's tanks have driven from Berlin in five days, 350 kilometers across Saxony and northern Bohemia, fueled and crewed past exhaustion. The lead T-34 of the 63rd Tank Brigade enters Prague from the north before dawn on May 9. By six in the morning Soviet armor is on Letná plain, where the giant statue of Stalin will rise five years later and stand for seven. Citizens come out with lilac. The trees are in full bloom; the photographs of liberation across Prague are photographs of tankmen covered in lilac sprigs. Lieutenant Goncharenko's tank, leading the column toward Old Town, is hit by a Panzerfaust at the Manesův Bridge. He is killed; his crew survives. He is the first Soviet officially buried in Prague liberation cemetery.
- — Petřín lookout tower opens. Petřín Lookout Tower, built for the 1891 Jubilee Exhibition Place: Petřín hill, above Lesser Town Figures: Klub českých turistů, Czech Tourist Club (commissioner) · Vratislav Pasovský, club president · engineers František Prášil and Julius Souček The Klub českých turistů sends a delegation to the Paris World's Fair of 1889, partly to walk up Eiffel's new tower. They return with the idea of an Eiffel of their own. Funds are raised within months; design completed in 1890; iron forged in Bohemian works. The tower is built at one-fifth Eiffel's scale, 63.5 meters of latticework on the crest of Petřín hill above the Lesser Town. With the hill's 327 meters factored in, the platform sits roughly level with the top of the original. It opens on August 20, 1891, two months into the Jubilee General Land Centennial Exhibition. The exhibition is the country's industrial demonstration to itself and to the empire: glasshouses on Stromovka, a pavilion for every industry, a fountain by František Křižík with electric light playing on the water at night. The subject dates from 1891; this photograph was taken in 2016.
- — Closely Watched Trains wins the Oscar. Jiří Menzel in 2017. His debut feature won the foreign-language Oscar in April 1968, four months before the tanks arrived. Place: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Los Angeles · Barrandov Studios, Prague Figures: Jiří Menzel, director · Bohumil Hrabal, novelist · Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer (the New Wave still working in Prague) Jiří Menzel is twenty-eight, a graduate of FAMU (the Prague film school), when he adapts Bohumil Hrabal's novella Ostře sledované vlaky: a young station-master's apprentice in a sleepy wartime Bohemian railway halt loses his virginity, joins the resistance almost by accident, and dies stamping a German munitions train. The film is funny, slow, indirect, and brief (ninety-three minutes). Hrabal co-writes the screenplay; the village is the one he worked in himself during the Occupation. It wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film on 10 April 1968, eleven weeks into Dubček's reforms. Czechoslovak cinema has now won two Oscars in three years; Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos took the same prize in 1965 for Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street), a film about an old Jewish woman in a Slovak town and the Aryanizer assigned to her button shop. The subject dates from 1968; this photograph was taken in 2017.
- — Charles-Ferdinand University divided. The Karolinum, seat of the divided Charles-Ferdinand University after 1882 Place: Karolinum and the new Czech faculties, Old Town Figures: Emperor Franz Joseph I, signing · Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, appointed associate professor of philosophy in October · Jaroslav Goll, historian · Jan Gebauer, philologist Charles IV's university has been a single institution since 1348. By the late nineteenth century it teaches in German with Czech permitted as a courtesy. Czech students and faculty have been petitioning for a separate Czech-language faculty for fifteen years. The imperial law of February 28, 1882 splits the Charles-Ferdinand University into two parallel institutions: a Czech university and a German university, each with full faculties of theology, law, medicine, and philosophy. They share the Karolinum building, the rector's mace, and the seals, in alternating ceremonies. They share nothing else. The split is enacted from the autumn semester of 1882. The subject dates from 1882; this photograph was taken in 2017.
