Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia Read online

  EARLY 1922: CRISIS

  In Europe, the post-war economic crisis continues for a third year, and there is galloping inflation, but Czechoslovakia manages to raise the value of the crown from six to eighteen U.S. cents. The country’s position vis-à-vis its creditors is growing stronger, yet its companies now have debts abroad. Bata has warehouses packed with goods, and his customers need shoes, but they have no money.

  Each month the company sells as much as it has produced in four days. For the other twenty-six days it might as well not be working.

  Tomáš refuses to fight for tax relief. He also thinks it would be wrong to lay off any of his workers, because they will immediately demand unemployment benefits from the young state.

  Other factories have already thrown out thousands of workers. It bothers him that the unemployed will now definitely not be able to afford his shoes. The value of the German mark falls, and the country is flooded by German shoes, growing cheaper from one day to the next.

  AUGUST 29, 1922: CHEAPER

  One morning, there’s a shock: posters appear on the walls showing a fist thumping the words “High Prices” and announcing that from today onwards, the price of Bata’s shoes has been almost halved. The shoes that used to cost 220 Czechoslovak crowns can now be bought for 119.

  He tells the workers that you cannot overcome a major crisis by taking tiny steps.

  He reduces their pay by 40 percent, but he doesn’t lay anybody off. He pledges that the food in the factory stores will only be sold at token prices. As the value of the crown isn’t rising, on their reduced pay they will live almost as well as before.

  Customers rush to buy his shoes. He sells all the reserve stock in three months.

  Of course he knows that the price reduction means immense losses for the factory, but it is the only way he can acquire hard cash. Moreover, this cash already has three times greater purchasing power, so he uses it to buy three times more materials.

  Other firms lower their prices too, but by now it’s too late. Bata was the first to do it. The newspapers write about Bata’s seemingly illogical, but brilliant reaction to the strengthening of the crown.

  Success. A year later Tomáš Bata will take on 1,800 new workers at the factory and will be elected starosta (mayor) of the city of Zlín.

  MAY 1924: THE HAT

  Ten-year-old Tomík travels to Brno with his parents in an open car. His hat is blown off by the wind. The car stops, and the boy runs to fetch it. He comes back and hears his father say: “I told you you’ve got to be careful. If that happens again we’ll drive off without you.”

  Ten minutes later, the hat is blown off again. Tomáš Bata tells the driver to stop the car, gives his son ten crowns, and says: “Go to the railroad station and take the train to Brno. You can ride in the car with us on the way home.”

  However, the father must resign himself to going home without his son. The boy reaches Brno on time, goes into a Bata shoe store, borrows money from the cashier, and takes the train back to Zlín on his own.

  1925: CHECKS

  When Tomík graduates from elementary school at the age of eleven, his parents send him to high school in London. He goes there with his own checkbook, and his father opens an account for him at the Guaranty Trust Company of New York. To pay his tuition fees, the boy presents checks to the proprietor of the school. At this elite school, the teenager from Czechoslovakia causes a sensation.

  At the age of fourteen, he goes back to Zlín and—in keeping with his father’s wishes—becomes a worker on the lowest wage. By now he can wear shoes.

  When he is eighty-eight, I will ask his American secretary whether I may ask him some questions. “Yes,” she replies. “Best to ask just one question, and to make it an important one.”

  I send it by e-mail: “Dear Mr. Bata, what’s the best way to live?”

  “You must study hard,” replies Mr. Bata. “Look around you with your eyes open. Never repeat your mistakes, and draw conclusions from them. Work honestly and not just for your own profit. I don’t think that’s so difficult, is it?”

  1925: BATAMAN

  Tomáš Bata founds his first school. He does it out of compulsion, “because,” he explains, “there are no known cases of the best educators in the country becoming millionaires. Usually they are paupers.”

