A Partial History of Czechia
Illustrated with images from Czech horror and horror-adjacent films
I wrote the below as text for an upcoming episode of the Evolution of Horror podcast, for which I was interested about Czech horror films. I did not end up using it… but I thought it might be interesting (perhaps moreso for Czech readers) to expose the “dull ease” of one English 30-something’s cognitive schemata about a country that is not his own! Rightly or wrongly, the below is what has stuck in my mind about Czech history some half-a-decade or more since I was actually studying it. My memory is pretty shabby and I have not tried to hide my biases here. At the end, I will add in a few reflections about how, in my view, Czech history has helped to determine the direction of their horror cinema…
The Czech Lands of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia are sandwiched between Germany and Poland to the North and Austria and Slovakia to the South. They're landlocked and so have, historically, often been invaded and occupied. Way back in the 9th century AD these lands were ruled over by the Přemyslid dynasty which, according to Alois Jirásek's Old Czech Legends were founded by Přemysl the ploughman. Jirásek as a writer was part of the Czech National Revival, a cultural movement that sought to emphasise Czech nationalism and the Czech language in the face of Germanisation.
Germany, especially that Southern Germany religion of Bavaria, have had a profound cultural influence on Czechia over the centuries. Picture the Bavarian culture of hog roasts, beer drinking and folk rituals, without the High Germanic culture of Goethe and Bach, coupled with a darkly absurdist and self-effacing sense of humour, and you have a broad outline of Czech culture. One of the most significant cultural influences that came across from the forests of Germany, was travelling puppeteers. Traditional puppetry is still kept alive in parts of Czechia and if you ever visit Prague I would highly recommend visiting the National Marionette Theatre
I think, for a lot of tourists, Prague is snonymous with the Czech Republic and I really love the description of the city from Angelo Maria Ripellino's book Magic Prague:
“There are a number of pointed objects in league throughout the skies of the Bohemian capital: the Cathedral pierces the thorax of the heavens with its spires, as does the magnificent belfry of the Old Town Hall, the Powder Tower, the towers of the Týn Church, the Water Towers, the towers of Charles Bridge and a hundred others. It is no accident that Nezval compares the towers in the clear night air to a 'gathering of magicians'. The Prague sky recovers from these pinnacle pricks by resting its cheeks on the soft cupolas of the Baroque age, though their marshy emerald conceals an admixture of witchcraft: according to Seifert you can hear the croaking of frogs in the verdigris when the moon rises.”
Like other medieval cities, like York here in the UK, or Maastricht in the Netherlands, Prague is kept alive and ultimately preserved by tourisms. So, you have cobble-stone streets and food stalls selling fried doughy sugars things on sticks and street performers like human statues and mines and puppeteers and people playing accordian and all those charming things, but you also have shops selling loads of tat, and commercial districts, and seedy, run-down parts, and grey concrete walls and peeling paint. It's a real bricolage or palimpsest of a city.
Alongside Germany, one of the other big cultural influences on Czechia is, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially when it was ruled over by the Habsburg monarchy. And there's definitely a sense of faded imperial splendor in Prague. The most iconic mythic period of Czech history is perhaps when the Habsburg Holy Roman Emporer Rudolf II set up residence in Prague Castle in 1583 to 1612. Prague became an important trading point in the heart of Europe, but also a cultural and intellectual centre. Rudolf II basically poured all his riches into researching alchemy and black magic, as well as commissioning and buying erotic paintings and acquiring weird and fantastic objects, like a unicorn's horn, for his personal Cabinet of Curiosities. During this period, Giuseppe Arcimboldo was the court painter, and you migjht know him for his startling composite paintings of faces made up of fruits or animals, most famously Rudolf II himself as the Roman God Vertumnus.
