Page 60 - bne_Magazine_July_2017

ARTS
60 I CULTURE bne July 2017 & PEOPLE
and had returned to Czechoslovakia to find others occupying their property and quite shamelessly not giving it up.
In 1992 the possibility of restitution often came out of the blue for many families, now dispersed across the globe. Some had lost or even destroyed the confiscation documents or the long lists of furniture, paintings, porcelain, clocks, armour, family photographs, and tapestries. Those lists had represented a loss that seemed could never be recovered and was best forgotten.
Also, the succession of owners was not even that clear. In an active family estate, typically one person succeeds not just
to the title, but to the lands and castles. Every landed family knows the necessity of keeping the family possessions intact for future generations. In Britain an estate can be ‘entailed’, making it impossible for a wayward heir to sell it. A similar system existed in the Austrian Empire, called a ‘Fideicommis’.
Some of these systems have been reawakened, but in other cases restitution eventually has fallen to a galaxy of cousins and distant cousins, all with carefully worked-out percentages of the properties involved. This multi-ownership caused by restitution has been impossible to resolve, since by law there has to be a consensus for any decisions. In the centre of Prague there are still several empty notable buildings with dangerous falling stucco where families just can’t agree to sell, to repair, or to let out the properties.
Also Czech citizenship had to be proven, in order to stop any ethnic Germans (who had largely been expelled in 1945-6)
Part II.
Bettina Lobkowicz was sitting in the Czech prime minister’s office in the mid 1990s on a special mission. She had been tipped off that in his office there was a valuable piece of furni- ture taken from the medieval castle that her husband, Jiri, had won back from the state a few years earlier after the collapse of communism.
She quickly spotted, over the premier’s shoulder, the fine Renaissance cabinet, whose twin had already been given back with the fortress in 1992. The Lobkowiczs had won a court order for the return of the castle’s furniture but nothing was officially listed on the inventory about the cabinet’s whereabouts, although it was no doubt carefully accounted for. So, by luck more than anything, Bettina Lobkowicz reunited her cabinets, and they are both to be seen today on the Melnik Castle tour.
The Lobkowiczs’ problem was a common one for former aristocrats who had managed to outwit a hostile post- communist bureaucracy and regain their castles. Restituants had to guess where the contents of their properties might
be stored; they wouldn’t be told whether they were correct
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from getting anything back. But many families had dropped their Czech nationality in the interim, or had had their citizenship revoked as a punishment for fleeing the country. For some the issue of dual nationality also became an issue because Czech law required restituants to give up the joint nationality they’d shared with countries that had welcomed them in their exiles.
No compensation would be paid by the state for the wrecked condition of most of the buildings – so getting a lot of property back was a double-edged sword. Many manor houses had been deliberately debased by being turned into pig farms and the like.
A nobleman with whom I am acquainted got back a large apartment building in Prague with fifty flats, mostly let on old communist rents of about €15 a month. For the first 20 years of restitution these rents had to be maintained. My friend
was often rung up at 2am or 3am in the night by a tenant complaining his tap needed fixing or some other trifling matter. The tenant just loved the idea of having a prince come round at his beck and call – and the more inconvenient the time, the better.
Restituants of castles were to face years of work either on the restitution of the buildings and the land underneath them (in separate registers), and in trying to trace the original con- tents, probably widely dispersed or ‘lost’, or in trying to put together a viable estate to make economic sense of it all. Only the resourceful and courageous ones managed to hang on.
unless they asked. It forced restituants to become detectives – and their possessions could be in any one of hundreds of state institutions – or stolen or destroyed. The contents of the world-famous Roudnice Castle library, for example, had been shovelled out of the first floor window by Soviet soldiers onto waiting army lorries and taken to be ground up for potato fertiliser.
Many restituants also had to rectify the massive neglect, if not vandalism, of their properties that had often taken place during the 40 years of communism. Many castles were used for completely inappropriate purposes and adapted for their new role in tasteless and damaged ways. Some interiors were filled with communal bathrooms, while corridors were sub- divided by ghastly glass-brick partitions.
Castolovice Castle had been partly used as a refrigerator repairman’s training school. Diana Sternberg-Phipps, its restituant, has made a great success of her restoration of the family seat; the rooms occupied by the refrigerator repairmen are now turned into imaginatively furnished guest rooms, supplementing the income from castle tours and special events.