Today is the 100th anniversary of the founding of Czechoslovakia. It was the day the Czech and Slovak people gained their independence after hundreds of years of Hapsburg rule, ushering in a new era of democracy, liberalism, and tolerance. It was a brief era (twenty years later the Nazis invaded) but a glorious one. And no one epitomised the spirit of the new nation like its first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.
Masaryk was 68 years old when he became president. Born to estate workers in Moravia, he’d followed a long path to the presidency and had been tireless in his quest for reform and freedom. And he was loved for it. He served as president for 17 years, until 1935, and in the early years conducted a series of extraordinary interviews with the much-loved author, Karel Čapek. The result of these interviews – although interview is hardly the right word for it, really it is musings that Čapek was around to capture – were several books that in 1995 were condensed into a single translated volume for English-speakers called simply Talks with T.G. Masaryk by Karel Čapek. The book is in Masaryk’s voice, which is a wonderful way of getting a sense of the man himself.
The collection has been laid out to follow the chronology of Masaryk’s life, beginning with his childhood in Moravia. His father was Slovak and his mother a German-speaking Moravian and those were the languages Masaryk grew up speaking. German was spoken all through school (as was typical throughout Austria-Hungary), making it easy to progress to university in Vienna, but when Masaryk moved to Prague years later to take up a teaching post he was uncomfortably conscious of his poor Czech.
He had fond memories of his parents and somewhat rural upbringing but also acknowledged the limitations of such a life:
A boy in an out-of-the-way village has few living examples of anything beyond his circle of farmers and artisans: the teacher, the chaplain and dean, the owners of the estate and their servants, and a merchant perhaps. What a boy becomes is determined not so much by his gifts as by the opportunities closest at hand.
A passion for helping young people runs throughout the interviews. Masaryk had founded a social democracy that firmly believed in helping people make the most of themselves. He thought about education and infrastructure and, constantly, health. He believed deeply that the nation’s systems and institutions had to be crafted in a way that benefited the people. They are ideas that sound very familiar to political discussions going on in certain supposedly developed countries even today:
…take health. I can’t understand why we’ve thought so little about playgrounds, swimming pools, and parks for children. The poorer the district, the more such facilities are needed: poor districts have more children. With the proper watering we can have the same grassy playgrounds as England. Here again it’s a question of money, yet putting money into children is the best investment there is.
But perhaps his most modern-seeming views were on the equality of the sexes. Masaryk was an unapologetic feminist. He was devoted to his American wife, Charlotte, and took her maiden name (Garrigue) as part of his. Guided by logic and reason as always, he could see no reason to treat women differently than men:
How can people ask, I wonder, whether woman is man’s equal? How can the mother who bears a child not be equal to the father? And if a man truly loves, how can he love someone beneath him? I see no difference between the endowments of men and women…
He believed firmly in marriage but was progressive as well, recognizing that divorce had its place in the society he envisioned:
The greatest argument for monogamy is love. True love – love without reservation, the love of one whole being for another – does not pass with the passing years or even death. One man and one woman for life, fidelity till death – that is how I see it. Happy is the man or woman who has lived a rigorously monogamous life. Yes, I am for divorce; I am for divorce because I want marriage to be love and not commerce or convention, not a senseless or thoughtless union.
Always a modest man, Masaryk believed in simple living. His dictates in aid of this occur throughout the book and make clear that he probably wasn’t a huge amount of fun on a Friday night. He gave up even modest drinking at 50, did not smoke, ate simply and sparingly (his details his menu at one point), and was devoted to his daily exercise regime (Sokol exercises and horseback riding). When living in exile in London, he lived cheaply and would travel by bus to meetings with government officials and world leaders and then dine at a Lyons café, where he appreciated that you could “get a decent meal for ten or fifteen pence.”
In the end, his prescription for a long life was simple:
It shouldn’t be a feat to live to a hundred, but no tricks or gimmicks will get us there, that’s for sure. Fresh air and sunshine; moderate food and drink; a moral life and a job involving muscles, heart, and brain; people to care for and a goal to strive for – that’s the macrobiotic recipe of success. Oh, and a keen interest in life, because an interest in life is tantamount to life itself, and without it and without love, life ceases to exist.
Reading these passages felt eerie, in a way. It was like hearing my great-grandfather speak, a man whose edicts for how to live were passed down from his children to their children to their children and now they are being passed again to the newest generation. It is no surprise that he was a huge fan of Masaryk.
But, helpful as such guidance is, health tips are not what made Masaryk so beloved. As staunch as he was in his personal habits, he was stauncher still in his beliefs. His devotion to democracy was absolute and he was that rare man who did not change with power, whose beliefs held strong and fast for decades and guided first him and then an entire nation forward. It was something he was rightly very proud of:
Should I be asked what I consider the high point of my life I would not say it was being elected president…It comes from having relinquished nothing as head of state that I believed in and loved as a penniless student, a teacher of youth, a nagging critic, and a political reformer, from having found no need in my position of power for any moral law or relationship to my fellow man, my nation, and the world but those which guided me before…I have not had to change one item of my faith in humanity and democracy, in my search for truth, or in my reliance on the supreme moral and religious commandment to “love they neighbour.”
My great-grandmother’s proudest story was of how Masaryk, whose estate shared a wall with her garden, used to ride past on his morning constitutional and admire her roses. The roses were already the pride of her life (her four children were modestly appreciated, too) but to have the great man stop and tell her of their beauty made both them and him even more precious to her. He was that sort of man – he appreciated small things and was thoughtful enough to show that appreciation.
Masaryk served as president until 1935 and died two years later at the age of 87. He left behind a robust democracy with a thriving economy. Thank god he did not live to see what came next. Would things have been different if “the Grand Old Man of Europe” had survived a few years more? Would Czechoslovakia’s allies have been so quick to desert them in 1938 if he had been there? Who knows.
Masaryk believed in human progress and that “The future is with us now. If we choose the best of what we have now, we’ll be on the right road; we’ll have extended our lives with a piece of the future.” He was an extraordinary politician and statesman then and, sadly, is no less extraordinary today. He is a reminder of what we all can and should be. And, thankfully, he has not yet been forgotten. In fact, a film has just been released dramatizing these conversations between Masaryk and Čapek. It seems unlikely to make its way into the English-speaking world but one can hope.
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