Customer Reviews

Defender of Democracy: Masaryk of Czechoslovakia (The Eastern Europe Collection)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The title of the book, "Defender of Democracy, Masaryk of Czechoslovakia", celebrates one of the astonishingly diverse roles (professor, author, parliamentarian, underground organizer, temporary warlord, diplomat, statesman) that Masaryk played during a long and productive life. This particular role became weightier at the end of his days -- when the interviews forming the bulk of the book took place -- because Czechoslovakia and the rest of Europe were looking at Hitler's Germany with wary eyes (and some were equally wary of Stalin's USSR). At that moment, when autocratic and totalitarian states were being exalted as the way of the future, democracy was in need of defenders, both theoretical and practical ones. In this crisis situation Masaryk was a capable spokesman on democracy's behalf. The title is also slightly misleading, since the book is not a conventional political biography with an emphasis on the ideals and techniques of democracy-building in a multi-ethnic state that occupied the last quarter of Masaryk's life, but a brief biography of sixty or so pages followed by the notes from an extended interview that took place over several days.

The biography assumes the reader's familiarity with the outlines of Masaryk's career in public life (for the reader who followed contemporary politics and intellectual trends this was a fair assumption in 1936, the date of the book's publication.) The second part of the book, in which questions or observations by Ludwig are followed by lengthy responses from Masaryk, is modeled on the format of Karel Capek's Talks with Masaryk, which had just been published (in Capek the questions are even briefer and the answers longer and more "formal"). A comparison is inevitable, so Capek's work must be considered first. The English translations of Capek's book may not be the complete record of his conversations with Masaryk -- Capek was a frequent guest of Masaryk and compiled his notes from conversations that took place between 1928 and 1935. The book that resulted from this was an explicit collaboration that went through an author-to-subject-to-author series of editorial shapings. The result is that the reader gets a thorough and systematic presentation of Masaryk's world-view, with detailed (and at times didactic) discussions of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics and religion.

Despite any natural skepticism one might have about the possibility of establishing final truths in these areas of thought, one should step back and note respectfully that no other prominent statesman or political leader of that era would have been capable of such discussions at Masaryk's level of intelligence and insight. For example, the long-winded, theatrical Hitler and the clever and devious Stalin liked to opine about everything under the sun, but their thinking was not well-founded on evidentiary data and was conspicuously tendentious and not especially well-expressed, with Hitler dissolving in a haze of purple and self-acclamatory rhetoric and Stalin resorting to the dull catechistical style of the ex-seminarian. And, in the presence of real journalists, both dictators were always on their guard. By comparison Mussolini was a bright penny, often well-informed and incisive, and a decent writer - being a former journalist and editor -- but intellectually fickle and plagued by a basic pessimism that should have made his ambitions ridiculous in his own mind but was willfully suspended for that very reason. Masaryk's virtues in this regard are the exact opposite of the defects of thought and expression exhibited by the grandiose dictators of the era, who were, unfortunately for all of us, the big "movers and shakers" of contemporary history. Masaryk was a major statesman representing a minor power and therefore less audible to his listeners on that account. It was only his broad network of prominent contacts in the English- and French-speaking worlds which guaranteed him a larger audience. And, it goes without saying, he was no villain, and it is the great villains of history who capture our interest. (We can see the distinctions among these four principals as perceived and represented by one and the same sensibility, since Ludwig himself authored a work of brief comparative biography - Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin - based on the public record and on interviews of Mussolini and Stalin; it was published in the spring of 1940, weeks before the fall of France. But that's another story that merits a separate review.)

In contrast to the preponderant substance of Capek's book (Masaryk's thoughts on religion, philosophy and ethics), Ludwig's has much more material on Masaryk's political ideas, although there is an underlying set of ethical axioms and philosophical concerns that gird these ideas and make their appearance when Masaryk thinks that is appropriate. There is a sensible discussion of the role of the Bohemian Germans, most of whom lived in the Sudetenland - how they should be encouraged to participate in parliamentary democracy without being asked to sacrifice either their native language or local culture. This unfortunate people paid the price of their leaders' obstinacy and pro-Nazi position when they were expelled from their birthplace with little ado and no moral support form the outside world in 1945. Had that leadership followed the path pointed out by Masaryk their fate might have been a very different one. The discussions ramble through other areas of interest to the leader of a state such as Czechoslovakia: interethnic relations within the state; the possible roles of small states in broader European culture and in the balance of European economic and political relations among states; the ideological and power-political bases underlying Nazism, Fascism and Communism, and the incarnations of these "philosophies" in expansionist and dangerous states (the dangers were more serious and more imminent than Masaryk believed); the necessary underpinnings of functioning democracies (transparency of decisions and administration; press-freedom; openness of public office and political party posts to men and women of all classes; the need of leaders and administrators to have accurate and up-to-date information about their own societies - demographic, sociological, economic, etc.); the role of parties vs. the role of cabinets constituted on the basis of administrative skill and technical knowledge; and numerous other aspects of both practical and theoretical politics.