  He advertises that he will accept six hundred boys aged fourteen for the next school year, and so his School for Young Men comes into being. A student at the school must finance himself. For eight hours a day, he earns enough in the factory for his food, board and clothing, and for four hours, he studies. Any sort of financial help from parents is forbidden. Each week, the student receives 120 crowns, spends seventy, and saves the rest in his own account. It is all worked out so that when, at the age of twenty-four, the young man returns to Bata from military service, he will have 100,000 crowns in his account. Tutors at the boarding houses keep track of booklets recording the students’ expenditures. They also watch over the boys to make sure they keep their hands above their quilts. They are all given talks about hygiene and masturbation.

  Emil Zátopek, the world’s top athlete of 1952, keeps his hands above the quilt. Others who will do so too include: the famous (forty years on) writer Ludvík Vaculík, and the leading representative of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema (also, forty years on) director Karel Kachyňa. Kachyňa starts work at Bata as a cleaner, and finishes as a trained draughtsman. “I was a Bataman,” he’ll say, in the early twenty-first century. “At Zlín I learned to fight against fear.”

  Each of Bata’s students is a Bataman.

  You can become a Bataman through obedience and hard work.

  SEPTEMBER 1926: MILK

  Tomáš is feeling pleased: he never went beyond elementary school, and has no title apart from “Chief” on his office door, but he’s the author of a handbook entitled Affluence for All.

  Tomáš Bata’s Academy of Commerce is established.

  Tomáš Bata slams his shoe against the desk when one of the students uses the money he has earned to drive all the way to Prague for a performance by the American dancer Josephine Baker—pioneer of the striptease.

  From then on, neither students nor workers are allowed to sit around in bars; drinking any sort of alcohol within the boundaries of Zlín is forbidden. Milk is recommended.

  1926–1929: CHESS

  Eight years after the Great October Revolution, Tomáš Bata initiates his experiments with capitalist society. He builds the citizens of Zlín an eight-story Community Center with a hotel (after the war, it will become the Hotel Moskva). He gives orders for there to be no café or wine bar on the ground floor next to the restaurant, just a big hall with table tennis, a bowling alley and a chess room (“because one should never stop thinking”).

  His people will no longer work eight hours, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

  Now they will work until 5 p.m., but at noon they will have a two-hour break. At that point the women can go home and make dinner, though Bata can’t see why they would, when he has built large canteens and a department store that sells everything. “Women,” he says in a speech, “you won’t even have to make preserves—Bata will make them for you.”

  During the break the men and women can do what they like, but the following are recommended:

  1. lying on the lawns in Práce [Labor] Square (in good weather);

  2. not succumbing to idleness (so it is best to read, but with one reservation: DO NOT READ RUSSIAN NOVELS, says a slogan thought up by Bata and posted on the wall of the felting unit. Why not? Bata’s reply is on the wall of the rubber unit: RUSSIAN NOVELS KILL YOUR JOIE DE VIVRE);

  3. making use of the movie theater when the weather is bad (because Bata has already set up the biggest movie theater in Central Europe downtown, seating three thousand, with tickets costing one token crown);

  4. compensating for falling behind at work—during the break, the incompetent are to make up for their arrears at the machines.

  The tr
ade unions and the Czechoslovak Communist Party claim that this is the real reason Bata thought up the break—to gain extra unpaid labor. Strikes are suppressed, and people are thrown out of the factory unconditionally.

  1927: SIGNALS

  The press writes about the incredibly high milk consumption in Zlín and the astonishing—for a beer country—lack of interest in alcohol. There is one car for every thirty-five citizens, which is the highest rate in the whole of Czechoslovakia.

  Everything is subjected to rationalization: to avoid having to summon unit managers to the phone by shouting over the machines, a bell gives a signal in Morse code. Each unit head has his own Morse signal, which he can hear even in the restroom. The factory buildings have their own numbers, too, to keep you from getting lost. All the doors in the buildings are numbered, and so are the alleyways within the factory grounds.

  By crossing 21, you get to VIII/4a.

