With the loss and dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy, the noble families in the new Czechoslovakia had lost their legitimating and ennobling roots, and their primary claims to hold on to vast tracks of arable and forest lands, as well as industries, had disappeared.
It was expedient for the new state to have the links to an earlier nobility and monarchy, which sent these further back to before the Battle of White Mountain, on which to base the legitimacy ofthe claim to the lands, rendered into a mythos. Local nobility in Bohemia tussled with Germanic identities and noble family relationships, but for the Czechoslovak state the realities lay more in the amount of land held by the 300 or so families which amounted to one-third of the lands of the new state. Conceptually
‘domestication’ of the land, its rendering from one of diaspora to home for the Czechs and Slovaks, required what the noble houses most feared: appropriation. Compensation was set at property value levels from before World War I and this was viewed as a form of confiscation given the increased value of land after the War. At the time of the 1918 inception of the Republic, the Czech lands in particular were one of the most advanced and industrialized nations in Central Europe, with a small ‘multicultural’ and overall more literate population, a larger portion of whom had settled in the cities than was common
in neighbouring nations. The new Czechoslovakia benefited from the confiscation of many of the Austrian industrial plants, and the redistribution of the land which had been held by the Austrian Empire and the Magyars, the Habsburgs and the local nobilities.103 The domestication of the Czech lands following independence, the Land Reform, as Lucy Textor described it, had “conspicuously and consciously a double purpose. It seeks to better the lot of the people and to right a great historic wrong”. 104
The vast territory of existing land ownership prior to independence was retained by a tiny percentage of the population, most notably in the nobility whose large estates did not allow a sufficient number of livings from the remaining land for the peasants in all of the areas, from Silesia to Bohemian lands. As Textor analysed, the economic rationalisation and thus practices of the large estate owners reduced the peasants and the local
inhabitants to seasonal or temporary work and led to a population loss, not only from migration to the city and towns, but from the lack of year-round subsistence even for those who remained.105
As soon as the new state came into being, all large estates were ‘frozen’, unable to be alienated in any way, such as sold, mortgaged or divided without the consent of the new Czechoslovak Department of Agriculture. This initial appropriation eventually led to the distribution of ‘confiscated’ land and property by the National Land Office, as well as industry (breweries, logging forests, glass industries etc.) to Czechoslovak citizens. This resulted in some cases in the demise of the industry through a lack of appropriate
knowledge, and the division of land into strips which made cultivation difficult. The new
Czechoslovak state legislated that land estates over 250 hectares could be taken, but not necessarily automatically confiscated, for national purposes. The state vested itself with sweeping powers over the management of large estates as aprelude to appropriation, the fear being that neglect or even the stripping of assets would take place in the interim. A list of suitable husbandry practices was established and local supervision took place. In cases of neglect, the state could take over the management and visit and examine every aspect of the running of the estates. Economic considerations were given as the overriding rationale in the language of the legislation, but as Glassheim explains, the social, class and economic structure of the old lands meant that this fell (as was the plan) on the German land owners. The distribution, or domestication, also allowed a social refashioning of the populations into the democratic and middle class denizens appropriate to the new Czechoslovakia.106
One of the rallying cries to the creation of the nation, as reported by Eagle Glassheim in his Noble Nationalists, was the call for a redress for the damage from the cultural
domination of the Habsburgs, dating from the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, a battle which began with the defenestration in Prague of Catholic nobles, and which led to a long and presumably dark age of 300 years of Catholic, Jesuit and Habsburg domination and a decline of the Bohemian crown lands.107 The loss and suppression of Czech or Bohemian culture led to what was seen as the last remaining repository for this cultural, ethnic and linguistic identity, which was imagined to be in the peasantry. Whilst it was Ernest Renan who claimed that the first task in the creation of a nation is to forget: “For, the essential element of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common but it must
also have forgotten many things.” the idea of a cultural loss had been potent enough – part of the emotional saliency of the Czech Revival prior to independence in 1918 – to lead to the creation of several of what became the new nation’s artefacts and monuments.108
Whereas the political and influential investments of the nobility were located in the Austrian Empire, the dissolution dictated a refashioning of these into a useful direction of nationalism previously (and rightly) seen as the threat to the survival of the Empire.
Glassheim reports on the various attempts to craft a Czech or German nationalism that was pitched towards the persistence of the Empire - though never sufficient to satisfy ardent independence driven nationalists. Accommodation created ‘amphibians’ who nevertheless were able to hold onto economic position and influence. The threat of confiscation attacked real modern and profitable positions that had developed in the first decades of the 20th century.109
The synthesis of art and architecture in the direct service of the nation, as opposed to the nobility, continued the efforts by the Bohemian aristocracy, beginning in the 18th century, of the delivery of art and artefacts to the public. As part of the enlightened and
enlightenment civic development in Prague, organisations such as the creation of the Patriotic Friends of the Arts, which took its place with scientific and education institutions of the era, became part of the civic and more cosmopolitan development in Prague in the latter part of that century. As Rita Krueger explains, activities that showed the aristocracy as part of the community, contributing to the cultural life, were made as attempts to redefine the concept of the modern state of nobility: “[…]by the turn of the eighteenth
century, patronage as a function of status had been amended and augmented to include the notion of service to the nation.” 110
Paradoxically also for the new pre- and post-independence nationalist sentiments however, the ‘dark age’ of Habsburg rule led also to the Baroque architectural and cultural flowering of Prague. Many of the buildings and monuments which made the city unique were created during these eras. The Obecni Dum (Municipal House or Presentation House 1913),
decorated by Alfonse Mucha with murals depicting the mythical and actual history of the Czech lands, was completed just before the First World War and had been conceived as a cultural centre for Prague citizens. Mucha’s epic murals gave an evocation of a determinate history, one in which there was a prophetic legend and providence for a future glory, depicting the noble sentiments and virtues of the people as embodied by historical and legendary figures such as Comenius and Jan Hus. The nation was already imagined as an entity and a deserving one before there could be any suspicion that world events would turn the correct way.
The Narodni Divadlo (National Theatre) was built from subscription funds (including a contribution from the Emperor) and local building materials and completed in 1881.
However it was open just a scant month before a fire destroyed a major part of the building.
A second public subscription raised sufficient funds to repair and rebuild in record time such was the importance of the building nationally. The appropriation of the term
‘Narodni’– national – as only applying to those Czech and Slovak monuments, were defining moments for the German populations.