In Ludwig's book the author is a stronger presence as an interviewer and commentator than Capek is in his book. Ludwig lets the reader know in asides when he disagrees with Masaryk's analysis of specific points of politics or philosophy; he also highlights the body-language and facial expressions that accompany Masaryk's talk. There is certainly more "give and take" in Ludwig's discussions than in Capek's, and you get the impression that you are actually listening in on a conversation -- this is possibly based on very different processes of editorial review and revision used in the two books. In the end Ludwig views Masaryk as a sort of secular saint, whose halo was all the brighter in the ambience of a Europe on the verge of making a truly lethal and self-destructive plunge into political and ethical darkness. (In an era when some leaders were elevated to semi-divinities, being a saint was a more modest status than it might seem today. Ludwig was a biographer in the "Great Man" tradition - he wrote of Napoleon and Bismarck - and he seems to have few reservations about including Masaryk in this company of statesmen and leaders while believing Masaryk was a far more accomplished and humane person than other leaders of note.)

Masaryk's thinking is exemplary of a "realistic creed" based on rationalism. What does this mean? As it comes through in the conversations with Ludwig it means that he was inclined to examine political problems without too many lofty ideological preconceptions. Based on accurate factual information about these problems he would analyze them and come up with acceptable solutions (not "final solutions" or solutions driven by theoretical requirements.) For him an acceptable solution was usually a "gradual" one that took into account the limitations of human beings and the degree of competence of those selected to implement programs. He counseled persistence, constant revision, and most of all, patience in dealing with refractory social and economic problems. In his own mind this approach was also ethically grounded in a very specific (and unthreatening) theism - he was a religious man in the broadest sense without strong allegiances to any specific religion (in this respect he was as individualistic as he was in his lack of strong ties to any particular political party.) What constantly surfaces in Masaryk's answers to Ludwig's questions is the clarity and the concreteness of his thinking. He disliked both religious and secular mystifications (and he correctly understood the latter to be quasi-religious in nature). In the creation of a democratic state he wished to proceed step by prudent step and to avoid the contamination of worthwhile goals by using underhanded or violent means.

Masaryk was a resolute and proud Czech, as "nationalist" in his ideas as he had to be without ever becoming a chauvinist (in this respect he reproduces the role played by earlier Czech intellectual luminaries such as Hus and Comenius, whose ideas had local objectives while they also had broader relevance throughout Europe). He longed for what we might call today "co-operative multi-diversity", i.e., a European United States based on a federation of democratic countries that maintain their own strong cultural identities. If the book has not been translated into Czech or has not been made available in the Czech Republic and/or Slovakia in its English or German versions, it should be. In its stilted, officially approved history texts the communist regime made Masaryk, the founder and first president of Czechoslovakia, a "non-person" and stigmatized him as an exponent of "sham humanism", while always referring to the state he helped to create as the "bourgeois democracy". This was to be expected, since Masaryk had written, "Always for the working man, often for socialism, seldom for Marx." The childish omissions and ludicrous mischaracterizations of a "correct Marxist approach" that prevailed for forty years have been reversed since 1989. For Czech and Slovak readers Ludwig's work will supply a very direct look at the man's intellect and personality which may not come through in more academic or period-based histories. It's an old book with an old-fashioned journalistic approach to biography but still a valuable one, especially in the way it places the reader in direct, contemporary contact with another era. While we cannot really read this work now in the same manner in which we would have read it in 1936 (the future which always recreates the past had not yet revealed itself) Ludwig's book provides the reader with an opportunity to re-capture an admirable mind that still speaks to the present.