  1927: HURT

  There’s a poster painter who works in the advertising department. When he and a colleague bring Tomáš Bata the design they’ve drawn, Bata stamps on the poster, without telling them what he was expecting. The second time, he leans the board against the wall at an angle and jumps right into the middle of it (once again with no explanation). The third time, he throws thirty poster designs to the floor, jumps on them, kicks the paper, and finally gives his opinion: “What kind of an idiot painted these?”

  The poster painter is called Svatopluk Turek, and in a few years’ time he’ll start writing vindictive books about Bata.

  1929: AIR

  Tomáš is widening his circle of acquaintances, and his firm is now a world-famous joint-stock company. Bata’s personal guest, Sir Sefton Brancker, shows the beaming Tomáš the object that will be the cause of his death.

  Sir Sefton is Great Britain’s director of civil aviation and has flown to Zlín to demonstrate the latest single-engine, three-seat airplane made by de Havilland. Tomáš is so impressed that he buys four on the spot.

  An airport is established, and Bata’s planes fly all over Europe. Soon, a factory is set up, and Zlín-brand sports airplanes go into production.

  As he is flying over town, Tomáš notices a small meadow surrounded by woods. “That would make a fine graveyard,” he tells the pilot.

  1931: GRAPHOLOGY

  Tomáš Bata’s son Tomík, aged seventeen, returns from Zurich, where for the past year he has been the manager of a large store. He becomes manager of a department store in Zlín. He quarrels with his father about something. “You’ll be sorry, Dad,” he says, and writes a letter to Bata’s biggest rival in the United States, Endicott Johnson.

  He offers them his skills. Then he folds the piece of paper, but doesn’t send the letter. His mother finds it and shows it to her husband, because he has instructed her to tell him everything. Tomáš triumphs: what a fabulous son he has, who can cope with anything!

  On the other hand, he has an idiot for a brother. Jan Antonín, son of his father’s second wife, is twenty years younger. Tomáš calls him a blockhead in front of the staff and kicks him, just like he does with the rest of his employees.

  A while ago, he ordered analyses of his closest colleagues’ handwriting from London graphologist Robert Saudek. He keeps them under lock and key so the victims know nothing about it. Egon Erwin Kisch will find them in the archives (in 1948 he’ll start his report, Shoe Factory, but after writing the first page he’ll die of a heart attack). Graphology Analysis #9—Jan’s—reads like an arrest warrant:

  1. Honesty: uncertain. If he is one of your office workers, I would not wish to cast suspicion on him on the basis of the handwriting presented to me, but I must say that I would never recommend him.

  2. Initiative: greedy for short-term success, initiative of an aggressive nature. He is not a blackmailer, but he has a tendency towards it.

  3. Openness: on the surface, he is frank, since he mainly comes into conflict with people. At the same time, a hypocrite.

  4. Ability to make judgments: he completely misses the point.

  5. Development potential: if you gave him free rein, he would be more likely to develop in a negative sense.

  (In six months’ time, Jan A. Bata will be given that free rein by fate. He will terrify people even more than his brother does.)

  Meanwhile, Tomáš Bata must create a site for the small graveyard in the forest.

  APRIL 1932: THE OPENING

  “We are accustomed to regard a graveyard as a place where one comes to mourn. But, like everything in the world, a graveyard should serve life. So it should not look frightening, but like a place that the living can visit in peace and joy. Going there should be like going to a park, a place to have fun, to play, and to enjoy happy memories of the dead.” With these remarks, Tomáš Bata opens the Forest Graveyard in Zlín.

  (It probably doesn’t occur to him that he will be the first person to be buried there.)

  JULY 12, 1932, MORNING: FOG

  When, at 4 a.m., he arrives at his private airfield in Otrokovice, there is a thick fog. He insists on flying. The pilot asks him to wait. “I am no friend of waiting,” replies the fifty-seven-year-old Tomáš.

  They take off, and seven minutes later, at a speed of ninety miles per hour, the Junkers D1608 airplane crashes into a factory chimney. The plane breaks into three parts, and a broken rib pierces Tomáš Bata’s heart.

