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Jazz in Central Europe
| Article
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11922 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
2,135 Words |
| Author
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Roger Scruton
Roger Scruton is professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck
College, University of London. His books include Art and
Imagination, Sexual Desire, and Untimely Tracts. |
Czechoslovakia has enjoyed only two decades of independence - long enough to raise the question of its identity, but not long enough to answer it. What is the ground of legitimacy in these land-locked territories, the historical proof that they have the moral unity and political will to exist as a nation-state within a community of like-minded neighbors?
T.G. Masaryk, philosopher-king of the First Republic, answered the question with a mythopoetic theory of Czech history. Czechoslovakia, he argued, was created not by the breakup of the Habsburg empire, but by centuries of struggle for national liberation. The explanation did not go unchallenged. A far-ranging discussion was initiated between those, like Masaryk, who saw the destiny of the Czechs and Slovaks as defined in the historical movement for national independence, and those, like the historian Josef Pekar, who saw the Czechs and the Slovaks as belonging to the larger history of Central Europe, with its Christian faith, Germanic culture, and Slavic temperament. For such people, Pekar argued, the greatest hope for a national culture lay not in separation, but in the historic compromise which had kept the peace in Central Europe.
The dispute ramified. Masaryk's vision was congenial to Protestants, progressives, and socialists; Pekar's to Catholics, reactionaries, and those, like Pekar himself, who viewed the rise of socialist enthusiasms with a justified foreboding.
Czech Identity
Since 1948, the "Czech question" has been officially undiscussable - or discussable only rarely, with a nervous glance over the shoulder. After 1968, most of those who had shown any interest in it were expelled from universities, many of them either imprisoned or forced to emigrate. Nevertheless, the search for an answer continues. Unofficial historians, helped by discreet librarians and by their Western colleagues, collect the forbidden documents of Czech and Slovak history and circulate them among themselves. Through samizdat journals and collections, discussion groups and seminars, the "Czech question" is kept alive. In 1984, Charter 77 issued a declaration called "The Right to History," in which access to the traditional history of the Czech and Slovak nations, free from propaganda and mendacity, was demanded as a right - as important as the right to life and in the end just as necessary. For national history is the thread that joins such nations to their culture. It tells them that they are not yet wholly vanquished, and that their being together in one place is not a meaningless
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