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30 I Central Europe bne March 2021
Photo: Gampe
executed – and on the 400th anniversary too! The statue of Maria Theresa may be less controversial, because it is minimalist and out of the centre, but it is hard to justify naming a park and monument to the Austrian empress in Prague simply because she was the only Czech queen. As for Radetzky, though he was at least Czech, he is also questionable because he crushed the liberal 1848 revolutions across the empire.
In reality, the rehabilitation of the Habsburgs is being pushed by local rightwing politicians in Prague, with little public debate. The Catholic Church has also played a behind the scenes role – the pillar was blessed
by conservative Archbishop Dominik Duka – demonstrating that its influence is growing, as shown by the way it regained much of its former wealth
in a 2012 church restitution law. Nevertheless, the church is still neither as reactionary nor as powerful as in neighbouring countries such as Poland because Czechs are mostly atheist.
Habsburg supporters have been able to restore the monuments with incredible ease because of popular indifference. Even though Prague’s Pirate mayor Zdenek Hrib said the erection of the
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Marian Column would be like rebuilding the huge monument on Letna hill to Josef Stalin, he never bothered to mount a real campaign against the pillar.
The city assembly’s decision to permit the column surprised even its backers, says Prague representative Martin Benda, a member of the city’s ruling centre-right coalition. Benda says he had pushed instead for a contemporary ecumenical monument that would be an act of healing and mutual respect, rather than something that “really looks like
a monument of Catholic triumph”.
“Some of my colleagues voted for it
as it looks quite nice, pretty much disregarding the meaning of it,” he says. “But statues are not just a matter of beauty or aesthetics, they are a political message too. They are saying something to the passersby.”
Self-confident nation
By contrast, the removal of the statue of Soviet general Ivan Konev, who liberated Prague in 1945, was accompanied by
a public furore, threats against the mayor of the local Prague borough
and official Russian complaints. The marshal had survived the purge of Soviet monuments after the Velvet
Revolution but had become the target
of anti-Russian vandalism. Critics said that, like Radetzky, he may have been
a great general but he also helped crush the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Soviet empire.
The pulling down of Konev’s statue was meant to end the debate over the meaning of his monument, which had become too violent and troubling. Meanwhile, the building or rebuilding of the Habsburg monuments barely aroused any debate, because Czech national identity is now based much less on the historical struggle for independence against the Austrian empire, and much more on that against the Soviet one.
“Czechs are a self-confident nation that does not need this quite unconvincing fairy tale of the struggle against the Habsburgs,” says Roubal.
He argues that anti-communism is now the guiding spirit of Czech patriotism, at least among the Prague establishment, which is reflected in the country’s foreign policy. “It has become an essential part of Czech ID,” says Roubal. “It is impossible to underestimate
how important this is and it shapes everything.”
But like the previous anti-Habsburg drive, this is also a contested area. The Communist Party was the largest party after the war, with one million members, and among older Czechs there is still some nostalgia for that period (and significant, though diminishing, support for the hardline rump of the party).
The opposition to removing Konev’s statue fits into a pattern of conflicts over how to remember the period. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, which holds the secret police files, has been fought over between left and right, with the right claiming the institute has now been neutered by leftwingers, who for their part claim the right just wanted to eaponise it against them. Significantly, in contrast to its neighbours, a Museum of Twentieth Century Memory has only just been created (by Prague