Planting the Republic: State Regulation of the Discourse on Food Shortages in Public Communication in Early Czechoslovakia (1918–21)

Abstract

Czechoslovakia as a victorious, yet still fragile post-imperial state, considered censorship and state propaganda to be a necessary tool to secure its legitimacy at home and abroad. From the very beginning, Czechoslovakia defined itself as a democracy with freedom of speech as its basic principle, yet at the same time, it had to deal with inner fragility and outer vulnerabilities. The strategic agenda of people's nutrition, which was closely associated with the perceived competence of state institutions, serves as a litmus test for the state's regulation of press and public speech and the implementation of republican practices and acceptable limits on public discourse. This study analyzes how the new republican state regulated information on food supply shortcomings in the press and at public gatherings. It argues that Czechoslovakia maintained the prewar Habsburg practices of censorship; however, instead of the vaguely defined public interest of the multinational monarchy, it was now used to protect the public interest of “the national state of the Czechoslovaks.” This study analyzes how the government thought about the consistency of its communication during the postwar (supply) crisis, and thus also options of how to shape a clear and positive brand of the state.

Providing food supplies can be seen as an important tool in establishing—or, in the case of failure to do so, undermining—the authority and legitimacy of the Habsburg monarchy's successor states.¹ In the case of Czechoslovakia, however, the state was not only responsible for rationing. It also had the power to regulate how food supplies were discussed in the public arena. From the very beginning, Czechoslovakia defined itself as a democracy with freedom of speech as its basic principle,² yet at the same time, it had to deal with inner fragility and outer vulnerabilities.³ The strategic agenda of people's nutrition, which was closely associated with the perceived competence of state institutions, serves as a litmus test for the state's regulation of press and public speech and the implementation of republican practices and acceptable limits on public discourse.⁴

In her book on the breakdown of social consensus in wartime Vienna, Maureen Healy used the notion of “information management” to refer to the state system that regulated the information space. She identified two pillars on which it rested: censorship and propaganda. Censorship was a defensive, passive tool. Propaganda was, on the contrary, offensive and proactive. Propaganda consisted of producing and disseminating content to make the wartime efforts seem meaningful and cast a positive light on the monarchy. Censorship, on the other hand, prevented the dissemination of content critical of the state or its war aims.⁵ From the viewpoint of wartime censorship, information on the increasing failures of the war economy was also seen as subverting belief in victory. Hence, suppressing information on unsatisfactory harvests, shortcomings in food supplies, and protests against hunger also became one of the goals of central censorship institutions.⁶

The basic division of information management into censorship and propaganda also proves suitable for studies of post-imperial and postwar transitions in Czechoslovakia. However, some clarifications are necessary here. First, this study analyzes how the new republican state regulated information on food supply shortcomings in the press and at public gatherings. It argues that Czechoslovakia maintained the prewar Habsburg practices of censorship; however, instead of the vaguely defined public interest of the multinational monarchy, it was now used to protect the public interest of “the national state of the Czechoslovaks.” Ironically, the new state was forced to take over the existing network of district captains’ offices to exercise this control. As it was neither possible nor desirable to completely replace the staff of this administrative pillar in circumstances where the authority of the state was precarious, censorship was carried out primarily by district captains whom the public often associated with the previous regime and with wartime suffering from strict requisitions, high prices, and a lack of rationed food.⁷

Second, Czechoslovakia as a victorious, yet still fragile post-imperial state also considered state propaganda to be a necessary tool to secure its legitimacy at home and abroad.⁸ Appearing as a viable state on the international scene not only helped it become more established in the international context but, also helped its own citizens regain much-needed confidence in the state and its institutions following the breakdown of the former social consensus.⁹ This study then shifts the scope of attention from the state's practices of censorship to the ways the Czechoslovak public was influenced through consistent and immediate communication on topics related to food supplies.¹⁰ In the second part, the study asserts that the achievement of a unified voice across all Czechoslovak state authorities was seen as a communication challenge by the Czechoslovak government. This was, among other things, linked to the issue of state influence in the media sector, which was in flux, given that some central authorities, such as the War Surveillance Office of the General Army Headquarters, that had controlled the state's information management during the war, were dissolved.¹¹ The visions of Czechoslovak ministries that oversaw various agendas and, moreover, were under control of differing political parties, varied as regarded the communication of the supply crisis. Conflicts between the ministries regarding their powers to provide information are used in this study to exemplify how the government thought about the consistency of its communication, and thus also options of how to shape a clear and positive brand of the state.¹² The geographical scope of this article is limited to the Bohemian Lands, as Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia had different legal systems, administrative traditions, and specific development both before and after 1918.¹³

Continued Wartime Censorship?

