Content area
Full Text
The press reports that Czech president Vaclav Havel recently unveiled a bronze statue of Masaryk in a Washington park. Masaryk, for most American readers, is only the dim memory of a foreign minister found dead in a Prague courtyard, after the Communists took over Czechoslovakia in 1948. But that was Jan Masaryk. The monument is to his father, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, founder of Czechoslovakia and its first president.
When T. G. Masaryk died in 1937 he was perhaps the best-loved European. His public image owed much to the work of a friend, the playwright Karel Capek. The friendship between the respected old statesman and the imaginative younger writer was extraordinary and effective. But as they talked, and acted, their democratic republic fell increasingly in the shadow of large tyrannies-Fascist, Nazi, and Soviet.
When the Communists fell from power in Prague in 1989, the new president who took Masaryk's old seat in Prague Castle-and who was to hold that seat until 2003-was also a playwright, Vaclav Havel. There are interesting comparisons to be made between Masaryk, Capek, and Havel, against the background of a nation that has suffered, and accomplished, more than many others.
Capek's high estimate of T. G. Masaryk was shared by many others in the 1920's and 1930's. Emil Ludwig, biographer of the world's most famous, saw Masaryk as a Goethean figure, a less melancholy Lincoln. R. H. Bruce Lockhart, an Englishman who knew nearly every European statesman between the two world wars, called Masaryk the noblest figure and the fairest-minded man that he had met in any country. H. G. Wells thought Masaryk and Lenin were the two most impressive men he ever met; Lenin for his part called Masaryk his most important ideological opponent in Europe.
The Russian and the Czech came from opposite backgrounds. Lenin, who preached a dictatorship of the proletariat, was the son of a school inspector and member of the nobility; Masaryk was born in 1850 in a Moravian village, the son of an illiterate coachman. The Czech lands-Bohemia and Moravia-were then part of the AustroHungarian Empire, and the elder Masaryk worked on an Imperial estate. Young Tomas saw his father dealt with rudely by his masters, and quickly learned to hate them. Sometimes a group of...