Page 59 - bne_Magazine_July_2017

bne July 2017 CULTURE I 59 & PEOPLE
ARTS
unthinkable. But the Lobkowiczs employed great legal skill in achieving this, and now it is the best museum and heritage attraction in the whole complex.
However, the restitution of the Kinsky Palace in Prague's Old Town Square was refused. This branch of the family had gone into exile to Argentina – where they had family connections – so it was easy for the state to drum up a story that they’d been hiding out as Nazis. Other famous Czech families – including the Schwarzenbergs and the Princes of Liechtenstein – were similarly accused wrongly of being German, and hence ineligible for restitution under the wartime decrees
of president in exile Edvard Benes.
It has to be remembered that when Czechoslovakia emerged from communism at the end of 1989, its population had been subjected for 40 years to a barrage of negativity about its former aristocracy. Every year the TV Christmas special was
a high-budget fairy story, always featuring an idiot king and his court of numbskull aristocrats as the butt of all the jokes. The hero was always a young village lad who would manage to convince the blonde princess that it was far more enjoyable to make soup (with him) in a grubby cottage kitchen than to live in style in the castle that towered above their mean hovel.
In the State Castles (the 110 castles which had been confis- cated when the Communists came to power on 1948 and which were open to the public as museums, usually with most of their original furniture), guided tours repeated a litany of calumnies against the people who had built the buildings and their successors, calling them villains and accusing them of being German or Nazi-collaborators – thus legally justifying the expropriation of their property.
The gentry and the aristocracy were almost the most reviled class of citizens – second only to priests of any Christian denomination. As in all totalitarian regimes, hatred was the major stimulation of the people. Some members of the gentry who had foolishly remained in Czechoslovakia after February 1948 – perhaps disbelieving that Communism really would happen – were quickly rounded up and sent to work in the uranium mines for indefinite sentences (many dying of the after effects of radiation). Luckier ones only got sent to the coalmines – where they were referred to as the ‘black barons’.
Senior servants and estate managers also got the same treat- ment after they had stated, under interrogation, that working for the wicked aristocracy had actually been quite pleasant, well-rewarded and very beneficial to the communities on or near to the nobles’ large estates.
Families who escaped prison were publicly humiliated. At Pardubice, the owners of a manor with 100 acres of market gardens were moved from their manor house to live in one room in the village, sharing a lavatory with others but with the use of a tap in the corridor.
Sadly, the chance to deflate the nobility and gentry, stirred
up by Soviet agitators, was a windfall that millons revelled
in after the 1948 coup. Villagers at Loucen, about 40 miles from Prague, for example – who had enjoyed the munificence of the Thurn & Taxis family for 200 years – were marched to the castle where they looted the rooms, threw furniture and pictures out of the first-floor windows onto the terrace and burned them.
In the currently restored Loucen Castle, apart from about a dozen pieces of furniture that were rescued by state conserva- tors, only the family portraits survived as they were placed too high on the walls for the casual looter to seize.
In one of the castles of another branch of the Kinsky family, the family portraits were auctioned off for CZK5 or CZK10 (around €0.40 now) apiece (depending on size!). Many years later, one of the family tried to trace them. He even managed to find the man who had purchased them, all those years before. “I bought them frames for the glass,” he told the count, “my greenhouse needed fixing. The pictures I burned.”
Apart from bureaucratic and legal obstruction, reinforced by lack of public and political support, restitution of castles has been so difficult because of the confusion of ownership during the wartime years.
The origins of the modern seizure of castles go back as far
as the Nazi occupation of 1938-45. The nobility who had signed a declaration in 1937 stating their allegiance to the Czechoslovak state in the face of the impending Munich crisis had their castles confiscated by the Nazis in 1939. Those
who managed to hold on to their property were accused of being collaborators in 1945, making their castles forfeit.
“In 1992 the possibility of restitution often came out of the blue for many families, now dispersed across the globe”
Those owners who were Sudeten German had their castles permanently confiscated at the end of the war under the Benes decrees, unless they could prove they resisted the Nazi occupation. Many of these disputes were still being argued before courts when the tragedy of communism arrived only three years after the war’s end.
The eventual restitution laws of 40 years later would state that restitution would apply to those who were listed as owning property on February 15th 1948 – the date of the communist coup. This meant, of course, that restitution could be argued to exclude those whose names were not in the land registeries on that date as their disputes were still in court. It also excluded those Jews who had somehow managed to survive the camps
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