Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Read online

  PRAISE FOR

  GOTTLAND

  “An intelligent, captivating, and much-needed book.”

  —ADAM MICHNIK

  “A great book. Mariusz Szczygieł is well versed in the Polish school of reportage writing and he applies his method to this specific Czech ambiguity. Original and surprising.”

  —AGNIESZKA HOLLAND

  “Extraordinary, hypnotizing, and disturbing tales.”

  —LIBÉRATION

  “If you want to understand the Czech Republic in the twentieth century, read Gottland.”

  —FRANKFURTER ALLEGEMEINE ZEITUNG

  “Masterful prose … impressive.”

  —NEUE ZÜRCHER ZEITUNG

  “One of the most valuable and eloquent testimonies about the Czech people.”

  —PRÁVO (CZECH REPUBLIC)

  GOTTLAND: MOSTLY TRUE STORIES FROM HALF OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  First published in Poland as Gottland

  Copyright © 2006, 2014 by Mariusz Szczygieł

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

  First Melville House printing: May 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Szczygiel, Mariusz, 1966-

  [Gottland. English]

  Gottland : mostly true stories from half of Czechoslovakia / Mariusz

  Szczygiel; translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.

  pages cm

  Originally published in Polish in 2006.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-61219-313-7 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-61219-314-4 (ebook)

  1. Czech Republic–Anecdotes. 2. Czech Republic–Social conditions–Anecdotes. I. Lloyd-Jones, Antonia, translator. II. Title.

  DB2011.S9313 2014

  943.71–dc23

  2014012465

  Design by Christopher King

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Time Line

  Not a Step Without Bata

  Lucerna Palace

  Just a Woman

  How Are You Coping with the Germans?

  Proof of Love

  Victim of Love

  Mrs. Not-a-Fake

  Little Darling

  The Public Concern

  Life Is Like a Man

  Better PR

  Happy Holidays!

  The Tragedy Hunter

  Kafkárna

  The Movie Has to Be Made

  Metamorphosis

  Gottland’s Life After Life

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  TIME LINE

  Before the First World War, the Czech state is known as Bohemia, and is part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  1918 After the First World War, Czechoslovakia is formed as an independent country. The first president is Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.

  1938 Nazi Germany annexes Sudetenland, an area with a mainly German-speaking population.

  1939 World War II—the Czech state is occupied by Germany. It is called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and administered by Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich.

  1942 Heydrich is assassinated by the Czech resistance.

  1945 Soviet and US armies liberate Czechoslovakia.

  1945–46 The minority German population—three million people—is expelled from the country.

  1948 The “Victorious February” takeover by the communists. Klement Gottwald is the country’s president.

  Early 1950s A period of Stalinist repression.

  1968 As leader of the Prague Spring, Alexander Dubček tries to introduce “socialism with a human face.”

  1968, December Soviet and other Warsaw Pact troops invade to crush the Prague Spring. Dubček is replaced by hard-line communist Gustáv Husák.

  1969 The introduction of repressive “normalization.” Jan Palach and other human “torches” self-immolate in central Prague in protest.

  1977 The dissident movement publishes Charter 77.

  1989, November The peaceful Velvet Revolution, led by the Civic Forum political movement, restores democracy. Former dissident playwright Václav Havel is the first president of the newly independent country.

  1993 The country splits into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

  2004 The Czech Republic joins the European Union.

  NOT A STEP WITHOUT BATA

  For Egon Erwin Kisch

  1882: A STINK

  “Why does it smell so bad in here?” six-year-old Tomáš Bata* asks his father, Antonín. This is the first manifestation of his desire to set reality straight.

  We do not know what his father says in reply. He is probably quite reticent on the whole.

  Cobbler Antonín Bata is married for the second time. Twice he has taken a widow with children as his wife. With each wife he has also had his own children. Altogether, at his small cobbler’s workshop in Zlín he is raising twelve children from four marriages. Apart from that, he works with seven other people. His second wife does not like drafts.

  TWELVE YEARS LATER: DEMANDS

  The three children from his first marriage, Anna, Antonín and eighteen-year-old Tomáš, are standing in front of their fifty-year-old father. They are demanding their mother’s inheritance. They’re also suggesting that he should immediately give them whatever they are going to inherit after his death. They don’t have the time to wait all those years, and anyway it is crowded at home.

  They get eight hundred gulden in silver coins, and they hire four workers.

  ONE YEAR LATER, 1895: THE PRINCIPLE

  They have debts of eight thousand zlotys. They can’t afford new leather hides and they have no money to pay for the old ones. Antonín is called up for the army, and Anna goes to work in Vienna as a domestic servant.

  Tomáš stares at the remaining leather, and in his despair he hits upon the most important principle of his life: always turn failure into advantage.

