The Animal Spirits of Democracy: Prague’s Martyrs and Modernity
Democracy has been a long battle of contested terrain, and nowhere more so than the capital city of the Czech Republic. Two steps forward, one step back.
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A few years ago, I was on a book tour for my book, Europe’s Promise: Why the European Way is the Best Hope in an Insecure Age. Paris, London, Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Brussels, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, Vienna, Athens, Istanbul, fifteen cities in only a few weeks — many of these capitals were birthplaces of democracy in their own right, where the battles of yesteryear still resonate today. Two steps forward, one step back. It was a whirlwind tour, exhausting yet exhilarating, and the title of that 1969 movie “If It’s Tuesday This Must Be Belgium” kept flashing through my brain.
Of all the cities I visited, one of the most captivating was Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic (also known as Czechia). It was still enjoying the fresh bloom of democracy that had blossomed some 20 years before during its peaceful Velvet Revolution. Along with similar revolts elsewhere in Eastern and Central Europe, the countries of the Iron Curtain had thrown off the chains of Soviet-Russian occupation. BIG steps forward, circa 1989.
At that time, the world had been witnessing the remarkable events in Egypt and Tunisia known as the Arab Spring. I noticed that many people all over the world referred to these events as the Arab "Velvet Revolution" – not as the Arab "American Revolution," or the Arab "Fall of the Berlin Wall," but as the Arab "Velvet Revolution." Such was the hold that the Czech Republic, a land of only 10 million people, had on the imaginations of people all over the world.
The vestiges of a troubled past
Prague’s thousand-year-old history stretches one’s concept of time. A thousand years of human history, and attempts to take two steps forward without the one back. With kings and empires giving way century after century to usurpers and successors, only to see themselves defenestrated – literally "thrown out the window," an ancient Prague tradition for dealing with tyrannical leaders who overstepped their authority. Legend has it that some of them were tossed out the highest window of the medieval clock tower in the Old Town Hall that looms over the central square.
I had the privilege of interviewing Petr Pithart, a leader of the Velvet Revolution and the Czech Republic’s first Prime Minister post-1989. Then Pithart became a Senator, and in our interview he spoke freely and frankly about the communist legacy of corruption that had continued to plague Czechia, estimated to drain away approximately 15% of the Czech gross domestic product. Since then, various commissions as well as NGOs have targeted the no-bid contracts, sweetheart deals and other practices that have amounted to a partial theft of the Velvet Revolution’s promise. One small step forward.
In my estimation, an atmosphere of melancholy still hangs over Prague after all these many years, reflecting its history as a city of martyrs. Its Old Town Square (Staroměstskénáměstí) is dominated by a large monument honoring native son Jan Hus, a religious thinker who was burned at the stake in 1415 for espousing his beliefs. They actually did that kind of thing then, killed you over what you believed and said (in some places in today’s world, they still do). For centuries that statue has stood as a symbol of one who spoke truth to power and paid the ultimate sacrifice.
Within walking distance from the Hus statuary is a memorial to Jan Palach, the Czech student who committed suicide in January 1969 by setting himself on fire as a protest against the Soviet tanks that had invaded to put an end to the liberalizing reforms of the Prague Spring in 1968.
The nearby Old Jewish Cemetery, with its twisted gravestones looking like rows of crooked skeleton teeth jutting out from layers of burial pits, is a constant reminder of the purges and pogroms that have targeted certain people with genocidal attention and intention. The charnel houses of Europe have been fully booked and overflowing for centuries.
Empires always have their victims, and there is the enormous Prague castle sitting on the hill overlooking the city, casting a shadow over the winding Vltava River and the famous Charles Bridge, dominating the spatial feng shui of the Prague valley. Since the 9th century, this is where the Kings of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperors, Nazi collaborators, Czech communists and now the president of the current Czech Republic all have installed their offices. The city has endured the suffering of the Protestant Reformation, the fratricidal Thirty Years’ War, Nazi invasion, communist occupation, capitalist consumerism and more.
Indeed, the fine hotel where I stayed on one of my trips to Prague is located on Bartolomejska, Bartholomew Street. This short alleyway and canyon of buildings was long a nest of the secret police, where communist authorities took their prisoners, many of whom were never heard from again. Disappeared. Two steps back. The very building in which my hotel resided, Number 9 Bartolomejska, was a former convent until the Communists ran out the nuns and turned the building into a dungeon. Prison cells were set up in the basement, offices loaded with interrogators and the church itself defiled as a shooting range.
