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Authors: Peter Demetz

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The story of Masaryk’s rise from the plebeian cottage of his birth to the castle of the Bohemian kings sounds like a modern fairy tale (he used the term himself), and though he came to enjoy a few surprising and happy turns of fortune, he never ceased to speak of the necessity of hard work, and he knew why. He was born in 1850 at Hodonín (Göding), the son of a Slovak groom and coachman, later a bailiff on an imperial estate in southeastern Moravia, and a Moravian mother who was educated in German and spoke the local Slovak only later in her marriage. It may be said of Masaryk that he did not have a mother tongue (though his mother taught him to count and pray in German), and he grew up with the Slovak-Moravian dialects spoken in the villages near the border. Unfortunately the family was continually transferred from village to village, the result being that the student and scholar Masaryk had considerable trouble with the literary Czech and educated German in which he was to teach and publish. In village schools, some Czech and more German were taught; after he had attended a Catholic
Hauptschule
with good success, his father sent him to Vienna (where his mother had worked as a cook) to be apprenticed to a locksmith; in practice, he had to operate a primitive contraption to punch out heel protectors; after running home from Vienna, he was put up with a local blacksmith in order to learn how to shoe horses and in the hope that the blacksmith would reveal to him something of his art in healing animals and people. A former teacher and an honest village priest, who taught him Latin, told his parents that he should go
on to school; after preparing for an entrance exam he entered the
Gymnasium
in Brno (Brünn). He had to tutor to eat and, in a surprising chain of events, was hired by Brno’s chief of police, Le Monnier, the very man who had once checked on Havlí
ek’s passage through Salzburg, to tutor his son; he also had a good chance to learn French and to read the German classics, including Lessing and Goethe, which stayed with him all his life. When the strong-willed lad from the provinces almost came to blows with the headmaster and was told to leave, Le Monnier, now appointed police chief in Vienna, welcomed him in his home; young Masaryk was accepted into the elite
Akademisches Gymnasium,
where among his fellow students were three future Austrian ministers and the later president of the Republic of Austria. Masaryk did excellent work in religion, German, and Greek, less so in history and philosophy, and passed his final examinations in the summer of 1872.
After his youth of dire poverty, Masaryk’s years as a student at the University of Vienna were free of difficult financial problems, and he devoted most of his time to classical philology and later to philosophy. He was also active in the Czech Academic Union and wrote his first essays, which editors in Prague usually turned down because of his “crabby Czech” (actually, a Slavic language he concocted out of Russian and Slovak elements). He lived as resident tutor in the opulent home of Rudolf Schlesinger, director of the Anglo-Austrian bank, teaching his oldest son, also interested in philosophy; he had no reason to complain either about his open-handed employer or his new academic friends. His early love for Plato prompted him to study Latin and Greek and to attend the lectures of the famous scholar Theodor Gomperz (from a Brno Jewish family), who kept an eye on the young and serious Moravian; Gomperz’s colleagues were pedants, however, and Masaryk, perhaps seeking consolation after the death of his younger brother, turned from classics to philosophy. He was attracted by Franz Brentano, ex-priest and newcomer to the university, who urged him to read Aristotle and to study the British skeptics and the French positivists; following Brentano’s ideas and Vienna tradition, Masaryk early turned away from Kant, Hegel, and the idealist tradition. But he never resolved, in his own mind, the conflict between his Platonic aspirations and British empiricism, and (as it would appear later) his sincere religiosity, ever in search of a fitting church, and his sociological view of a world accessible to reason and patient research.
In 1876, Masaryk submitted his doctoral dissertation, in German, on the essence of the soul as defined by Plato, and his
Doktorvater,
Brentano, though somewhat puzzled by his written German, which obscured the
argument, readily accepted the dissertation, saying, “The labor expended on the thesis must be rated higher than the thesis itself.” After passing his oral examination in mid-March 1876, Masaryk received his Ph.D. in philosophy and left for Italy with his student Alfred Schlesinger, all expenses paid by Schlesinger
père.
It was resolved that later they would go to Leipzig to continue their studies in philosophy. Arriving there on October 15, 1876, they rented rooms with Mrs. Augusta Goering (no relative of Hermann) in a little
pension
in which many American visitors also stayed. Masaryk liked Leipzig, attended lectures by Wilhelm Wundt, and enjoyed conversations with his fellow Moravian Edmund Husserl, but in the summer of 1877, studious Masaryk, twenty-seven years old, turned away from the abstractions of philosophy to the enchantments of life. He met Charlotte Garrigue, a young American student of music, who took lodgings at Frau Goering’s too.
Masaryk is often described by his biographers as a Victorian and a puritan, and he certainly was (not only judging from his literary opinions about European “Decadents”), but in the summer of 1877 it must have dawned upon him that something was missing in his experience. Curiously, he felt what was coming; he read more voraciously than ever (three novels a day), went to the opera to immerse himself in Richard Wagner, and perused a spate of sociological and anthropological studies about women. When Charlotte turned up with her grave eyes, energetic nose, firm chin, and the bearing of an independent young American woman, his awkward hesitations were gone; he wrote to a friend that the idea had occurred to him that he might be capable of cherishing affections for Charlotte. She was giving English lessons to the landlady’s handicapped daughter, Masaryk joined the ladies (who were reading Lord Byron), and upon his recommendations they went on to study Henry Thomas Buckle’s
History of Civilization in England,
not exactly a literary aphrodisiac; when Masaryk, on an excursion, helped to save Frau Goering’s life (she had slipped and plunged into the Elbe River) he came down with a cold, so the English reading lessons decorously shifted to his room. Romance was in the air.