  As they cannot afford leather, they will have to make shoes out of what is available: canvas. Canvas doesn’t cost much, and the rest of the leather can be used to make soles. This is how Bata devises one of the great successes of the new century: canvas shoes with leather soles. He brings in several thousand orders from Vienna, all gathered in a single day. People start to call the shoes batovky.

  This allows him to build his first small factory, where fifty men work in a space of two thousand square feet.

  1904: QUESTIONS

  The workers notice that he can never be calm. He is always so stimulated that other people feel exhausted in his company.

  He reads a newspaper article about some machines being made in America. He sets off for the States, and in Lynn, Massachusetts, a shoe-making city, he hires himself out as a worker at a large factory. He takes three of his employees with him, and each one finds employment at a different place. He gives them orders to monitor each stage of production closely. Every Saturday the four shoemakers from Zlín meet up at a saloon, where they exchange observations.

  They are amazed that, in America, even small children do their best to earn their own keep. What makes the biggest impression on Bata is a six-year-old boy who goes from house to house, catching flies in exchange for payment.

  Some people are dying of poverty, but others bake fritters in the st
reet and sell them for one cent. Tomáš notices a curious feature of the Americans: they can adapt en masse to any kind of novelty humanity has managed to invent.

  He has brought 688 questions with him to the States, to which he seeks the answers. During his stay he adds seventy more questions. He reaches the conclusion that the standard of living of the average American, which is higher than in Europe, is due to being free of any kind of routine.

  (“It’s clear that Tomáš Bata was an industrial spy in the USA,” Czechoslovak historians will write sixty years later.)

  1905: TEMPO

  Tomáš learns more and more English, and hears something about Henry Ford. This employer, as E. L. Doctorow wrote of him, has long been convinced that most people are too stupid to be able to earn enough for a decent life. So he hit upon an idea. He divided the assembly of a car into separate, simple operations, which even an idiot would be capable of performing. Instead of teaching one worker hundreds of tasks, he decided to stand him in one spot and give him one and the same task to perform, all day long, and send the parts along a conveyor belt. This way the worker’s mind would be unburdened. (It would take Ford several more years to put this idea into action.)

  In the United States, Tomáš Bata comes across the term “wristwatch” for the first time. It has been in use for four years. With the beginning of the twentieth century the Americans have started to count time in minutes, and time has become the basic measure of production. “Productivity” and “American tempo”—the new fetishes—have demarcated the day into equal units of time. The working day has ceased to depend on the rising and setting of the sun.

  SEPTEMBER 5, 1905: SECONDS

  That night his father dies.

  Tomáš returns to Zlín—still a squalid little town of the kind the Czechs describe as “where the bread ends and the stone begins”—and paints a large sign on the wall of his factory: THERE ARE 86,400 SECONDS IN A DAY. People read the sign and start to say that old Bata’s son has lost his wits.

  1905–1911: TOIL

  He buys German and American machinery. The factory has six hundred workers by now. He builds the first residential housing for them.

  When, in 1908, Ford issues his “car for Everyman” series, Tomáš is filled with excitement: “Ford is already making use of his production line!”

  In America it takes seven hours to produce a single pair of shoes, and in France it takes almost six. On the wall of the rubber unit, Tomáš writes in letters six feet high: PEOPLE THINK, MACHINES TOIL!

  At Bata, it only takes four hours to make a single pair of shoes now. Cobblers all over Moravia are devastated. Tomáš builds a brick wall around his factory, and has the following message inscribed on it: IT’S NOT PEOPLE WE FEAR, IT’S OURSELVES. (For over twenty years he will ignore this principle. It will never cross his mind that he will end his life a victim of his own self.)

  1911: LOVE

  He falls in love and proposes. He breaks off the engagement when his fiancée reveals to him that she can’t have children.

  JANUARY 1912: MAŇA

  He goes to the famous Czech ball in Vienna; by now he is a well-known shoemaker who exports his shoes to the Balkans and Asia Minor. He is hoping to meet his future wife at the ball. He is attracted to Maňa Menčíková, daughter of the curator of the Imperial Library. The girl plays the piano and speaks three languages. Tomáš knows there has to be a written contract for everything. He sends a friend to ask the young lady whether she would sign a memorandum to this effect: if she were not able to have children, they would divorce.

  “So what benefit may I demand of him if I fail to satisfy his hopes?” replies the future Marie Batová. (After two years of trying for a child without success, Marie secretly buys a bottle of poison.)

  DECEMBER 1913: THE LITTLE BOTTLE

  For several months they have been living in a new villa, which Tomáš built before the wedding, so that his wife wouldn’t feel any difference between life in Vienna and life in Zlín. When orders increase and the factory has to operate at night, Marie pours lemonade for the workers and hands out sandwiches. On returning home, she sometimes wonders whether a tree that doesn’t produce fruit should be cut down, and glances at the little bottle.

