# The Czechoslovak Review/Volume 3/Present Conditions in Czechoslovakia

Present Conditions in Czechoslovakia
By ALES BROŽ.
I have travelled throughout Czechoslovakia, have seen many towns and spoken to many people, politicians, workmen and peasants and tried to formulate an idea of the conditions now prevailing. The general impression one gets is that the country is in a comparatively prosperous condition. There are, no doubt, signs of the recent adversity and of many present needs, but people are cheerful and look confidently towards the future. Owing to this year’s good harvest there is a sufficient quantity of food to last throughout the winter. Meat is, of course, still rather scarce and dear. On the whole the economic conditions of the country are very promising. Ordinary peace work has been resumed, though not all factories are as yet working to the pre-war extent owing to the lack of raw materials. What is mostly lacking is cotton and wool; thus the number of unemployed is still very great. But once there is a sufficient quantity of raw material so that all factories can work and all workmen be employed, the economic life of the country will soon assume its normal appearance. On the land people are working very hard.
The political life of the Republic is becoming settled. The great popular enthusiasm which existed in the earliest days of the Republic is now being applied to a serious policy of social reconstruction. The readjustment of social differences, transference of the financial burden to the shoulders of the rich, restoration of the normal economic conditions, improvement of the currency, and the resumption of work; such are the things pre-occupying the minds of the Government. The Czechs without exemption of classes are ardent Republicans. After the centuries of tyrany suffered during the rule of the Habsburgs it could not have been otherwise. They have an ideal President in whom they have the fullest confidence, and the Republican institutions are being firmly established. A reaction aiming at the overthrow of the Republic and the present order, if it ever arose either from the left, or from the right, would be crushed at once. But in fact no sane man entertains or believes in such aims.
Hardly in any other country so ravaged through the war are affairs proceeding and developing so smoothly as in the Czechoslovak Republic. The labours of the National Assembly are also being conducted very smoothly. The former Government coalition including all parties ended, of course, on the resignation of Dr. Kramář and the formation of Tusar’s Government, but the opposition which consists of the National Democrats though sharply criticising the present Government, never neglects the common national interests and never fails to support measures essential to the well-being of the state. Thus all parties including the opposition issued a manifesto in favor of the second State loan.
Kladno, a town inhabited by miners and steel workers, was some time ago described as the centre of Bolshevist agitation, yet it is a town as peaceful and orderly as any other. There are no strikes and no disturbances whatever. The miners in their meetings pass resolutions in favor of the Republic and in support of President Masaryk. Such are the Czech “Bolshevists.” Prague, the capital of the Republic, is growing enormously. Before the war Prague together with its suburbs has had a population of about 600,000; now it has almost doubled having about a million. Quite naturally all hotels and houses are full up. The whole city is overcrowded. New houses are of course being built, but it will take some time before the present dwelling requirements can even partially be met. The large boulevards of Prague such as the Václavské Náměstí (Václav Square), National Avenue etc. at present offer a striking resemblance to life in Paris. French, English and American officers are seen in many places, and in most of the large café houses and restaurants French and English is spoken. All German incriptions which here and there were found before the war have disappeared altogether. There is no doubt that Prague is rapidly becoming the political centre of the Central Europe. Just as the importance of Vienna is on the decline, so that of Prague is growing.
In the germanised parts of Bohemia the great percentage of the Czech population ​formerly submerged has come to the surface. Now that nobody can be persecuted for speaking Czech in the streets or in public establishments, the German character of the so-called “German” territory is on the wane. But the Germans themselves appear to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. They pretend to be Republicans, but in all their private houses and even in their public establishments they have a picture of the dead Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph, or of the German Kaiser. When an American journalist seeing a picture of the late Franz Joseph in a public bath at Karlsbad asked a German why they still indulged in glorifying the dead Emperor, no good explanation was forth coming, and the American turning to one of his compatriots said: “Even of the dead they seem to be afraid.”
The Bohemian Germans complain of being oppressed. If you ask them where and in what form they are oppressed, they will say that the Czechs do not allow them to have separate army command. This is very characteristic of the present German mentality. They have their own national schools and all linguistic rights, but that is not enough; they want an independent army of their own as if any state could allow its national minorities to keep and maintain independent armies. It is not only the Bourgeois element that wants an independent German army within the Czechoslovak Republic, but even the German Social Democrats include this claim in their political programme.
The same old monarchistic, reactionary and imperialistic spirit is cultivated and found everywhere among the Germans. It may take generations perhaps before the German mind will change. They consider the Paris peace treaty as a scrap of paper to be torn to pieces, whenever the first opportunity arises. The great pangerman ideas proclaimed during the war are not dead. The power of German militarism is of course broken, but the spirit that dominated Germany for generations is still alive. The western democracies ought to be well on their guard. There is as yet very little that is genuine and sincere in the so-called new German political orientation.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1919, before the cutoff of January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1952, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 72 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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