Zahradníček’s blog for English speaking students

Part seven: , or Brünn? As I have promised, I am decided to alternate more relaxing and a little bit more serious topics, and now I am coming to one that is a little bit more serious and history-related. – Brno, of course, is now considered to be a Czech city. Not only that it is in Czechia; but also overwhelming majority of its inhabitants speak Czech. Apart from Slovaks, Roma people and some Vietnamese there are no big language minorities in Brno. But has this been the same in history?

Usually not. Apart from speaking about people living in what is today Czechia before the Migration Period (what includes Celtic people, but also some Teutonic people), Slaves started to live in that area between the 6th and the 8th century. But even in this time they have been mixed with many other people. Slaves themselves used to live in flat areas not far from rivers, and during centuries deep forests with wild animals still existed.

Only in 13th century this started to change; the Přemyslid dynasty wanted also the forest to be colonised; but local Slavic people were not sufficient to do that. So they invited people from abroad – Germans, but also Walloons, some of them colonised the forests and hills. Very interesting theory exists about people from Hameln in Lower Saxony, that might come to a forest not far from Brno and create a village. The village had the name Hamlíkov (after Hameln). Now the village does not exist anymore, but its remainders have been found by archaeologists, so it really existed. It is even possible that this piece of history gave the basis to the story of the “Pied Piper of Hamelin”. – Some of the colonizers stayed in cities and they traded with many types of commodities. Also in Brno there were many German-speaking people; but during the centuries, it did not played a big role. Of course, after Austrian (and later Austro-Hungarian) monarchy had been more centralised and its centre made in (in the 16th century even one Habsburg emperor, Rudolph II., had his main domicile in Prague; but especially after the Thirty Years’ War (1618– 1648) Vienna started to be “the only centre”. But even this had not been so serious; but the nationalism started to blossom in the 19th century, the social life started to be organized in Czech societies and German societies, Czech sport clubs and German sport clubs, and some Czech people had an impression that the German ones are preferred. This changed after 1918 with foundation of Czechoslovakia; now started to me “the people that rules” and Germans, although having many minority rights, were not happy. That is why many of them saw as a savior and already before the World War II they voted for a nacionalist German party that wanted secession of the mostly German speaking parts of Bohemia and Moravia from Czechoslovakia.

In Brno the German and Czech population had been nearly “fifty fifty”; some people, especially from mixed marriages, claimed to be Germans or Austrians before World War I, but they after it they found better to claim to be Czechs. So it is difficult to say who had the majority and there exist different statistics with different results.

What is sure is that German-speaking people, expelled from Czechoslovakia after 1945 (some of them even quite brutally and against the existing law) left a big trace in the Brno history. If you visit the outlook tower Babí lom near Lelekovice (to the north of Brno), you would have a nice outlook to Brno and its surroundings. From the tower you can follow a stone path on a rocky ridge; it requires good shoes, but no special climbing equipment. If you look carefully, you can see local stones displaced so that they are forming steps. All this is the result of work of Brno embranchment of “Austrian tourist club” and the German speaking Brno mayor (with French roots) Christian d’Elvert. There were many big German-speaking people living in Brno during centuries. Let me give you just a couple of names. Ernst Mach, physicist and philosopher (Mach number in aviation is after him), born in what is today Brno- Chrlice. Kurt Gödel, an excellent mathematician, born in a house in Pekařská street. Musical composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and some of them that were neither Germans nor Czechs, rather “something between”, like Blessed Maria Kafka, an excellent nurse murdered by Nazis in Vienna in 1943 (there exist a church consecrated to her in Brno-Lesná). Unfortunately, Czechs only now start (slowly) to understand, that the former German speaking inhabitants have been a very important and inspiring part of the history of this city.

Ondřej Zahradníček, 20th March 2019