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The Marian Column was originally built to celebrate the Catholic Habsburg reconquest of Prague from the Protestant Swedes in the Thirty Years War.
Czechs reassess their Habsburg legacy
Robert Anderson in Prague
Czechs have become embroiled
in their own version of the “statue wars” that have raged in Europe and the US in the past year over historical monuments, but with two important differences: the statues are of foreign oppressors rather than slave owners, and while the Russian ones are being pulled down, the Habsburg ones are being re-erected.
A largely Catholic civic group has placed a copy of a column topped by the Virgin Mary back in Old Town Square – originally built to celebrate the Catholic Habsburg reconquest of Prague from the Protestant Swedes in the Thirty Years War, it was pulled down by the newly independent Czechs in 1918.
A Prague borough has also built
a statue of Empress Maria Theresa
near the remains of the city’s Habsburg fortifications, and another borough
plans to bring a statue of Habsburg Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky – subject of Johan Strauss’ famous March – out
of a museum and put it back in the Little Quarter Square under the Castle. Meanwhile, amid a media storm, Soviet Marshal Ivan Konev’s statue has been removed from its plinth in the capital, and its fate is still unclear.
The differing reactions to these Austrian and Russian monuments explain
a lot both about Czechs’ complicated attitude to their long history of foreign oppression, and also about the different texture of Czech nationalism compared to their Central European neighbours.
Once again this demonstrates that statues are not just neutral historical or artistic artefacts – they have
a contemporary message that should be explored and debated. “Czechs are
not exceptional in ignoring statues – the statues don’t exist unless there is a controversy about them,” says historian Petr Roubal.
The Czech view of the Habsburg Empire was initially black and white. When Czechoslovakia first won independence in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, most of the imperial monuments were torn down to mark the end of what was called “300 years of darkness”. This was how Czech nationalists referred to the repression of the Bohemian lands after the Habsburg Empire retook control of
the kingdom after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620.
After this victory, the Habsburgs executed 27 of the leading Czech Protestant nobles and burghers in Prague’s Old Town Square, displaying