An exemplary case of the Czechoslovak government's approach to censorship occurred in Teplitz-Schönau/Teplice-Šanov, a district capital with a prevalent German population and one of the worst areas for food distribution, at the end of February and beginning of March 1919.¹⁴ The local district captain, Artur Daczicky-Heslowa,¹⁵ in formal terms the first man of the district who represented the state authority, received a letter from the Provincial Political Administration in Prague (at that time the higher authority in turn controlled by the Ministry of the Interior), sharply reprimanding him for his inactivity in censorship. The letter was distributed among the other district officials and can be seen as one of the first examples of the Czechoslovak government's approach to censorship. According to the letter, the district captain was requested to stop the publication of the weekly Teplitzer-Schönauer Anzeiger and to confiscate the issue dated 1 February 1919 because of its lead article, which mixed the demand for the right to self-determination of the German-speaking population with criticism of the government's food distribution policy. The article stated that, although it promised improvements in food supplies, in German-speaking areas the Czechoslovak government only cared about requisitions. According to the newspaper, although it was only possible to secure food for the region “with great effort,” the “Czech” government continued to export foodstuffs from its German-speaking districts.¹⁶

This case should have made it clear that the Czechoslovak government had decided to apply more repressive practices. By doing that, it lent an ear to the numerous complaints of Czechoslovak military commanders that they were working in the German-speaking areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia essentially in a “state of war” and that the situation, escalating in nationalist and social terms, could not be handled without strict censorship.¹⁷ The worrying situation in supplies and prices, and the dissolution of German local governments, culminated at the beginning of March 1919 in mass anti-Czechoslovak protests in these regions, which in many instances were violently suppressed.¹⁸ Confiscation of the press offered an immediate tool of repression. The district captains were supposed to focus not only on the protection of the state integrity but also to carry out targeted censorship of public statements that questioned the viability of Czechoslovakia in an environment of general shortages. The district captains were therefore not supposed to assess, for instance, German appeals to boycott Czech shops and food supplies merely as a traditional manifestation of economic nationalism, but as evidence of an unacceptable separationist trend.¹⁹

The district captain Daczicky-Heslowa, in contrast, did not consider the reprimand that he was not adequately censoring to be justified. According to him, the 1852 Austrian Criminal Code remained the legal backbone of the Bohemian Lands, and he did not see any violation of laws in the Teplitzer-Schönauer Anzeiger's editorial and in similar articles. He based his statement on the argument that, regarding freedom of speech, he was merely continuing the more liberal trends that had emerged in Austria before the end of the war. Jan Kosina, Head of the Provincial Political Administration in Prague, however, threatened Daczicky again in a circular letter stating that such an attitude could have “adverse consequences” for Daczicky's career.²⁰

This exchange should be viewed against the backdrop of wartime censorship in Austria. In the Bohemian Lands alone forty-six Czech-language newspapers were banned in the first months of the war, and some had to shut down because it was not worth trying to publish anything. The state also expanded the scope of censorship to cover other areas it considered in the state interest. When unmistakeable signs of failure in the state-controlled system of war economy appeared in 1916, the cover-up of economic results and the food supply crisis became one of the main objectives of censorship. As Healy has written about the home front in Vienna, apart from a black market for food, there also emerged a black market for information about food. Correspondingly, censorship began to invade everyday life, with widespread inspection of private correspondence. The authorities also responded repressively to ordinary grumbling, something that was unimaginable in times of peace.²¹ However, commencing in 1917, the situation began to change. Following the reopening of the Imperial Council in Vienna in May 1917, discussion was permitted of military objectives and censorship of reports focused purely on domestic policy gradually loosened. Newspapers again explored the boundaries of freedom, and even pro-government papers with large print runs and readerships, such as Der Abend and Neue Zeitung, rejected the government's call for moderation in reporting on the critical food supply situation; on the contrary, they openly appealed to the authorities to re-establish order in the field of distribution.²²

Austrian information management, which was controlled by the War Surveillance Office of the General Army Headquarters in the first years of the war, corroded in the year 1917 along with the increasing collapse of the social consensus.²³ Nor did the nascent Czechoslovak state authorities, who had declared freedom of speech as a fundamental principle, have the capacity or the political authority to monitor the communications of their citizens on such a large scale. In the quasi-war state existing in some border districts with prevailing German populations, Czechoslovak army units were still confiscating newspapers and violating the privacy of correspondence at the end of 1918. Their commanders justified such action by referring to the (Cisleithanian) constitution which allowed the “suspension” of freedom of speech in case of war or unrest. However, the government limited such arbitrary behavior early in 1919.²⁴ Incidentally, the phenomenon of denunciations, which had become widespread during the war, continued in the new conditions. However, in 1919, the overwhelmed Czechoslovak authorities indefinitely postponed cases involving individuals who were reported to have rudely complained on trains or in pubs about the situation with supplies and the incompetence of state representatives.²⁵

