Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

“An intelligent, captivating, and much-needed book.”
—
ADAM MICHNIK

“A great book. Mariusz Szczygieł is well versed in the Polish school of reportage writing and he applies his method to this specific Czech ambiguity. Original and surprising.”
—
AGNIESZKA HOLLAND

“Extraordinary, hypnotizing, and disturbing tales.”
—
LIBÉRATION

“If you want to understand the Czech Republic in the twentieth century, read
Gottland
.”
—
FRANKFURTER ALLEGEMEINE ZEITUNG

“Masterful prose … impressive.”
—
NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG

“One of the most valuable and eloquent testimonies about the Czech people.”
—
PRÁVO
(
CZECH REPUBLIC
)

GOTTLAND: MOSTLY TRUE STORIES FROM HALF OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

First published in Poland as
Gottland
Copyright © 2006, 2014 by Mariusz Szczygieł
Translation copyright © 2014 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

First Melville House printing: May 2014

Melville House Publishing
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Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
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Islington
London N4 2BT

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Szczygiel, Mariusz, 1966-
[Gottland. English]
Gottland : mostly true stories from half of Czechoslovakia / Mariusz
Szczygiel; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
    pages cm
Originally published in Polish in 2006.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-61219-313-7 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-61219-314-4 (ebook)
1. Czech Republic–Anecdotes. 2. Czech Republic–Social conditions–Anecdotes. I. Lloyd-Jones, Antonia, translator. II. Title.
DB2011.S9313 2014
943.71–dc23
                                                            2014012465

Design by Christopher King

v3.1

For Egon Erwin Kisch

“Why does it smell so bad in here?” six-year-old Tomáš Bata
^*
asks his father, Antonín. This is the first manifestation of his desire to set reality straight.

We do not know what his father says in reply. He is probably quite reticent on the whole.

Cobbler Antonín Bata is married for the second time. Twice he has taken a widow with children as his wife. With each wife he has also had his own children. Altogether, at his small cobbler’s workshop in Zlín he is raising twelve children from four marriages. Apart from that, he works with seven other people. His second wife does not like drafts.

The three children from his first marriage, Anna, Antonín and eighteen-year-old Tomáš, are standing in front of their fifty-year-old father. They are demanding their mother’s inheritance. They’re also suggesting that he should immediately
give them whatever they are going to inherit after his death. They don’t have the time to wait all those years, and anyway it is crowded at home.

They get eight hundred gulden in silver coins, and they hire four workers.

They have debts of eight thousand zlotys. They can’t afford new leather hides and they have no money to pay for the old ones. Antonín is called up for the army, and Anna goes to work in Vienna as a domestic servant.

Tomáš stares at the remaining leather, and in his despair he hits upon the most important principle of his life: always turn failure into advantage.

As they cannot afford leather, they will have to make shoes out of what is available: canvas. Canvas doesn’t cost much, and the rest of the leather can be used to make soles. This is how Bata devises one of the great successes of the new century: canvas shoes with leather soles. He brings in several thousand orders from Vienna, all gathered in a single day. People start to call the shoes
batovky
.

This allows him to build his first small factory, where fifty men work in a space of two thousand square feet.

The workers notice that he can never be calm. He is always so stimulated that other people feel exhausted in his company.

He reads a newspaper article about some machines being
made in America. He sets off for the States, and in Lynn, Massachusetts, a shoe-making city, he hires himself out as a worker at a large factory. He takes three of his employees with him, and each one finds employment at a different place. He gives them orders to monitor each stage of production closely. Every Saturday the four shoemakers from Zlín meet up at a saloon, where they exchange observations.

They are amazed that, in America, even small children do their best to earn their own keep. What makes the biggest impression on Bata is a six-year-old boy who goes from house to house, catching flies in exchange for payment.

Some people are dying of poverty, but others bake fritters in the street and sell them for one cent. Tomáš notices a curious feature of the Americans: they can adapt en masse to any kind of novelty humanity has managed to invent.

He has brought 688 questions with him to the States, to which he seeks the answers. During his stay he adds seventy more questions. He reaches the conclusion that the standard of living of the average American, which is higher than in Europe, is due to being free of any kind of routine.

(“It’s clear that Tomáš Bata was an industrial spy in the USA,” Czechoslovak historians will write sixty years later.)

Tomáš learns more and more English, and hears something about Henry Ford. This employer, as E. L. Doctorow wrote of him, has long been convinced that most people are too stupid to be able to earn enough for a decent life. So he hit upon an idea. He divided the assembly of a car into separate, simple
operations, which even an idiot would be capable of performing. Instead of teaching one worker hundreds of tasks, he decided to stand him in one spot and give him one and the same task to perform, all day long, and send the parts along a conveyor belt. This way the worker’s mind would be unburdened. (It would take Ford several more years to put this idea into action.)

In the United States, Tomáš Bata comes across the term “wristwatch” for the first time. It has been in use for four years. With the beginning of the twentieth century the Americans have started to count time in minutes, and time has become the basic measure of production. “Productivity” and “American tempo”—the new fetishes—have demarcated the day into equal units of time. The working day has ceased to depend on the rising and setting of the sun.

That night his father dies.

Tomáš returns to Zlín—still a squalid little town of the kind the Czechs describe as “where the bread ends and the stone begins”—and paints a large sign on the wall of his factory:
THERE ARE
86,400
SECONDS IN A DAY
. People read the sign and start to say that old Bata’s son has lost his wits.

He buys German and American machinery. The factory has six hundred workers by now. He builds the first residential housing for them.

When, in 1908, Ford issues his “car for Everyman” series, Tomáš is filled with excitement: “Ford is already making use of his production line!”

In America it takes seven hours to produce a single pair of shoes, and in France it takes almost six. On the wall of the rubber unit, Tomáš writes in letters six feet high:
PEOPLE THINK, MACHINES TOIL!

At Bata, it only takes four hours to make a single pair of shoes now. Cobblers all over Moravia are devastated. Tomáš builds a brick wall around his factory, and has the following message inscribed on it:
IT
’
S NOT PEOPLE WE FEAR, IT
’
S OURSELVES
. (For over twenty years he will ignore this principle. It will never cross his mind that he will end his life a victim of his own self.)