Karl Popper Lecture, Prague 1994 ****************************************************************************************** * ****************************************************************************************** Mr. Rector, Mr. Dean, Ladies and Gentlemen. To the 3rd Faculty of Medicine of the Charles University and its Dean, Professor Hoeschl, you who have come here today, I wish to express my deeply felt thanks for the great honour conferring on me. To be in Prague again, after 60 years - and those were difficult years for everybody): - t experience. I visited Prague from Vienna in 1912 and 1913, before the First World War, and times during the war. And it was at the latest in 1934 that I decided that Prague was the city in Central Europe. This has not changed. But everything else has. 60 years ago, there lived in the Hradcany Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the great founder of the Czechoslovakia, and its Liberator President. I deeply admire Masaryk. He was one of the mo pioneers of what I have called, one or two years after Masaryk,s death, the Open Society. of an open society, both in theory and in practice; indeed, the greatest of its pioneers b Lincoln and Winston Churchill. Of the successor states of the Austrian Empire, now defeated and improverished, Masaryk,s Czechoslovak Republic, was the only successful one. It was a financial, an industrial, a p educational and a cultural success; and it was well defended. Never was a new state - after all, the result of a revolution - so peaceful and so success the creative achievement of one man. And all this was not due to the absence of great diff was the result of Masaryk, s philosophy, his wisdom and his personality in which personal truthfulness, and openness, played so conspicuous a role. He described his own philosophy realism. This is indeed what it was. But humanism, or humanitarianism, also played a domin Masaryk,s extraordinary life has, I expect, been closely studied by historians. Neverthele to Prague in the possession of two stories, or anecdotes, that are, very probably, quite u his biographers. Both stories may, I believe, still be testable, at least partly, by someo researching the documents that may still be extant. The first is the story of the strange circumstances under which I first heard Masaryk,s na the winter of 1915-16, during the First World War, when I was 13 years old. My father was a lawyer in Vienna, and a family by the name of Schmidt, with their three so daughter, were close friends of our family. One son was a professional army officer, anoth Schmidt, then in his late twenties, was a lawyer; and the third, Oscar, was a pupil in my Dr. Karl Schmidt frequently came to see us, and he often stayed for dinner. On one of thes dressed in his war-time uniform of an officer of the Austrian Imperial Army, he told us th duty in the army was to investigate cases of high treason and prepare for the military cou against the traitors. He told us of a most interesting case which he was then pursuing: th Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, Dr. Tomas Masaryk, then 66 years old, England or in the United States, one of the main leaders of the Czech and the Slovak Movem Independence and, most obviously, a man guilty of high treason. But, he continued in stric a wonderful man. - Schmidt told us that he was reading Masaryk,s book, especially a book a relations to Europe, which he found most impressive. Warming to his subject, Schmidt gave on this incredible traitor a man of the highest learning and culture, a leading philosophe ethics, a great liberal, and a man prepared to risk his life to achieve the freedom of wha his people. Schmidt later told us also of the Czech Army which Masaryk was organising agai Germany with Czechs living abroad, in France, England, Russia and the United States, and a Czech soldiers who had become prisoners of war in Russia. This was an extraordinary experience, and it is vividly before me after 78 years. It could I now think, only in Austria. Imperial Austria was then at war and ruled by a law that app conditions that made parliamentary control impossible. It was ruled by its prime minister, who exerted dictatorial powers, under martial law. And yet, the liberal atmosphere of the was still alive in Vienna. Here was a lawyer, at the same time an army officer, appointed - and he was, obviously, committing treason himself by telling us, ordinary civilians, in each of his occasional visits, about the progress of his investigations, and about his adm traitor! Yet he had, clearly, no fear at all. He knew he was safe: safe in spite of the di the state of martial law. What a difference from the situation that started a year later i led to that horrible thing that we may now call "modern dictatorship"! So this happened in 1916, in Vienna. But locally in some of the provinces, in the regions of Austria in which the state authori irredentist nationalism, state terror ruled. The bureaucrats, the pocket dictators, were u the liberalism of the cities - and they were afraid. They ruled by secret terror, and even learned it all from the same extraordinary source, from the recurring visits of Dr. Karl S Schmidt told us all about the movements of Masaryk, his hero against whom he was preparing that was bound to lead to Masaryk,s execution, should victorious Imperial Austria ever get by 1916 it had become clear even to me that this would never happen: that the central powe war.... What I did not know was that even members of the Government of Austria wished to g Austria continued with the war largely for fear of a German invasion. This is the end of my first story. Almost twenty years later, when Chancellor Schushnigg was the dictator of Austria, I happe something very