The Prague Post Online: Opinion: Got an agenda? We've got your monument

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Got an agenda? We've got your monument

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April 18th, 2007 issue

Outside of sports, Czechs aren’t big believers in national heroes. The list of people in the canon of history that could fill out a monument of superhuman proportions in bronze and not draw a snicker, at least in Prague, is a short one.

Perhaps that’s to be expected in a society that had to endure endless monuments to dubious or wholly manufactured heroes for more than 40 years under the Soviets. You still can’t visit the center of a small Czech town without encountering a lumpy statue of a Russian war martyr, generally made hastily with little regard for anatomical accuracy or inspiring lines.

As for prizing the qualities that make up a great hero — stridency, vision, courage, integrity — well, let’s put it this way: Movies with dramatic scores about ordinary men rising to greatness by dint of character don’t play awfully well in this market.

Then there’s Jan Hus. A more complex figure to mythologize would be difficult to imagine. A Catholic priest and rector of Charles University, clearly well embraced by the orthodox powers of medieval Europe, who begins to assume just a bit too much power of his own. He dares to criticize the church for hypocritical practices such as selling indulgences but also for not allowing the masses to partake of communion.

For these, and for generally being difficult to manage, he’s summoned to fraternal discussions in Constance, under a safe conduct pass, and there burned at the stake after a show trial July 7, 1415.

If you want to read a moral into that to back your agenda, whatever it may be, the possibilities are rife. Those who vilified the invading Habsburgs, so closely tied with a foreign church, embraced Hus as the first real Protestant, proudly claiming a heritage that beat out Martin Luther’s by a century.

That kind of inspiration resonated so well with the Czech fever for independence at the turn of the century that they saw fit to set up a fearsome bronze monument to Hus, emblazoned with the text “Truth will prevail,” in 1905. For the previous three centuries a Baroque column honoring the Virgin Mary had stood on Old Town Square opposite where Hus now glowers.

Hus won out in the end, of course, with the Mary column pulled down at the end of World War I.

The communist agitprop authorities saw in Hus a useful common-man-against-the-imperialists metaphor and invoked him often in promoting the party and its wonderful achievements. To this day, every July 7, big-budget epics from the 1950s about Hussite warriors air on national television.

As it turns out, the man who demanded change is just as handy for the capitalists.

The text wrapped around the Hus monument is slightly modified now (at least, as it appears on the advertising canvas that encircles the reconstruction scaffolding): “The new statue. The new Škoda.” Except that the first “The” has been crossed out and replaced with “Jan’s” and the second replaced with “Tom’s.” Clever, huh?

It’s probably inevitable in a country that says it has no funds for monuments to its heroes that someone would come up with selling advertising space on the Hus monument to pay for the repairs.

At least, like those of most glorious Czech leaders today, Hus’ image turns out to be both flexible and expedient, depending on how you want to exploit it.

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