It was a full house at Kino Art for a Friday night screening of Julius Ševčík’s Masaryk (aka A Prominent Patient), and it made uncomfortable viewing. I was about the last one in and had to sit on the front row, one English guy watching a film about how my country sold out Czechoslovakia with a room full of Czechs.
I grew up thinking that we were unconditionally the good guys. In history class, we learnt a little about the Munich Agreement, saw pictures of Neville Chamberlain waving his piece of paper and his infamous “Peace for our time” speech. Our teacher never really got into the human consequences of it – who cared about Czechoslovakia anyway? He just wanted to get to the fun stuff, and it was just a prologue before Winston Churchill sparked up a big cigar and guided us to our Finest Hour.
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History is written by the victors, and we were raised on our grandparent’s war stories. Although they all lost friends and family during the war, they always talked about it with pride and nostalgia. Pride in playing their own small part in defeating the Nazis, and nostalgia for the sense of identity and purpose it gave them.
Then I grew up a bit, and found out that we weren’t always the good guys. In fact, there were many occasions when we were the bad guys. That boggled my mind for a while because I’d always been unthinkingly proud of my country’s role in World War II and the world as a whole, and it didn’t occur to me that other countries might not like us very much. Then it dawned on me – perhaps there is a reason no-one votes for us in the Eurovision Song Contest…
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