  “Tomáš Bata’s orders were sacred. He alone was above them. One day he gave himself an order, and died of it,” writes Kisch.

  HALF AN HOUR LATER: THE CHIEF

  When his thirty-seven-year-old brother is informed of the disaster, he picks up the phone and calls the factory manager. “This is the Chief speaking,” he introduces himself. Without batting an eyelid, he uses his brother’s title, which those around him regard as blasphemy. It is said that he has taken the news of Tomáš’s death as a sign from God, and has consequently started to imagine that he is the most important man on earth.

  JULY 13, 1932: THE ENVELOPE

  At the district court in Zlín, the envelope containing Tomáš’s last will is opened. The company directors, his wife, son and brother are present. Eighteen-year-old Tomík receives cash from his father, Marie Batová receives cash and real estate. A second envelope is inscribed “FOR JAN A. BATA,” and is dated a year ago. Tomáš writes that he has sold all the shares in Bata SA Zlín to Jan.

  Jan opens his mouth and can’t believe that for a whole year he has been the owner of Zlín and all its foreign branches! (The factory manager, one of the very few people who knew about this idea earlier, had asked Bata the reason for such a surprising decision. “The biggest scoundrel in the family will still steal less than the most honest outsider,” the boss had apparently replied.)

  According to the will, Jan is to manage the business at home and abroad. For quite a while he says nothing, but then he comes to his senses. Just in case, he adds to the deceased man’s statement that a year ago he bought it all “under a verbal contract.” By law, a verbal contract is exempt from taxes, and thus the whole thing can appear to be true—there doesn’t have to be any evidence of the transaction at the tax office.

  FROM 1932: A NEW ERA

  Two Bata representatives fly to North Africa to investigate the potential for sales there. They send two conflicting telegrams back to Zlín. The first one says: “No one wears shoes here. No market opportunity. Am returning home.”

  The other one telegraphs to say: “Everyone here is barefoot. Vast market potential, send shoes as quickly as possible.”

  Bata shoes conquer the world, and the company acquires its own mythological status.

  In the new era, statistics will be quoted constantly: in Tomáš’s time, there were 24 enterprises, and in Jan’s 120; in Tomáš’s time, there were 1,045 stores, and in Jan’s 5,810; in Tomáš’s time, there were 16,560 employees, and in Jan’s 105,700.

  1933: SCAPEGOAT

  The world crisis of the 1930s is underway. The company makes an excellent
scapegoat.

  In Germany, import duties on shoes go up, and it is announced that Jan Antonín Bata is a Czech Jew. Dozens of caricatures of him adorn the Nazi press: RABBI BATA SAYS IT ALL! The manager of Bata in Germany comes to Zlín to check up on the family background. They are Catholics for seven generations of cobblers; there are no documents going further back. He returns to Berlin and issues a statement to the press about Bata’s origins. He is interrogated by the Gestapo. Jan decides to sell his German factory at once. In France, a factory has been in operation for a year, but it has to be closed because the competition starts up an incredible campaign: BATA IS A GERMAN. Huge photographs on the walls show Jan as the stereotypical Prussian, with fair hair and blue eyes. In Italy, the competition spreads a rumor that Bata has been attacking Mussolini in the Czechoslovak papers. In Poland, they say a secret Soviet commission visits Zlín each year: BATA HELPS THE SOVIETS.

  For five years, in spite of the crisis, Czechoslovakia holds first place for the export of leather footwear worldwide.

  1933: VENGEANCE—ACT ONE

  The poster painter Svatopluk Turek publishes a novel called The Shoe Machine. The name Bata does not appear in it, but everyone is convinced it is a savage attack on “Batism.”

  Jan Bata sues Turek, and the court orders the destruction of all unsold copies of the novel. Two hundred gendarmerie posts conduct searches in all the bookstores in the country. (Turek claims Bata’s storekeepers do what the gendarmes say because he has such a privileged position in the country.)