Ari Linden. Karl Kraus and the Discourse of Modernity Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. 216.

Abstract

scientific challenges to the Masarykian school. The book is a part of the Václav Havel series of Karolinum Press, which seeks to continue the intellectual agenda of the late president. The authors’ main goal was to introduce academic debates about Czech history to a broader Czech public. The book supposes a deep level of knowledge about the intricacies of Czech history. The discussions between Hvížďala and Přibáň move from the tenth-century establishment of the Slavic Přemyslid dynasty, through Bohemia’s relationship with the Holy Roman Empire and Habsburg monarchy, to statehood in the twentieth century. In translation, the book will speak only to academics with a very strong knowledge of both Czech history and theories of nationalism. For scholars specializing in Habsburg and Czech history, many of the topics will be familiar. For example, the writers challenge the idea that the Battle of White Mountain in 1620 ushered in a period of “temno” or darkness. They recognize that scholars have long discounted these generalizations, but they remind us that “this interpretation has stuck in the nation’s collective memory right up to the present” (114). They also compliment the work of an ecumenical commission on the Hussite legacy, but they show that Czechs still embrace a national myth of a “bellicose and marshalling [Jan] Hus created by the film director Otakar Vávra and the novelist Alois Jirásek.” Přibáň explains, “I am confident that a discussion on the ‘dark age’ could be . . . liberating for our modern national myths and the black-and-white view of our own history” (114). The book comprises 13 chapters, some with broad themes, such as “Law without the State and State Law: from the Middle Ages to Modernity” or “Intellectuals and Politics.” There are also more focused chapters, such as “The Republic of Educated Citizens, or Masaryk’s Attempt at a Central European Utopia.” Because the book is structured as a series of conversations by two of today’s most erudite Czech public intellectuals, the topics covered in each chapter wander quite a bit. The two discuss, for example, Milan Kundera’s novels and essays; the political philosophies of Montesquieu, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Alexis de Tocqueville; and the contemporary crises of Brexit, Scottish nationalism, and Vladimir Putin’s irredentism. Because of this conversational and meandering style, an index would have been very helpful. Although both Hvížďala and Přibáň critique the oversimplification of Czech history, they do begin with the premise that there is a Czech history about a singular nation. The impetus for the book was the hundredth anniversary of the Czechoslovak State established in 1918 after World War I. The historic German and Jewish populations of Bohemia play only a background role. A conversation between these two brilliant intellectuals that decenters Czech national history in favor of a multiethnic Bohemian history would be most welcome.