  JUNE 28, 1914: WAR

  In Sarajevo, the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to an end. Austria announces mobilization.

  The most eminent Czech of the twentieth century, professor of philosophy Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, deputy to the Viennese parliament, comes back from vacation. “As I was on my way to Prague, I saw our people answering the call-up—in horror, as if going to the slaughter,” he will say later. He has pangs of conscience. “Our people are off to the army and to prison, while we deputies sit at home.”

  Tomáš Bata is horrified: all his factory workers must report for the war being fought by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Next morning, over his coffee, bacon and eggs, he has an idea: he will go to Vienna and extract an order for boots for the army. He leaves his eggs, gets in a horse-drawn cab, and races to the railway station at Otrokovice near Zlín. But the train has already left. So he buys the horses from the coachman and tells him to chase after the train. The animals rush as fast as the express through three villages, but in the fourth they collapse. In only six minutes Tomáš buys another cab and horses. He catches up with the train, and in a few hours he reaches Vienna.

  In his opinion, one should never give in to reality, but always make skillful use of it for one’s own purposes. In the course of two days, he secures an order for half a million pairs of boots and a guarantee that his workers won’t go to the war.

  His deal struck, he has seven minutes left to catch the train home; meanwhile a police unit is already rounding up his workers as deserters. On the way to the station, the cab in which Tomáš is riding gets into an accident, so the passenger jumps out and runs the rest of the way. He boards an express train to Brno.

  He also gives work to laborers and cobblers who aren’t employed at his factory. Even to those who used to be his sworn enemies. He saves the entire district from going to the front.

  Towards the end of the war, in spite of the crisis, he will have almost five thousand workers, who will produce ten thousand pairs of army boots each day.

  Marie Batová has long since forgotten the little bottle of poison which she bought before Christmas, and her decision that, if the eleventh course of treatment by the eighth doctor failed, she would commit suicide.

  The last doctor had advised that impregnation could not happen in Zlín, and that Tomáš Bata would have to be away from his own terrain. So they went to the Krkonoše Mountains for ten days. (Nobody believed that Bata could endure so many days without inspecting the production line.)

  As the shoemaker leaves his eggs and bacon and runs for the train, his wife is already in the seventh month of her pregnancy.

  JANUARY 17, 1914: TOMÍK

  Bata’s son Tomáš is born, known as Tomík to differentiate him from his father.†

  1918: BATA-IZATION

  The war ends and the Czechoslovak state is founded. A large part of it has been “Bata-ized” for some time now.

  “Tomáš established branches of Bata in almost every Moravian village, and as a result soon there was hardly anyone working privately as a cobbler in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, or Slovakia. Made-to-measure shoes became a thing of the past. Later on, Bata founded his own chain of workshops for shoe repair, and the profession of cobbler disappeared entirely,” writes the communist reporter Egon Erwin Kisch.

  Bata defends himself: “The Earth has two billion inhabitants,” he keeps saying. “Each year, only nine hundred million pairs of shoes are produced in the entire world. Each person needs two pairs a year at the very least. An ambitious shoemaker is presented with the opportunity to sell a billion pairs of shoes. It’s all just a question of price and the degree of civilization.”

  1919: RUMOR

  They say (here I quote Kisch) there was a cobbler from Ostrava wh
o, when he realized he had been completely ruined by Bata, packed his old workshop, dating back to the seventeenth century, into two cases and sent them to Bata’s factory, straight to the boss. Then he, his wife and their two children jumped into the river.

  Tomáš Bata, who received the news of this desperate step and the legacy at one and the same time, declared: “Put a sign above it to say that this is a cobbler’s workshop from when I started working.”

  1920: A HUMAN BEING

  Six-year-old Tomík goes to school barefoot. His father wants him to be no different from his schoolmates from Zlín.

  The father sets up new production lines so that “each human unit is automatically driven to the greatest productivity.” If any single worker cannot keep pace in the production line, the conveyor belt stops and a red bulb lights up on the wall. Thanks to this signaling system, the entire unit can see not only that they must stop work, but also who is to blame.

  “In my work I do not only think about building factories, but people. What I do involves building the human being,” notes Tomáš.

  1921: LEAFLET

  Rumors go round that Bata is in a mental hospital. One of the newspapers even publishes its address. Then, suddenly, leaflets appear all over Czechoslovakia, with the words:

  I AM NOT RICH

  I AM NOT POOR

  I AM NOT BANKRUPT

  I PAY GOOD WAGES

  I PAY ALL MY TAXES HONESTLY

  I MAKE GOOD SHOES

  PLEASE BELIEVE ME

  TOMÁŠ BATA.