In the correspondence with the district captain Daczicky-Heslowa, the government decided to limit the scope of censorship in the Bohemian Lands primarily to media content and addresses delivered at public gatherings. However, it remained necessary to confirm powers and to set the boundaries of what speech was prohibited and how authorized topics could be addressed.

Fruits of a Tended Garden

To regulate public communication in the Bohemian Lands the new Czechoslovak state adopted the well-established Cisleithanian administrative chain: Ministry of the Interior—Provincial Office—District Captain's Office, and in bigger towns also the police commissariat. Every entity that intended to publish or deliver a public speech had to pre-register and pass through a censorship checkpoint. In Cisleithania, this checkpoint had been a concept official of the district captain's office or, in bigger towns, an official at the police commissariat. All printed matter and public addresses had to be submitted for prior approval. Kosina, head of the Provincial Political Administration in Prague, also reminded Daczicky-Heslowa of the advantages of these checkpoints, which allowed preliminary censorship, by quoting the phrase “principiis obsta, sero medicina paratur” (resist from the beginning; remedying the consequences is too late).²⁶ He based his observation on the well-proven assumption that if controlled channels were the only way to get into an information space, no further monitoring would be necessary.²⁷

The Cisleithanian censorship system had developed over decades in the environment of a nationally, politically, and socially complex state. It was based on the local activity of a district captain who was bound by his oath to the emperor and by many years of service and loyalty to his office. Czechoslovakia took over this administrative pillar, including the majority of officials in the German-speaking border districts. More than 60 percent of German-speaking district captains continued to lead their district administrations.²⁸ After the establishment of Czechoslovakia, they did not play an active role in the German-Austrian political movements that refused to join the national state of Czechs and Slovaks. Whether their efforts to stay in office even under the new conditions can be explained by loyalty to their office or safeguarding their careers, the case of Daczicky-Heslowa from March 1919 shows that the government of the “national state” intended to secure their loyalty. As the principle of preliminary censorship anticipated reliable control mechanisms, the Czechoslovak government ordered state prosecutors' offices (whose task was to approve proposals from district captain's offices to confiscate newspapers) to also review all censorship proposals from the local military commands even in cases that the district captain's offices did not treat as criminal.²⁹

Despite this military-like security, the line of political administration under the control of the Ministry of the Interior became responsible for censorship in all areas of the Bohemian Lands in the spring of 1919. The directives from Kosina to Daczicky-Heslowa also reflect the basic argumentative strategy of the Czechoslovak state power. His censorship guidelines were already framed by the mobilizing narrative of the development of the victorious state and its great potential. In emotional terms, it summoned hope for the future, and the metaphor of fruits from a weeded garden: “The sun shining on this path [of future well-being] may not be obscured by any clouds—it must shine, it must emit warmth, to produce blooms and to make blooms fruit. And one of these large black clouds is the seditious German press, which must be paid the greatest attention now in these serious times.”³⁰

The narrative of Czechoslovakia as a privileged state was not limited to censorship. It also formed a framework for the instructions for district captains regarding how to communicate generally the freedom to assemble at times of impending unrest. The basic instruction on writing local decrees dated back to January 1919 and was repeatedly referred to in May and June 1919 following waves of riots caused by high prices. The decrees were supposed to show, in the spirit of de-Austrianization,³¹

what conditions we would now live in had the old governmental system not been overthrown. Let it also be emphasized how economic conditions have improved and that our republic is now one of the leading countries in Europe. It can also be stated that a future such as that of rich Belgium and comfortable Switzerland awaits us if we remain calm, and that this requires the patience, work, and good will of all our people.³²

This type of emotional management worked with a pattern known from wartime, appealing for close coexistence and temporary self-sacrifice for the benefit of the whole or the homeland.³³ Here the promise of a better future, however, was already linked to the sentiment of victory. The local decrees were supposed to be formulated in a “popular yet pregnant” style, situating Czechoslovakia as the space which, owing to its international position, had the possibility to guarantee personal security as well as food security. From the viewpoint of the Czechoslovak state administration, in the new state of “parallel” national communities,³⁴ a unifying role could be played by the promise of a better life, at least at this moment.

