The 20th Century

The Czech Revival

In the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution drew Czechs from the countryside into Prague, where a Czech national revival began.

As the industrial economy grew, Prague's Czech population increased in number and power, overtaking the Germans. In 1868, the Czech people threw open the doors to the gilded symbol of their revival, the neo-Renaissance National Theater (Národní divadlo), with the bold proclamation NÁROD SOBE ("The Nation for Itself") inscribed over the proscenium. Then, in 1890, at the top of Wenceslas Square, the massive National Museum Building (Národní muzeum) opened, packed with exhibits celebrating the rich history and culture of the Czech people.

As the new century emerged, Prague was on the cusp of the Art Nouveau wave sweeping Europe, and Moravian Alfons Mucha's sensuous painting of Sarah Bernhardt wowed Paris.

The Founding of the Republic of Czechoslovakia

As Czech political parties continued to call for more autonomy from Vienna, Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off World War I. Meanwhile, a 65-year-old philosophy professor named Tomás Masaryk seized the opportunity to tour Europe and America, speaking in favor of creating a combined democratic Czech and Slovak state. He was supported by a Slovak scientist, Milan Stefánik.

As the German and Austrian armies wore down in 1918, the concept of "Czechoslovakia" gained international support. U.S. President Woodrow Wilson backed Masaryk on October 18, 1918, in Washington, D.C., as the professor proclaimed the independence of the Czechoslovak Republic in the Washington Declaration. On October 28, 1918, the sovereign Republic of Czechoslovakia was founded in Prague. Masaryk returned home in December after being elected (in absentia) Czechoslovakia's first president.

The First Republic

The 1920s ushered in an exceptional but brief period of freedom and prosperity in Prague. Czechoslovakia, its industrial strength intact after the war, was one of the 10 strongest economies in the world. Prague's capitalists lived the Jazz Age on a par with New York's industrial barons. Palatial Art Nouveau villas graced the fashionable Bubenec and Hanspaulka districts, where smart parties were held nonstop.

The Great Depression gradually spread to Prague, however, drawing sharper lines between the classes and nationalities. As ethnic Germans in Czech border regions found a champion in the new German Chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1933, their calls to unify under the Third Reich grew louder.

In 1938, Britain's Neville Chamberlain and France's Edouard Daladier, seeking to avoid conflict with the increasingly belligerent Germans, met Hitler and Italy's Benito Mussolini in Munich. Their agreement to cede the Bohemian areas (which Germans called the Sudetenland) to Hitler on September 30 marked one of the darkest days in Czech history.

Chamberlain returned to London to tell a cheering crowd that he'd achieved peace in our time. But within a year, Hitler absorbed the rest of the Czech lands and installed a puppet government in Slovakia. Soon Europe was again at war.

World War II

During the next 6 years, more than 130,000 Czechs were systematically murdered, including more than 80,000 Jews. Though Hitler ordered devastation for other cities, he sought to preserve Prague and its Jewish ghetto as part of his planned museum of the extinct race.

The Nazi concentration camp at Terezín, about 48km (30 miles) northwest of Prague, became a way station for many Czech Jews bound for death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Thousands died of starvation and disease at Terezín even though the Nazis managed to dress it up as a "show" camp for Red Cross investigators.

Meanwhile, the Czechoslovak government in exile, led by Masaryk's successor, Edvard Benes, tried to organize resistance from friendly territory in London. One initiative was launched in May 1942 when two Slovak paratroopers, in a mission called Anthropoid, attempted to assassinate Hitler's lead man in Prague, Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich. Setting a charge at an intersection north of Prague, the soldiers stopped Heydrich's limousine and opened fire, fatally wounding him.

Hitler retaliated by ordering the total liquidation of a nearby Czech village, Lidice, where 192 men were shot dead and more than 300 women and children were sent to concentration camps. Every building in the town was bulldozed to the ground.

The soldiers, Jozef Gabcík and Jan Kubis, and some of their civilian helpers, were hunted down by Nazi police and trapped in the Cyril and Methodius church on Resslova Street near the Vltava. They reportedly shot themselves to avoid being captured. The debate still rages on whether Anthropoid brought anything but more terror to occupied Bohemia.

The Advent of Communism

The final act of World War II in Europe played out where the Nazis started it, in Bohemia. As U.S. troops liberated the western part of the country, Gen. George Patton was told to hold his troops at Plzen and wait for the Soviet army to sweep through Prague because of the Allied Powers agreement made at Yalta months before. Soviet soldiers and Czech civilians liberated Prague in a bloody street battle on May 9, 1945, a day after the Germans had signed their capitulation. Throughout Prague you can see small wall memorials on the spots where Czechs fell that day battling the Germans.

On his return from exile in England, Edvard Benes ordered the expulsion of 2.5 million Germans from Czechoslovakia and the confiscation of all their property. (An agreement between Prague and Bonn in early 1997 tried to put an end to compensation demands from the families of expropriated Germans and the Czech victims of war crimes by setting up a joint fund, but the demands continue.) Meanwhile, the government, exhausted and bewildered by fascism, nationalized 60% of the country's industries, and many looked to Soviet-style communism as a new model. Elections were held in 1946, and Communist leader Klement Gottwald became prime minister after his party won about one-third of the vote.

Through a series of cabinet maneuvers, Communists seized full control of the government in 1948, and Benes was ousted. Little dissent was tolerated, and a series of show trials began, purging hundreds of perceived threats to Stalinist Communist authority. Another wave of political refugees fled the country. The sterile, centrally planned Communist architecture began seeping into classical Prague.

The Prague Spring

In January 1968, Alexander Dubcek, a career Slovak Communist, became first secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. Long before Mikhail Gorbachev, Dubcek tinkered with Communist reforms that he called "socialism with a human face." His program of political, economic, and social reform (while seeking to maintain one-party rule) blossomed into a brief intellectual and artistic renaissance known as the "Prague Spring."

Increasingly nervous about what seemed to them a loss of party control, Communist hard-liners in Prague and other Eastern European capitals conspired with the Soviet Union to remove Dubcek and the government. On August 21, 1968, Prague awoke to the rumble of tanks and 200,000 invading Warsaw Pact soldiers claiming "fraternal assistance." Believing that they'd be welcomed as liberators, these soldiers from the Soviet Union, Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, and Hungary were bewildered when angry Czechs confronted them with rocks and flaming torches. The Communist grip tightened, however, and Prague fell deeper into the Soviet sphere of influence. Another wave of refugees fled. The following January, a university student named Jan Palach, in a lonely protest to Soviet occupation, doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire in Wenceslas Square. He died days later, becoming a martyr for the dissident movement. But the Soviet soldiers stayed for more than 2 decades during the gray period the Communists called "normalization."

Charter 77

In 1976, during the worst of "normalization," the Communists arrested a popular underground rock band called the Plastic People of the Universe on charges of disturbing the peace. This motivated some of Prague's most prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals, led by playwright Václav Havel, to establish Charter 77, a human-rights advocacy group formed to pressure the government--then Europe's most repressive--into observing the human rights principles of the 1975 Helsinki Accords. In the years that followed, Havel, the group's perceived leader, was constantly monitored by the secret police, the StB. He was put under house arrest and jailed several times for "threatening public order."