Learning from Small Nations

Iwas born in Prague in 1932. My parents—both Czech by origin—had come to the city from the provinces in the 1920s. My father was a skilled worker who went on to become a technician; a socialist, but Catholic and strongly anti-Communist. Perhaps, later on, his difficulty in understanding my decision to study humanities, which he saw as pointless, inclined me more to study topics that would have some social relevance. My mother’s father was also a socialist, but with staunch anti-clerical and national feelings. Religion was never discussed in the family and played little role in my formation, beyond the not-very-attractive teaching at elementary school. The decisive intellectual environment for me was the eight years spent at the Gymnasium, where Latin and Greek were the core of the syllabus.

The years of occupation above all schooled me in fear: I learned to be distrustful, a capability which later became important for survival. I remember the uprising of May 1945, in which my father participated, as a time of great euphoria—and pride; after the liberation, the whole of Czechoslovakian society was intensely patriotic. The three years that followed seem to me today the only period of my life in which I felt absolutely free to express myself. Naturally, this is an illusion, for I was certainly being influenced by the media. February 1948 was seen by everyone in my family as a disaster, but I also felt a strong sense of indignation towards the non-Communist politicians, who had opened the door for the Communists to come to power and then fled to the West. I knew little of the Treaty of Yalta and the division of the world between the superpowers. After 1948, the patriotism of the liberation era had to be politically modified to meet the requirements of the Cold War: Czech national feeling had to be made compatible with love for the Soviet Union and other socialist countries, while attitudes to the West needed to distinguish between ‘the people’, the object of positive sentiments, and the ‘bourgeoisie’, the enemy—pedagogical concepts that were, needless to say, ineffective and soon degenerated into farce.

I had originally intended to study literature at university, rather than history—I saw it as necessary to maintain the Czech cultural tradition, which I felt was endangered by Communist nihilism. But I was discouraged by the low level of intellectual discussion and the political atmosphere, and after a year switched to history, where there were still some teachers from the pre-revolutionary days, and where the climate was friendlier and less politicized. My favourite teacher, Josef Polišenský, was from the pre-1948 generation, and it was he who suggested I study the Wallenstein archives and analyse his less well known activities on the Baltic coast. The fact that I knew German and Nordic languages also played some role in this—as a young boy, I had been involved in a Red Cross project taking undernourished Czech children on summer holidays to Norway; so I learned basic Norwegian, which opened up Scandinavian languages for me. Studying Wallenstein began as quite a traditional topic, but it served as a bridge to my doctoral work on the inter-relationship between trade and politics during the Thirty Years’ War, where I combined political history with the history of trade, prices and transportation. This was considered too far removed from standard approaches, and Polišenský was not very enthusiastic about it. Later, when the debate on the 17th century reached the socialist countries, I concentrated on the distinction between crisis and decline. I tried to prove that crisis did not automatically mean decline, but was rather a manifestation of the sharpening internal contradictions of a system; if the system was able to overcome the crisis through partial changes, it could emerge stabilized or even strengthened.