Censors: On the Edge of the Balcony

The government must have been aware of how difficult the conditions district captains had to work in were. It also understood that considering how established they were in the local society, they could play a key role in dealings between the “state” and the public. Their suppressive and repressive tasks were seen as sensitive because they also had to perform tasks in the area of food supplies. Even though formally independent district grain offices were set up in August 1919 in Czechoslovakia, their staff were solely officials of the district captains' offices who used the same office rooms as before. In the eyes of citizens of all nationalities, everything remained the way it used to be: district officials who had defined freedom of speech and assembly in their district and were supposed to strictly prosecute offenses against public order were also responsible for shortcomings in food supplies.³⁵

As former officials of the “Austrian hydra” who had extracted supplies from farmers in the hinterland during the war while still unable to provide workers with a sufficient supply of foodstuffs, the district captains remained a suitable target for popular anger from the supply crisis, and this came from two sides. On the one hand, were farmers who had often sabotaged the system of supplies with the support of the local Agrarian Party MPs, on the other hand were citizens demanding food for the lowest possible prices. In many cases, the district captains fell victim to violent demonstrations against hunger and high prices, experienced actual assaults, or, in certain cases, violence ritualized at a symbolic level. In Kutná Hora, Central Bohemia, for instance, in October 1919 the district captain had to sign a symbolic letter of resignation in front of an angry crowd due to the unsatisfactory situation in the food supply, otherwise he faced the threat of being thrown off a balcony.³⁶

In line with widespread trends, in 1919–20 on the streets of Prague alone, some three hundred demonstrations were held. Strikes also grew in number across the Bohemian Lands after 1918, from 184 in 1918 to 242 the following year and 590 in 1920.³⁷ Generally, trust in institutions plays the key role in handling emergency situations. The question was to what extent the district representatives of state power were permitted to reflect independently upon the local conditions and maneuver in the escalating situations, for example, by “squinting their eyes.” At a workers' gathering in Moravská Ostrava at the end of February 1919, a speaker compared the Czechoslovak government's suppression of speech to that presided over by Karl von Stürgkh (Minister-President of Austria, 1914–16) and called the representatives of civil administration good-for-nothings because “food will suffice for no more than twelve weeks and then a catastrophe will occur.” Following that, the police commissar, the equivalent of district captains in larger cities, investigated these statements as the criminal offense of “sedition” and “dissemination of unsettling news,” the same legal qualification as in the case of Daczicky-Heslowa.³⁸ In this case, however, the police commissar was eventually able to convince judicial authorities to drop the case. He justified the pardon as being an act “in the public interest.” According to him, given the escalating situation in the region, there was a legitimate worry that workers could see such a process as “curtailing their freedom to gather and would be prone to a violent response.” It is, therefore, apparent that there was a certain space to maneuver that depended on the communication or trustworthiness of the representative officer and on the overall situation. The archival sources prove that inhabitants of coal mining areas were treated as priority groups by the Czechoslovak government not only from the viewpoint of being provided food supplies.³⁹

The stricter period of spring 1919, when censorship was tasked to follow even the concealed intent of public speeches and texts and identify “hostile aims against the needs of the young republic,”⁴⁰ ended in early autumn 1919. The more relaxed attitude to freedom of speech that followed was probably related to the state having established its international position on the grounds of new peace treaties and the temporary improvement in supplies following the harvest. Less obviously, it could also have been a symptom of the unsettled political climate, in which the ruling Social Democrats in fact still included a staunch Marxist communist faction and tried to take certain friendly steps toward its representatives, such as granting them impunity for their speeches. In the autumn of 1919, the government informed political and judicial authorities that “in the public interest” they should be ready to “withstand even more open manifestations of discontent” that went beyond criminal boundaries. The authorities were supposed to consider the potentially adverse societal impacts of their actions.⁴¹

While both censorship and expressions of German separatism were becoming more conventional (aptly enough, the representatives of German policy were not part of the government),⁴² the newly outlined and more benevolent trend could be seen, especially in industrial centers. The communist leader Antonín Zápotocký (the Czechoslovak president in 1953–57), for instance, was not charged criminally after 1 May 1920, when, at a gathering summoned by Social Democrats on the square in Kladno, he delivered a speech that had not been approved beforehand by the district captain. In the speech, he criticized the weed-choked state-owned farms and proclaimed that “there won't even be a crumb of bread or foodstuffs at all” for workers. And as “tears and curses won't feed their hungry children,” he called on those present to “be ready, armed, for the moment when the proletariat will enforce its rights violently.”⁴³ Unlike the suspended case from the Ostrava region from the spring of 1919, Zápotocký's case wasn't even investigated, and the supervising officer only tersely commented upon his own benevolence, stating that Zápotocký did not handle his speech well anyway because he stuttered, so not even half of those present on the square raised their hands for his “revolutionary vow.”⁴⁴

