I just returned from a windswept jaunt to The Czech Republic with my dear Benjamin and our little ladies.
The Berlin-Prague trek is a treat for the train ride alone, the tracks winding along the sometimes placid, sometimes vigorous Elbe River.
Like every vacation, this one allowed me to mercifully pivot out of my headspace. To walk foreign boulevards, seeking to experience them as they were designed. To embrace layers of architecture and history. To get lost imagining life in a different place and a different time.
There was a time, not so long ago, when Czechia was part of Czechoslovakia. Born in a milieu of pan-Slavic brotherhood as WWI lumbered to a close, this union of Bohemians, Moravians, Slovaks, and Germans had ample reason to be optimistic for a long, happy marriage.
Czechoslovakia was, at the very least, hardly doomed to fail. It was a multiethnic, multiparty democracy with a thriving industrial sector. Indeed, the 1920’s and 30’s were ripe with hope for this new couple. Maybe a throuple if we count Moravians, Bohemians, and Slovaks. Maybe something of an ethnic orgy if we count the Hungarian, Ukrainian, Romanian, and German populations who were underrepresented in the new Czechoslovakian democracy.
Of course, the Nazis, with their knack for counting, were keen to count the German population of Czechoslovakia. Germans were 25% of the Czechoslovakian population. And if there’s anything Hitler hated, it’s underrepresentation in a parliamentary democracy.
Sticklers for counting and fair play, in 1938, the Berliner Morgenpost stoked the ire of the nationalistic Germans, bitter that their brethren should have to live under Czech occupation. And if there’s anything Hitler hated more than underrepresentation, it’s an occupation!
So in 1938, the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia to “liberate” their brethren from the Czech “occupation” of Germania.
So appalled were the European powers that they (Britain, France, and Italy) met at the Führerbau in Munich to kiss Hitler’s ring and give him western Czechoslovakia in exchange for a promise that Germany would not seek further expansion. They averted war, or so they desperately hoped. Having made a deal with The Devil, Chamberlain returned to London to a hero’s welcome, ever since which historians have debated whether he was wise to appease Hitler.
Dr. Seuss was less than impressed with Chamberlain’s compromise.
I can’t say with confidence whether the West was wise to appease. I can say that my students watch this Intelligence Squared debate over the proposition: Neville Chamberlain Did The Right Thing and, 85 years later, there is still much debate to be had. Perhaps 85 years from now, we will be debating if the West should have appeased Putin when, in 2014, he invaded and seized Crimea to “liberate” Russians from the Ukrainian “occupation” of the peninsula.
Hitler. Putin. All hail the liberators.
For all the suffering that Czechoslovakia suffered during WWII, comparatively little of the damage was physical. Prague escaped the mass bombings that destroyed so many great European cities before being, here we go again, liberated by the Soviets in May 1945.
Also in 1945, in an act we would now call ethnic cleansing, three million ethnic Germans were forcibly removed from the Third Czechoslovak Republic. About 20,000 died in the cleansing.
It’s hard, for many, I imagine, to feel particularly empathic towards Sudeten Germans. International law has no empathy for them, even the children; in fact anyone suspected of committing anti-German crimes between May and November 1945 is protected by a blanket amnesty.
Though history is history, it stirs the imagination to consider the many possible postwar fates of Czechoslovakia. While it was sure to endure the strains of superpower strong-arming as the Cold War got hotter, there were still so many possibilities. President Klement Gottwald and Prime Minister President Edvard Beneš could have found more common ground. The Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 could have played out more favorably. Jan Masaryk could have lived longer, or at least not died in such shady circumstances. Alexander Dubček could have been more humane in pursuing his policy of “socialism with a human face.” The Prague Spring could have sprung further. Brezhnev could have been more (or less) compromising. The Lightness of Being could have been more (or less) Unbearable.
My point here is that, having weathered the fates of fascism and communism, the fine folks of Czechoslovakia had been to hell and back again together. Their marriage had seen better and worse, richer and poorer. But on 31 December 1992, without conflict or malice, in what has been dubbed The Velvet Divorce, Czechia and Slovakia went splitsies.
The divorce was not a natural or inevitable outcome of collapse of communism. Moreover, there was no popular support for it. No referendum. In fact, in 1992 only 37% of Slovaks and 36% of Czechs supported the divorce. Revolutionary icon turned president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel resigned rather than preside over the break up. 30 years after the divorce, a poll found that 47% of Czechs and 62% of Slovaks think the divorce was the right move.
Despite public opinion, Vladimír Mečiar and Václav Klaus, who later become Prime Ministers of their respective countries, decided the terms of the divorce under a tree at Villa Tugendhat, north of Brno. This week I listened to this riveting BBC program (programme, if I must) in which the two men reflect on their divorce proceedings.
The Velvet Divorce was a rare moment. An amicable separation. A peaceful repudiation of “Better Together.”
As I was meandering Prague, getting bossed around by tweens, as I do, I was imagining what that divorce must have felt like. To have suffered through fascism and communism together. To be suffused with the spirit of the 90’s. Then, without any public outcry, to endure a quiet divorce, only to live nextdoor to one another.
No great marriage has ever ended in divorce. I’m not qualified to judge how great the Czechoslovak marriage was. But I was thinking this week about other peaceful divorces. After ten days of conflict, Belgium divorced Holland, since which they’ve had almost two centuries of peace and positive relations. 175 years later, with a narrow 55 to 45% vote in a 2006 referendum, Montenegro peaceably divorced Serbia. 2020 brought Brexit. Help me out here. Other examples?
Surely there are ample examples of brutal divorces (Korea, Vietnam). There are also abundant cases of brutality leading to one spouse leaving (South Sudan, Pakistan/Bangladesh, China/Taiwan). But a Velvet Divorce is rare. Brexit could've been bloodier.
But not as bloody as Texit could be. According to a recent poll, 33% of Texans would support independence, 39% oppose it. In 1869, soon after the Civil War, the Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. White that states could not secede from the Union. The court concluded that, "The Constitution, in all its provisions, looks to an indestructible Union composed of indestructible states."
Constitution be damned, Daniel Miller, leader of the Texit movement threatened, "Independence is a bare-knuckle sport. You've got to expect the opposition to throw blows but you also have to be ready to do so as well. We're going in 100 percent on the truth and we're going to club the opposition over the head with it.”
But the polarization is hardly the Lone Star State v. Union. One need not look far to find evidence of polarization. When I returned from Prague I perused this 2022 Pew publication to gather evidence for the divisions we feel…
A CBS poll revealed this depressing data
A YouGov/Economist poll gives us this foreboding perspective
Ugh. I could go on. But why?
Look, Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km, almost twice the size of Germany. It can survive on its own. I would kinda sorta mourn the loss of Texas. But I sure as hell wouldn't fight for it. Joe Rogan and Greg Abbott can have it.
America is 96% of the size of Europe. Have you seen a time lapse video of European borders changing over the centuries? It’s worth three minutes of your time, if only to jog your imagination.
If the divorce were guaranteed to be velvety, would you still want to keep the union together?
I have repeatedly channeled Whitman in this newsletter. Regular readers know that I celebrate America’s multitudes. But the divisions seem to have reached a fever pitch. The multitudes are warring.
I do not take Daniel Miller or the Texas independence movement seriously, nor do I take seriously the idea that America will forever be one nation, indivisible. The fate of nations are not sealed. Twas never thus and never thus will be. All we can hope for is velvet.
It’s nice to be back in Berlin, a city who knows the indignity of divisions all too well.
Yours,
D