The Czech magazine A2 is dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the breakup of Czechoslovakia (31 December 1992) and is printed collectively with its Slovak counterpart Kapitál. Whilst A2 specializes in the shared previous and the rising variations between the 2 international locations, as mirrored in ancient writing, fiction, the visible arts and documentary movie, Kapitál takes a speculative way, gauging the way forward for cultural coverage, theatre, tune, folklore and structure.
A conflicted partnership
A2 editor Matěj Matelec sees the historical past of Czechoslovakia because the ‘unsuccessful try at a not unusual state of Czechs and Slovaks’. A key foundational delusion of the newly-created state in 1918 was once the fictional thought of a unmarried country, invented to make sure that the bulk would have a bigger presence than the sum-total of nationwide minorities: ‘Simply because the Czechs wanted the Slovaks as a result of the Germans, so the Slovaks wanted the Czechs as a result of the Hungarians.’
However inequality was once baked into the venture from the beginning, with Czechs taking a look down on Slovaks and incessantly seeing the jap a part of the rustic as little greater than an open-air museum of people artwork. Regardless of the rhetoric, Slovaks aspirations to actual equality have been thwarted for many years, fuelling resentment and nationalism. For the reason that Czechs and the Slovaks didn’t proportion the similar concept of what a not unusual state will have to be, the breakup of Czechoslovakia was once inevitable.
However, Matelec believes that ‘the Velvet Divorce represents a failure of our younger democracy – a betrayal of the voters’ that heralded long term selections taken by means of elected representatives above the citizens’ heads. Matelec concludes his scathing review of the Czech elites as follows: ‘We’ve blamed any individual else for many of the primary ancient upheavals in our trendy historical past – the start of Czechoslovakia, the Munich Settlement, the liberation and career. The one factor we did by means of ourselves was once to destroy up our not unusual state.’
The primary time as tragedy…
‘The breakup was once a whole failure,’ argues sociologist and previous flesh presser Fedor Gál in a lengthy interview with Matěj Matelec and Lukáš Rychetský. Born in 1945 to Slovak Jewish oldsters within the Theresienstadt ghetto, Gál was once a number one determine within the ‘Mushy Revolution’, because the Velvet Revolution is understood in Slovakia. He was once additionally a founding member of Public In opposition to Violence, the birthday celebration that spearheaded Slovakia’s transition to democracy. In 1992 Gál moved to Prague, upset with politics and emerging antisemitism. ‘I incessantly surprise what we did unsuitable for issues to finally end up like this, for Czechoslovakia to be damaged up by means of other folks foaming on the mouth and spewing out damaging feelings, other folks whose visions had been harking back to what we noticed in Slovakia within the Thirties.’
Gál is similarly scathing about present-day Slovak politicians who faux to be pragmatic whilst behaving ‘like black marketeers and peddlers of shoddy items’. However, when requested if Czechoslovakia would nonetheless exist if it hadn’t been for the Czech top minister Václav Klaus and his Slovak counterpart Vladimír Mečiar, Gál replies: ‘Each ancient scenario chooses its personal forged. If it hadn’t been Mečiar and Klaus, it will were some clones of theirs a yr or two later.’
Forgetful Slovaks?
In Kapitál, Czech sociologist Dominik Želinský takes a essential view of a new e-book by means of Martin M. Šimečka, a former dissident, creator and journalist with a blended Czech and Slovak background. Šimečka’s extensively praised account of his lengthy stroll around the Slovak nation-state, Príhody tuláka po Slovensku (‘The adventures of a wanderer round Slovakia’), was once hailed by means of its writer Matúš Kostolný as ‘a brand new mind-set about the important thing topics of our occasions’. However whilst Šimečka sees a better stage of building the Czech aspect of the border, he fails to give an explanation for why the adaptation ‘isn’t just ‘dramatic’ (whether or not in financial, political or different phrases) however ‘civilisational’.
Šimečka asserts that Slovakia lags at the back of its Czech neighbour since the nation hasn’t but absolutely reckoned with its previous. ‘Essential mirrored image at the previous is for sure necessary,’ Želinský contends, ‘alternatively, one would possibly ask if the loss of retrospective research is in reality what engenders a way of hopelessness in Slovakia … Shouldn’t Slovakia’s precedence, but even so reflecting on its previous, be its reward and long term?’ Finally, there are many shameful moments within the Czech previous that experience no longer been correctly mirrored: Želinský cites, amongst different issues, the focus camp for Roma other folks in Lety that was once no longer became a memorial till 2022, after many years of getting used as a pig farm.’
Moderately than providing any new insights into the state of the country, writes Želinský, Šimečka’s e-book supplies simplest well-worn clichés about ‘oligarchs, offended other folks, nostalgia for socialism, and never-ending lamentations about issues being higher within the Czech Republic’.