In the autumn of 1920, the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party split. In this era of postwar shortages, the right-wing faction called for calm, while the communist faction called for revolution, eventually resulting in bloody conflicts in December 1920. Martial law was declared in Moravia, and the state security forces came down hard against the rebels. A total of 3,732 people were arrested, of whom 461 were imprisoned. The state authority, which emerged stronger after this conflict, subsequently adopted permanent measures under which censorship and criminal liability were consistently enforced in a unified manner following centralized processes. From then on, a unified suppression process and charges were to be applied to all calls for revolutionary change in Czechoslovakia delivered in the press or at public gatherings. Simply put, a similar degree of benevolence as in the 1920 Zápotocký case was no longer tolerated in the subsequent period of interwar Czechoslovakia.⁴⁵

Unlike in the hardest times of Austrian war censorship, food was no longer automatically seen as a concern of the state in Czechoslovakia. However, censorship in the state-controlled rationing system could link the topic of supplies to an assault on the state's integrity. While during the war the Slavic-language press experienced closer monitoring than the German-language press, German publications were more often confiscated after the declaration of Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, high prices and food shortages were an everyday newspaper topic in both Czech- and German-language publications. They were also one of the main objects of satire in humor magazines. The topics of high prices, profiteering, and farming barons were actually so common that they became normalized. But as the topic of food will demonstrate, differing censorial approaches were applied to individual nationalities.

The State's Reputation

The primary goal of the Czechoslovak government's information management was to ensure the successful integration of the state. This, however, did not reduce “the public interest” to merely a symptomless provision of public order.⁴⁶ It was also defined with respect to “the state's reputation”—local representatives of state power were supposed to be aware that they were building the Czechoslovak brand. Censorship was to act, “with all effort,” against dealings which would “question the reputation of the republic.”⁴⁷

Media reports that could undermine trust, even indirectly, in state institutions were suppressed in the first months. This principle was applied to the looting of Jewish shops in which members of the Czechoslovak military, participated. Not only did soldiers implicitly support popular ideas of social and national justice when they, for instance, supported forced food buyouts, but they sometimes joined in the looting.⁴⁸ To give just one example, a serious case of looting by soldiers on 26 January 1919 in Přívoz, near Ostrava,⁴⁹ was not reported in any of the key Czech dailies. The real reason for this omission was likely not just the “fog of war” that enveloped military clashes with Poland in this contested region, but rather the ban on press reports on the position of military units. Army units, an important factor in the field of public relations, were extensively protected by censorship. This practice was reinforced by a 1920 policy requiring all official reports on military matters to be automatically submitted to the Ministry of National Defense's censorship office prior to being dispatched to the Czechoslovak Press Agency.⁵⁰

This propagandistic dimension of censorship also seems to have influenced the highest ranks of politicians in the first months of the republic. According to Michal Frankl and Miloslav Szabó, President T. G. Masaryk “never made a public comment on the antisemitism that accompanied the establishment of Czechoslovakia.”⁵¹ The reason for this could lie in the fact that the government censored some of the president's speeches. As the prominent journalist Ferdinand Peroutka put it, Masaryk intended to warn of antisemitic unrest in his message to the Parliament on 24 December 1918. Yet, the text of the president's address was first sent to the government by courier, where its paragraph on antisemitism was deleted. This was likely a step taken to protect the “state's reputation.” Such statements could undermine Czechoslovakia's prestige and negotiating position as they would uncover problems faced by the state.⁵²