personal about Tomas Masaryk. At the University of Vienna I had been a pupi Heinrich Gomperz, the Greek scholar, and we had become friends. After the murder of Chance by a troop of Austrian National Socialists, Schuschnigg had taken over, and had demanded f employed by the state, or by local governments, including all teachers and professors, tha organization which he called the Patriotic Front, an organization that admitted as members signed a declaration that they were opposed to the Asnschluss, the unification of Austria Germany was then under Hitler,s dictatorship. All university professors signed, (and espec who were Nazis). There was only one exception: Professor Heinrich Gomperz whose family cam and whose cultural background and Greek scholarship made him partial to a union with Germa scholars abounded. He himself was of Jewish descent and he was well aware of Hitler,s terr theories - and his terroristic practices. But he had faith in the high civilization of Ger looked upon Hitler as a political freak, certain to disappear soon. Gomperz, I think, foun dignity to take much account of Hitler. In most of this, Gomperz was sadly mistaken. Howev to sign up with Schuschnigg,s Patriotic Front led to the dismissal of Gomperz from his pro total loss of his income: and censorship prevented this from ever getting into the papers. of this dismissal. No rumour reached me, until one day he rang me and we met. Then he told happened and that after his dismissal he had decided to emigrate to the United States. But money to pay for the costly journey. So he went to Prague, to ask his old colleague and fr a loan. Masaryk gave him the money from his own personal savings as a gift, rejecting a lo to Gomperz that he did not wish to use any kind of official funds for this purpose because element in it might make it look as a pro-German act, and even as pro-Hitler... And Gomper wonderful and moving his meeting with Masaryk had been. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have always admired Masaryk as one of the two great statesmen and twentieth century Europe: I mean Masaryk and Churchill. Masaryk,s Czechoslovakia was, I do not doubt, the most open of all societies ever to devel It lasted for only twenty years. But what difficult and what marvellous years! In the shor open society had built a solid economy and the most solid military defence system in Europ Czechoslovakia was destroyed by the two older of the European open societies- by Britain a the governments of the appeasers, who co-operated with Hitler in destroying Czechoslovakia speculate that, had Masaryk still been alive, it is improbable that the appeasers could ha in the Destruction of Czechoslovakia. Hitler was still bluffing, and Masaryk, I believe, w the bluff. But there was from the beginning an unnecessary weakness built into the structure of the C open society. I am alluding to the so-called Principle of National Self- Determination, a had acquired an almost absolute moral authority in the West (and it has not lost this auth - although just a very little thought should have told us all that this "Principle" is tot in Europe, where even islands like Great Britain, Ireland and Cyprus are each populated by called nationalities with political leaders claiming National Self-Determination. And Masa society was unable to give these claims a deeply considered moral and political reply. It recently that your country came again under this pressure, and that it had no well thought and moral defence. And so it had to split. What the consequences will be, nobody knows. No doubt, a homogeneous population that speaks one language has a tremendous advantage for of industrial collaboration; but where do you find this in Europe? Europe just is not like in very few countries where it has been brought about, by political and educational means, minorities or dialects. This holds especially for Germany and France. But even these two h minorities, and indeed all countries have. The exception left in Europe is Iceland (and, p I think that all lovers of peace and a civilized life should work to enlighten the world a impracticability and inhumanity of that famous - or shall I say it notorious? - Principle Determination, which now has degenerated into that ultimate horror, ethnic terrorism. We must fight against such horrors. We must not fall prey to the cynical view that history and horrible, driven by the lust for gold and oil, for wealth and domination. This cynical of history is not true. European History begins with Solon,s peaceful revolution that refo Constitution of Athens. By it, he freed those slaves that had been free citizens but had l to their creditors whom they were unable to pay. Solon,s revolution prevented this from ev Athens again. It was a long way from there to America and to Abraham Lincoln who fell as t 600,000 white soldiers in a most terrible war that succeeded in freeing the negro slaves i Confederate states. These are not just two exceptions that happened in an otherwise endless history of greed a Rather, these are some of the important successes - admittedly not very frequent successes many defeats and set-backs we have suffered, often through our own mistakes, in our ceasel freedom and justice. And now, when we are again suffering some of these set- backs, we must think of our very l South Africa. And we must keep fresh before our memory such incredible achievements of the freedom, openness and humanity, as that of Churchill,s seemingly hopeless resistance to Hi the fall of France, and of Masaryk bringing back his valiant soldiers, an army of 60,000 m Siberia and Vladivostok, and across the Pacific Ocean and the American continent in order republic, an open society, strong enough to rise again after many a violent death.