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Gellner’s Prague

The biographical sketch of Ernest Gellner in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him as “brilliant, forceful, irreverent, mischievous, sometimes perverse, with a biting wit and love of irony, while abundantly generous with his time, support, and energy”.

He was Professor of Philosophy, Logic, and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics before heading to Cambridge to become the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology. With the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism, Gellner returned to his native Prague as head of the new Centre for the Study of Nationalism there.

Gellner had many intellectual enemies — proponents of linguistic philosophy, Western Marxists, the post-colonialist offspring of Edward Saïd — but his hard-hitting attacks on them were often tempered by good humour and a skilful ability to tell a joke that only further infuriated his opponents.

The sociologist David Glass once said that he wasn’t sure whether the next revolution would come from the right or from the left, but he was quite sure that wherever it came from the first person to be shot would be Ernest Gellner.

Despite living most of life in exile, Gellner was above all a child of old Prague. Professor Stefan Collini explored the professor’s background in Bohemia in the LRB:

His parents were assimilated German-speaking Jews, Habsburg subjects before 1919, and thereafter citizens of the new state of Czechoslovakia (where it seemed wise to speak Czech, at least in public).

Prague in the interwar years was cosmopolitan even by the standards of Central Europe: alongside Czech schools, it could boast German gymnasia, Russian and French lycées, and an English grammar school.

It was to the last that his parents sent the nine-year-old Ernest in 1935, perhaps prudently preparing for a time when they would have to flee mainland Europe. They almost left it too late; they were fortunate to make it to England in April 1939, eventually settling in Highgate.

Gellner’s parents were representative of that stratum of educated, middle-class Jews who, profoundly grateful to Britain for providing them with a home, nonetheless continued throughout the war to speak to each other in the language of the now hated enemy.

Before his 1995 death, Gellner was interviewed by John Davis for the February 1991 issue of Current Anthropology.

In the exchange, he touched upon his relationship with Prague, the “Crown of the Realm”.

JD: Your family was urban?

EAG: My family lived in Prague, and we were deeply urban, yes.

JD: Was Prague particularly anti-Semitic?

EAG: Yes. Very openly so in the working class, nauncé elsewhere.

This was Kafka’s Prague: tricultural, with two universities, a Czech and a German. The German university was very, very distinguished and had at one time Carnap and Einstein and so on, and of course benefited from Hitler by the influx of scholars. Two universities and three cultures and ethnic tension was certainly very emphatically part of it. I mean: if you are asking me whether this was a crucial part of my environment in Prague, then the answer is yes.

It’s a stunningly beautiful town, and during the first period of my exile, which was during the war, I constantly used to dream about it, in the literal sense: it was a strong longing. We came to England in 1939 after the German occupation of Prague.

EAG: One of my main recollections of Prague in ’45 was a communist poster saying “everyone with a clean shield into the Party,” that is, everyone whose record was good during the Occupation.

It meant in reality exactly the opposite: “If your shield is absolutely filthy we’ll scrub it for you; you are safe with us; we like you the better because the filthier your record the more we have a hold on you.” So all the bastards, all the distinctive authoritarian personalities, rapidly went into the Party, and it rapidly acquired this kind of character.

So what was coming was totally clear to me, and it cured me of the emotional hold which Prague had previously had over me. I could foresee that a Stalinoid dictatorship was due: it came in ’48. The precise date I couldn’t foresee, but that it was due to come was absolutely obvious for various reasons.

Above all, in ’45 the Czechs expelled 3,000,000 Germans with considerable brutality. I think the estimate of the number of killed in the process was 200,000 thought I don’t know how reliable that is. And at the same time everyone was scared stiff of the Germans and remembered Munich, so they handed themselves bound and helpless to Stalin as the only protection against the German revanchism which they confidently expected at the time.

They don’t expect it now, interestingly enough; but they did then. All this occurred in conjunction with the quite skilful communist exploitation of the situation. And I wanted no part of it and got out as quickly as I could and forgot about it.

(This post is dedicated to Květoslav, another brilliant Bohemian, in belated celebration of the completion and awarding of his third doctorate.)

Published at 11:15 am on Thursday 19 December 2024. Categories: History Tags: , .
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