As with the rest of Europe in the early 17th century, there was a lot of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants (and proto-Protestant sects like the Hussites) in the Czech Lands, which culminated in the battle of White Mountain in 1620, which led to the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt and Habsburg control of the region for the next three hundred years. Thus, the aforementioned Czech National Revival. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 basically split the Czech Lands under the rule of Austria on one side and Hungary on the other, until in 1918 the first Czechoslovak Republic was formed, united the Czech Lands with Slovakia. Culturally there are similarities between Czechia and Slovakia, but I would say the central differences are that Slovakia is more rural and has a much higher Catholic population. Czech nationalism has historically been a Protestant movement and nowadays there are more atheists in Czechia than there are in any other part of Europe, including the UK. The First Czechoslovak Republic had parliamentary democracy and a liberal balance between socialist and conversative elements, which held until the Nazis occupied part of the region in 1938 and then invaded the rest in 1939.
After the horrors of Nazism, there was popular support for the Czech Communist Party in the wake of the Second World War. However, the government of Klement Gottwald was something of a puppet government for the Russian Soviets under Stalin. Perhaps the most interesting period of Czech Communism came with the liberalising government of the Slovakian Alexander Dubček, First Secretary of the Communist Part of Czechoslovakia from January 1968 to April 1969. In this short-lived period, state censorship was abolished, with citizens allowed to debate government policy on television. The slogan linked to this period is “socialism with a human face”, which referred to the democratisation and economic de-centralisation that was taking place under Dubček's policies. Not coincidentally, this coincided with a period of cultural flowering known as the Prague Spring, during which a group of young film school graduates made a host of cine-literate, blackly comic, politically critical films that have been grouped together as the Czech New Wave.
Sadly, the reprieve from dogmatic Soviet-style communism didn't last long and was promptly ended by the Warsaw Pact invasion, after which many of these films were literally locked away only to be seen after the collapse of Communism after Central and Eastern Europe in 1989. The popular liberal government that came to power after Communism was head by an ex-dissident playwright and all round cool guy Václav Havel, so cool in fact that he wanted Frank Zappa to be his Minister of Culture. Slovkia, long fed up with Czech nationism, split off from the Czech Nations, leading to the formation of the independent Czech Republic on the 1st January 1993. Today Czechs have more consumer choice than ever before... and a lot of the lousy stuff like advertising that also goes along with being a cosumer-capitalist country. Prague has become a tourist hot-spot for stag-dos, including drunken blokes from here in the UK who want to buy cheap Czech beer, known as pivo. There isn't much of a Czech film industry any more. As veteran animator Jiří Barta has said, under Communism filmmakers were given all the money they would need to make films, but the censorship rules meant they couldn't make the films they wanted to make. Now, under capitalism, they can theoretically make any film in the world they want to make... but noone will give them the money to do it.
In terms of drawing any conclusions from all this with regards to the influence upon the nation’s horror traditions…
1.) The fairytale and puppetry traditions form Bavaria have led to a tendency towards folk horror and dark fantasy with elements of the gothic, rather than the kind of horror cinema you see in Western Europe and America post-Psycho (1960).
2.) The censorship of the Czech Communist Party (under the ideological guidance of Soviet Russia) simultaneously limited the amount of explicitly violent and sexual content in Czech horror cinema across much of the 20th century, but meant that political critiques had to be encoded in inventive, sometimes ingenious ways. This made for less “high octave” cinema, but also allowed horror to maintain its more literary traditions in its links to the gothic. Jan Švankmajer, for instance, was only allowed to return to filmmaking in the early 1980s (having been effectivly banned from making films for the preceding seven years) under the understanding that he would only produce adaptations of literary works.
3.) Centuries of being invaded and occupied have led to a cultural tendency towards fatalism and pessimism, but also a reluctance to produce grand narratives about epic heroes (unless these are in a far-off mythic period of pre-history). As such, characters are often “little people” with small concerns, pulled this way and that by the vagaries of fate. This makes the horror more grounded, but it can also easily tip into bathos and black humour, rather than the truly frightening.
4.) A combination of folk and baroque traditions make for some startling mise-en-scène and costuming. Arguably, outside of the Czech New Wave and animation, however, the cinematic techniques rarely equal the quality of these more pictorial aspects. This might be due to limited cinematic exposure, but that would be complete speculation on my part!
Great post, Adam!