World War I had radicalized ideas about the enemies of the national community.⁵³ The Czechoslovak brand was also protected by a section of the 1852 Criminal Code that pertained to hate speech. The reprimand sent to the district captain of Teplitz/Teplice, Daczicky-Heslowa mentioned the specter of “[anti-Czech] instigation” or “[anti-Czech] provocations.” What hate speech meant and to whom it applied, however, was encoded somewhat unilaterally.⁵⁴ While it was common in the Czech-language press after the war to see Jews stereotyped as usurers, or Germans referred to as “voracious mice” that “gobbled whatever was there, not leaving a single morsel for other creatures,”⁵⁵ Czechs, Slovaks, and members of allied nations enjoyed increased and one-sided protection. Thus, in theater plays it was not permitted to ridicule even French pronunciation, and “truly anything that could insult the French nation” was censored.⁵⁶ In February 1920, the district censors were instructed by the Ministry of the Interior that if they could not apply any of the sections of the Penal Code in the case of a “gross attack” by the German press on the allied countries, they should confiscate the newspaper in the public interest for “another reason.” This meant that in cases when an allied country was to be protected, censorship interventions did not necessarily have to be based on the provisions of the law.⁵⁷ This increased polarity can be documented in the press with an example from the Těšín region, an area with valuable resources and a mixed and to some extent nationally indifferent population, that both Czechoslovakia and Poland sought. “For ridicule of the worst kind of the Czechoslovak state and nation” was the reason given in August 1919 for the confiscation of the Polish-speaking magazine Republika in the entire political district of Silesia. The censor at the police commissariat added six exclamation marks to a caricature of a Czech musician with a pig's nose in a patched jacket who, after the Treaty of Versailles, hypocritically mocks the Germans with a song “Dajczland, dajcland iber ales. Prazdna misa, prazdny talerz” (roughly “Germany, Germany above all: Empty plate and empty bowl”).⁵⁸

A plebiscite proposed for the Těšín region was never carried out. Instead, the definite border between Czechoslovakia and Poland was determined in July 1920 by Inter-Allied arbitration. From August 1919, however, in this region, a massive propaganda battle raged to win over not only the local population but also the international reputation. The area under international control was where the Czechoslovak and Polish governments used cultural diplomacy to gain prominent allies abroad and prove the viability of their own states.⁵⁹ At a time of critical food shortages, food supplies became the key propaganda tool in the Těšín region. Both governments built up a myth of prosperity, redirecting the last foodstuff reserves from other regions to send to the Těšín region for propaganda purposes.⁶⁰ The Czechoslovak government worked on improving the citizens' confidence in the state by expanding the administrative staff and security forces, supporting the idea that the increased “presence of the state” guaranteed the distribution of supplies. The methods of propaganda were influenced by the fact that the Inter-Allied Commission abandoned preliminary censorship in the Těšín region. As the Czechoslovak side was more effective in organizing distribution, its official propaganda was able to boost its reputation by contrasting against the image of a “messy Polish economy.”⁶¹ For its part, Polish propaganda explained the difference in distribution as a result of the brutality of Czech requisitions and the “Prussian” nature of the Czechs who had already “confiscated even chicks from the people, and were about to make lists of cats and dogs.”⁶² This type of propagandistic agitation, however, was only used in the areas where a plebiscite was to be carried out. When the Polish governmental propagandists explored the possibility of lobbying the editorial boards of Czechoslovak nationwide dailies that showed an affinity toward Poland, the fact that the nationwide media were subjected to preliminary censorship, and thus also the risk of confiscation, was the reason they eventually abandoned this approach.⁶³

In 1921, a debate emerged in the communications of the Czechoslovak judicial and political administration concerning “inconsistencies” in the existing censorship practices. Regarding the assessment of hate speech, senior officials at the Ministry of Justice raised doubts over whether the performance of justice was unbiased and balanced for all nationalities. One of the results of this internal (self-) criticism was a decree dated 18 December 1921.⁶⁴ It instructed censorship authorities to prevent manifestations of economic nationalism, something common in Central Europe and succinctly expressed in the phrase “us for ourselves.”⁶⁵ Similar to matters concerning the “sedition” provisions of the Criminal Code mentioned in the previous section, the unified enforcement of the section dealing with hate speech in fact accompanied the stabilization of state power. The need to establish the new state and overcome the postwar crisis had initially imbued its censorship with an ethnic-national edge. It was understood as an instrument of the contest between those who represented the Czech (and Slovak) achievement of 1918 and those who threatened or seemed to threaten it (Germans, Poles, Jews, etc.). Only after the postwar crisis was resolved around 1921 was the performance of censorship transferred from the ethnic-national framework to a more equal, civil concept.

Unified Voice of State Institutions?