When Charlotte went to the little Thuringian spa of Elgersburg, Masaryk sent her a letter proposing marriage (she must have thought he was out of his mind), then shortly appeared in Elgersburg himself, and after a few days of walking and arguing, the two announced their engagement on August 10. Charlotte then returned to Brooklyn and Masaryk to Vienna to work on his treatise about the principles of sociology, which was to be submitted to the university. Perhaps it is not impossible to assume that
Charlotte’s father—a Huguenot by extraction, of Danish birth, a Leipzig bookseller by training, and more recently director of the Germania Insurance Company—and her midwestern mother wanted to meet her fiancé personally; they wrote to him that she had suffered a little accident and wanted to see him, and in February 1878, T. G. Masaryk went aboard ship in Hamburg. Seventeen days later in New York he found Charlotte much improved (if there had been any danger to her health at all). Young Masaryk expected, perhaps in the European way, that Garrigue Sr. would financially contribute to setting up the new ménage, and he sulked around Brooklyn when his father-in-law refused, but on March 15 Charlotte and Thomas were married nevertheless. Garrigue Sr. then relented as far as financial matters were concerned, and the two newlyweds immediately sailed back to Europe, where they eventually settled in a spacious apartment in Vienna. Their daughter Alice was born within the year, and later Herbert, Olga, and Jan.
Masaryk did not have an easy time trying to fulfill the requirements for his appointment as university lecturer. His disquisition on the principles of sociology was not accepted, and his manuscript “Suicide as a Collective Social Phenomenon” barely squeezed through, a curious and yet remarkable mixture of a romantic philosophy of culture and statistics that ascribed modern frustrations to the loss of religious certainties; his amiable professors argued that their positive evaluation was based on his personal commitment rather than on the manuscript’s intrinsic merits. He was duly appointed lecturer, teaching Plato, while Charlotte tried to make ends meet, and when it became known that Prague’s Czech University was to be established formally, he applied there, though he had qualms about Prague, which he did not know well, and about his Czech. Charlotte did not like Vienna and welcomed the possible move.
In the fall term of 1882, Masaryk gave his first lecture in Prague, entitled “Hume and Skepticism,” immediately challenging his older colleagues by turning to British and French thinkers, by inviting his students to his home on Friday evenings, and by speaking, in a special lecture series for young lawyers, about problems of the state, morality, and prostitution (he was the first professor to utter that terrible P-word, though he abhorred the phenomenon, in the hallowed halls of the university). There were many reasons why the conservatives disliked the newcomer; when in February 1886 the distinguished philologist Jan Gebauer, in a periodical Masaryk edited, again raised the question whether the famous
Rukopisy
were authentic (those allegedly ancient manuscripts, falsified by Václav Hanka in 1817-18, to make certain that the Czechs had an older
literature than that of the Germans) and Masaryk in a friendly editorial letter revealed that he too did not believe in the authenticity of the documents, nearly everybody turned against him, accusing him of nihilism. But the young philosopher merely insisted that, from a moral point of view, it was important that national consciousness was not mired in fabrications lacking real historical existence. People called him an abominable traitor to his nation, and the worst was yet to come.
Yet younger intellectuals, scholars, and professionals were attracted by Masaryk’s honesty and sobriety. Together with Masaryk himself, they formed a political alliance with the Young Czechs; from 1891 to 1893, Masaryk commuted from Prague to Austria to serve in the Vienna parliament, where he learned fast; his maiden speech touched on the academic problem of reforming the study of the law; later he resolutely condemned the Austrian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878 and turned his attention early to Slovak and South Slav problems.
When the alliance Masaryk had made with the Young Czechs not surprisingly broke down, he returned to his studies, published a series of temperamental books—e.g., about Jan Hus (he could not bear the Young Czechs’ disregard of his religious engagement) and Karel Havlí
ek—and in 1896, after thirteen years of near-disgrace, the associate professor was finally promoted to a full professorship, with a somewhat higher salary. Again, he was not a man to withdraw to his library and to learned discussion; when a young Bohemian Jew was accused of ritual murder and Masaryk fought against the ancient superstition, even his students revolted against him. He thought of going to America until Charlotte, now almost Czech and in strong sympathy with the Social Democrats, encouraged him to fight his adversaries vigorously.
On March 29, 1899, the seamstress Anežka Hr
zová had been found murdered in a little forest near Polna, a provincial Bohemian town, a terrible gash through her throat, and since there was, or seemed, so little blood on the corpse (which had been dragged from another spot closer to the road), local people began talking about ritual murder, and twenty-two-year-old Leopold Hilsner, unemployed and of uncertain means, was arrested on suspicion of murder; after a first trial in Polna based on circumstantial evidence, he was sentenced to death by a second Bohemian court (though found not guilty of another murder which had been thrown in for good measure). The trial of Leopold Hilsner was a European cause célèbre; the emperor commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment, of which Hilsner served twenty-eight years in an Austrian prison.
BOOK: Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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