Among the people who were jailed there – right there in my hotel’s basement – was a young playwright by the name of Vaclav Havel, who later became Petr Pithart’s more famous counterpart as the first Czech president of the post-1989 era. In the basement, there is a thick metal door indicating that the preserved closet-sized room was Havel’s former cell. The hallways of the three-floor hotel are lengthy and labyrinthine, dimly lit, and as I walked to my room each night I couldn’t help but reflect on how I felt like I was being swallowed down the passageway of a long dark throat that in days gone by had gobbled the hopes, aspirations, indeed the daylight, of so many innocent people.
The City of Hundred Spires
Prague today, comparably, seems bathed in light. It has assumed its rank as a quintessentially European capital, combining beautiful architecture and urban collage with winding alleyways and crisscrossed streets of the old town, whispering the tales of its storied past.
When gazing out from the gates of Prague Castle, high above the city, one can appreciate why the 19th century mathematician and philosopher Bernard Bolzano counted the towers in the city and gave it the name the City of Hundred Spires.
Today, I can attest that Prague is an energetic place, filled with entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, filmmakers, music clubs and good inexpensive beer. It is ranked fifth among Europe’s 271 regions in terms of gross domestic product per inhabitant, achieving 172% of the EU average and ranking above Paris and Stockholm.
Czechia has become a regional auto manufacturing leader and energy exporter. Like everywhere else it was hurt by the pandemic, but it has emerged from that crisis in remarkably decent shape with an unemployment rate hovering around 3.5% for the whole country and only 2.6 percent in Prague (compared to 3.7% in the U.S.). It occupies a crucial geopolitical role in the heart of the European Union, a swing voter of sorts between East and West, sometimes joining with, other times spurning, its troublemaking neighbors, the populist Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Poland’s diminutive Jarosław Kaczyński, as they vex and poke their thumbs in the eye of EU rules and bureaucracy.
Czechia finds itself at the core of a fragilely peaceful and prosperous Europe, yet one foot drags behind as it still tries to shed vestiges of its communist past.
Two steps forward, one step back. It’s as if from the mulch of this corpse-filled history has sprung periodic blooms of new life and creativity. The national museum located across the famous Charles Bridge from Old Town Square houses the fine art of the most amazing Czech and East European painters that virtually no one outside of Czechia has heard of. Reflecting its history, the style of surrealism stands out, along with a Czech version of cubism. I was stunned walking through the galleries, interspersed with modern and contemporary artists mounting their riveting and provocative work, an amazingly eclectic mix of politics, cultural and historical eras.
Democratic contradictions, full steam ahead
Yes, when in Prague, one is surrounded by all these sorts of contradictions and more. And yet, cutting through the fog of memory is the fact that the Velvet Revolution amounted to a final triumph of a centuries-long struggle of truth and nonviolence over brute power and its lies. And it continues to inspire people all over the world.
Its governments have tended to alternate in power between classically European conservatives and the center-left (but keep in mind that the European center tends to be to the left of the Democratic Party in the US on many issues, so political leanings across the Atlantic are not so easily categorized). Its meandering trajectory of two steps forward, one step back has tracked that of Europe itself. Or, for that matter, the United States.
In its parliamentary elections in 2021, the 200 members of the Chamber of Deputies were elected from 14 multi-seat districts by open list proportional representation with a victory threshold of 5% for a political party to win seats. The final results saw the turning out of the incumbent populist prime minister in the closest parliamentary election in the history of the Czech Republic. The opposition parties, which ran on a pro-Western and pro-European center-right platform, focused on fiscal responsibility (in response to some national scandals) and closer relations with NATO. The opposition won a majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and power was peacefully transferred. No January 6-type insurrections. That’s democracy, both feet forward.
The Czech Republic has come a long way from its troubled history, and that of Eastern and Central Europe, and with Prague only a day’s drive from Ukraine, and squeezed between right-wing populist Poland and Hungary, its liberal democracy will have to keep finding its own foundations of certainty among the uncertainty of the region, and the world.
Steven Hill @StevenHill1776
This is a wonderfully written historical piece and certainly mirrors many of the current US struggles.
Helps me to take heart and keep going.