Abstract
Karel Čapek hated war, but he loved to write about it; war is one of the most persistent themes of his writing. His best-known novel is probably War with the Newts (1936), and wars are waged time and again in his other major works. Alongside War with the Newts, the plays of the 1930s, The White Plague (1937) and Mother (1938), grapple directly with war or the threat of war. All of these late works were responses to the deterioration of the international situation in Europe in the 1930s, specifically the rise of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War. What Čapek feared above all else was the renewal of national conflict in Central Europe. As justified as his worries were, he did not live to see the Second World War, dying just nine months before its outbreak. The only war he knew personally and the one that decisively shaped his attitude toward organized violence was the First World War.
You must forgive me for I truly have stagnated in the memory of the years of the war, those years of mass murder, despotism, and injustice.
—Karel Čapek, 19321
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Milan Blahynka, ed., Čeští spisovatelé 20. století (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1985), 337.
Holger H. Herwig, The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 296–301, 439;
Rudolf Kiszling, Österreich-Ungarns Anteil am Ersten Weltkrieg (Graz: Stiasny Verlag, 1958), 95.
This was a phenomenon that took place not only in a provincial city like Prague, but in a cosmopolitan center like Paris as well. Ironically, whereas in Paris conservatives condemned cubism as an un-French German import, in Prague cubism was attacked for exactly the opposite reasons. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 3–27.
Another notable exception was his brother, Josef, who was called up repeatedly but was granted a series of temporary exemptions because of his poor eyesight. See Jiří Opelík, Josef Čapek (Prague: Melantrich, 1980), 132–33.
Karel Čapek to Stanislav K. Neumann, [December 7, 1914], in Stanislava Jarošová, Milan Blahynka, and František Všetička, eds., Viktor Dyk, St.K.Neumann, Bratři Čapkové: Korespondence z let 1905–1918 (Prague: Nakladatelství Československé akademie věd, 1962), 109.
Despite his denunciations of popular antisemitism, Čapek was also given to some anti-Jewish feeling during the war. Specifically, he was disturbed by the overwhelming support for the war among Austria’s Jews. See, for example, his letter to Neumann [January 4, 1915], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 115. On Jewish support for the war, see Marsha Rozenblit, Reconstructing a National Identity: The Jews of Habsburg Austria during World War I (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
On the popular and intellectual enthusiasm for the war see, for example, Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially Chapter 2, “Willingly to War,” and
Roland Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals in 1914 (Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982).
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), 229–30.
See Ivan Šedivý, Češi, české země a velká válka, 1914–1918 (Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny, 2001), 270–85, and
Claire Nolte, “Ambivalent Patriots: Czech Culture in the Great War,” in Aviel Roshwald and Richard Stites, eds., European Culture in the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 162–75.
See Mahulena Nešlehová, Bohumil Kubišta (Prague: Odeon, 1984), 174, 206. The submarine that Kubišta’s unit sank was the Marie Curie. In 1915, it was raised from the bottom of the harbor at Pula, repaired, and placed into the service of the Austro-Hungarian navy as SM U-14. Georg Ritter von Trapp of The Sound of Music fame became U-14’s most successful commander, sinking numerous British, French, and Italian vessels. See
Lothar Baumgartner and Erwin Sieche, Die Schiffe der k. (u.) k. Kriegsmarine im Bild (Vienna: Verlagsbuchhandlung Stöhr, 1999).
Josef Čapek to Neumann [October 27, 1915], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 150.
Josef Čapek to Neumann [December 5, 1917], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 189.
Karel Čapek to Neumann [December 5, 1917], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 191–92.
Josef Čapek to Neumann, [December 5, 1917], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 189.
Karel Čapek to Neumann, [December 5, 1917], Korespondence z let 1905–1918, 190.
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1944).
Miroslav Halík, Karel Čapek: Život a dílo v datech (Prague: Academia, 1983), 26.
Karel Čapek, Pragmatismus, čili filosofie praktického života (Prague: F. Topič, 1918). The paper was not in fact written for Beneš’s class, which was a lecture course, but for a separate philosophy seminar that Čapek took the same semester. See Halík, Karel Čapek, 26.
Bergson and James were great friends and mutual admirers. Both shared a deep distaste for rationalist philosophy, and there is clear convergence in their conceptions of the fluid nature of consciousness and reality. But their views of “life” are very different, as are their attitudes toward the attainment of absolute knowledge. See Horace Kallen, William James and Henri Bergson: A Study in Contrasting Theories of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1914).
Karel Čapek, Pragmatism, čili filosofie praktického života (Olomouc, Czech Republic: Votobia, 2000), 57.
Václav Štěpán, “Pařížský Loupežník bratří Čapků,” Sborník Národního muzea v Praze 41 (1987): 1–49.
Cited in Willam Harkins, Karel Čapek (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 71.
Copyright information
© 2013 Thomas Ort
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ort, T. (2013). The Lessons of Life: Karel Čapek and the First World War. In: Art and Life in Modernist Prague. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077394_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137077394_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-29532-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-07739-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)