As mentioned above, trust plays a key role in handling emergency situations. Reports from Prague's military command in 1919 mention frequent public complaints about the state administration and a high level of mistrust of state institutions. They report “bitter complaints” about the behavior of officials, their ineffectiveness, and rough conduct. The principle of rationing, introduced by the Austrian government during the war, stayed in place. The Czech public, however, increasingly complained about the new distribution offices, stating that they were as ineffective as those in the times of Austria.⁶⁶ Officials on the ground often found themselves in situations where they lacked any information about the next deliveries, or where expected delivery dates came and went with no deliveries, and if they did arrive, the quantities were low and the quality was bad. Unsurprisingly, the government saw distrust of the authorities as a critical issue. The image and perceived competence of state institutions played a principal role in the official narrative of a viable state. Conflicts and tensions between the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry for People's Supply, which oversaw the distribution agenda, could have added to doubts of the existing regime's legitimacy if they became too visible. And if the authorities were to enjoy increased protection via censorship, they had to at least make unified representations. Ideally, the clearness of the Czechoslovak brand would be buttressed by the consistency in communication of the state and its institutions with the public.⁶⁷

On 23 May 1919, the government made a “declaration on mitigating poverty” in response to a wave of protests against high prices. The Minister of the Interior, Antonín Švehla (Agrarian Party), presented the declaration in parliament. His appeal, put up on posters in all villages, was again connected with the advantages of Czechoslovakia as a privileged area that, owing to its international renown, could guarantee personal as well as food security.⁶⁸ The Ministry of the Interior consistently communicated in such an optimistic spirit. For instance, in autumn 1919 at the start of the plebiscite campaign in the Těšín region, both the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs repeatedly exhorted the press department of the Ministry for People's Supply not to provide the Czechoslovak media with information that could incite wider public criticism of Czechoslovakia's food distribution. Such criticism might reveal the fact that supplies to the Těšín region were given preference over other regions in advance of the plebiscite; uneven provision of food (and other) supplies elsewhere were to be covered up. At the same time, admitting there was a distribution crisis in Czechoslovakia would provide the Poles with propaganda material that could harm Czechoslovakia's reputation at the international plebiscite commission.⁶⁹

It seems, however, that similar appeals in which the Ministry of the Interior and Ministry for Foreign Affairs repeatedly attempted to calm the situation were not fully satisfactory to other ministries. The Ministry for People's Supply in particular followed other motivations, and by raising expectations of the citizens too high actually made its communication of supply issues rather complicated. Věstník (Bulletin), the official periodical of the Ministry for People's Supply, therefore, began to publish more cautious statements in addition to statistical reports. For example, the August 1920 lead article by Václav Johanis, a Social Democrat and minister, seems to have opposed the division into winners and the defeated in a somewhat subversive tone: “The individual states’ care of nutrition did not end [with the end of war]. On the contrary, supplies and nutrition have become the only matters of importance for any state, whether defeated or victorious, whether in the West or in the East.”⁷⁰

As regards the direct impact of the message, the public relations capacity of the Ministry for People's Supply was more limited than the Ministry of the Interior and its network of political administration offices. Věstník, for instance, had a print run of 6,000 in Czech and 2,000 in German.⁷¹ The numerous press releases of the Ministry were not guaranteed to appear at all in the state-supporting newspapers, let alone on their front pages. In the Czechoslovak media environment which was, for the most part, subject to private business and party struggles, the editorial boards were not obliged to publish governmental or ministerial representations. Even the state-run Czechoslovak Press Agency did not have sufficient influence over the media to make them unconditionally publish ministerial statements.⁷²

Much thus depended on the communication skills of the ministries and the political and media power of their ministers.⁷³ The Ministry for People's Supply, as a “non-power” ministry, tried something like subterfuge. In 1920, for instance, the government analyzed the article in the periodical Čas (Time), signed by the secretary of the minister of supply himself, that ascribed many of the problems to the political administration offices of the Ministry of the Interior.⁷⁴ Similarly, the Ministry of the Interior protested against an article in the official state periodical Československá republika (Czechoslovak Republic), which accused some officials from district captain's offices of turning a blind eye to cases of usury. The Office of the Government investigated those who appended “such an ill-thought heading” to the article which blackened the reputation of state officials and reminded the editorial boards of the propagandistic mission of the official gazettes.⁷⁵

The internal debates that found their way to the media were seen by the government as its own communication issue, and it tried to resolve it. First, the October 1919 government resolution helped to make state communication more coordinated. According to the resolution, officials were no longer allowed to make public representations without the approval of their head of office. This rule referred to the 1914 guidelines for state officials, namely Section 23 on confidentiality in official matters. However, this was expanded substantially to cover all internal state matters to “avoid the state authorities being undermined by state officials.” The government also adopted a resolution on 15 January 1921 which instructed that the involved authorities must always be consulted in advance on all official press releases that pertained to more than one authority.⁷⁶

Not even during the war had the Habsburg state authorities introduced an overly coordinated program that would explain the steps taken by the state at the supranational, patriotic level. The War Surveillance Office of the General Army Headquarters, as the state institution that was to be in control of information management, was rather a chaotic institution with unclear powers outside the system.⁷⁷ In the postwar situation, the Press Department of the Office of the Government showed ambitions to centralize the communication of ministries.⁷⁸ However, it had to give them up in spring 1919 when the political competition between the government parties became increasingly more apparent. It is worth mentioning that the Czechoslovak Ministry of Propaganda was not established until September 1938, when the state was under extreme military threat from Nazi Germany.⁷⁹

Conclusion

Censorship was transferred from the monarchy to the new republic as one of the tools with which the new heterogeneous state intended to establish itself and overcome the postwar upheaval, including the food supply crisis. Instead of completely abandoning censorship, the Czechoslovak authorities mentioned it as an obvious necessity in the unstable situation at the end of 1918. It was, however, in no case supposed to be as repressive as it was in the first years of World War I, or in some respects as benevolent as in 1917–18. Czechoslovak censorship was primarily intended to strengthen the position of Czechoslovakia as a nascent national and democratic state. It was within this new context that the original terms of the 1852 Criminal Code got their specific meanings and the representatives of state authorities, in many cases the same people in the same places both before and after 1918, as well as journalists and other public activists, learned the republican limits of free speech.

While the highly repressive Austrian censorship as regards matters of wartime supplies had led to a socially atomized population which instead of patriotic self-sacrifice was increasingly consumed with its own survival, censorship could, in the context of the new state, have a constructive effect when defining the national community and protecting its interests. This is revealed in the performance of censorship in 1918–20, which did not treat all groups of citizens equally. While the public image of Czechs, Slovaks, and allied countries was subjected to protection by relatively strict censorship, Czechoslovak Germans could be denigrated in newspapers as “voracious mice” and Jewish “profiteers” were commonly depicted as those who created high prices and food shortages. In this respect, censorship to some degree met the majority population's ideas of the new order and helped to pacify the part of Czech society that demanded public space be governed by Czech nationalistic conventions.

Whereas Austrian wartime censorship in its most rigid phase had created a dearth of relevant information about food supplies, in Czechoslovakia the topic of food supplies was widely discussed in public spaces. State authorities sought not only to prevent the instrumentalization of the supply crisis against Czechoslovakia but also actively communicated their view on the issue and offered something attractive and convincing for everyone. The information management of the government thus echoed wartime appeals calling for close cooperation and temporary self-sacrifice for the good of the whole. After 1918, however, the promise of a better future was linked to the rise of a victorious nation-state. Despite warnings from the Ministry for People's Supply against overpromising, the optimistic approaches of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior dominated communication of the crisis. The latter called for shortcomings to be glossed over and made promises of an early improvement to build an unambiguously positive brand of Czechoslovakia and its authorities.

The exceptional position of the Ministry of the Interior in communicating the supply crisis, therefore, did not stem merely from its repressive powers. The district captains concentrated the majority of interactions between citizens and the state in their offices. As under the monarchy, officials of the political administration and policemen, whether uniformed or not, were expected to stay in close contact with the local population and respond to local sentiment. Through them, the Czechoslovak government carried out a litmus test of its approach to freedom of speech in a rigid as well as looser form. Czechoslovak society was highly segmented, and it was imperative for the state authorities not to allow centrifugal forces to prevail. Over the first years of the state's existence, however, representatives of district captain's offices could apply a more independent approach to local conditions, especially at workers' assemblies in strategic industrial areas. That was something that built on the Austrian prewar practice but also reflected the weakened position of these officials who were co-responsible for the food shortages both before and after 1918.

The suppression of a large-scale communist strike in December 1920, however, changed the state authorities' approach to censorship. The Ministry of the Interior saw the previous erratic performance of censorship as one of the causes of the rise of the communists, who used food shortages to their advantage. Following the strike, the government's use of censorship was to become transparent, but at the same time strictly centralized. In 1921, having established its borders and survived the subsistence crisis, the Czechoslovak government unified its approach to censorship. If censorship in the early days applied an ethnic-national perspective, from 1921 onward, it straightened out toward all inhabitants of the state, partially moving away from an ethnic-national framework to one based on civic identity. On the other hand, the elaborate censorship instructions and the obligation of district captains to exercise censorship in a unified manner definitely deviated from Austrian prewar practice, which was built on the flexibility of local decision-making. This centralization of censorship, however, laid out a future question of the risk of rigidity in emergency situations where some room for maneuvering was necessary to negotiate with the public. The importance of this transition becomes apparent in the later context of protests during the Great Depression and the Sudeten Crisis in the 1930s. At that time, district captains had adopted new roles and were acting more like on-the-spot correspondents of the Ministry of the Interior, merely carrying out its orders.⁸⁰