“My Father Was an Incredibly Honest Person”

What comes to mind when you hear the word “nobility?” Is it property, wealth, money, history, the Middle Ages, or feudalism? Is it pretentiousness, arrogance, snobbery, exploitation, superiority, the abuse of people, the top ten thousand, blue blood, or—on the contrary—tradition, order, duration, education, elegance, and chic?

It is likely that your associations with this word will be slightly more negative and you will probably say that nobility no longer serves any useful purpose. And for the minority among you who do view nobility in a positive light (from 25 percent to 45 percent of you), the significance of nobility today will relate to charity, humanitarian activity, aid for the poor, responsibility for property and land, historical tradition or perhaps representation of the state.

Such were the outcomes of a small but unique survey on public attitudes toward nobility in the Czech Republic. In 2004 and 2005, approximately 300 people answered a specially developed questionnaire. ¹ The research was conducted in three Czech towns, where the public was expected to possess a range of different attitudes toward nobility. Surprisingly, the responses of the three towns’ inhabitants were very similar to each other. ²

The results of the this research indicate not only what kind of recollection of nobility is dominant in modern Czech society but also help to uncover a hidden relationship between the public’s collective memory and the memories of nobility.

In this article, I argue that nobility, as with all elites, but perhaps even more so, has the ability to behave as memory requires. Memory is therefore a strong part of their constructed identity. They prove it through their faithfulness to the stereotypes and myths about them, and further by helping, unconsciously, to create these myths.

Among the various approaches to analyzing myths, ³ the myths in this text are understood mainly in terms of psychology, especially in terms of psychoanalytical theory. As Jacob Arlow said, a myth is a kind of communal experience, a special form of shared fantasy, and it serves to bring the individual into relationship with members of his cultural group on the basis of certain common needs. ⁴ The function of such myths is therefore to encourage socialization and to create positive social relations, and the myths “produced” by nobility, as will be shown later, operate in a similar way.

Nevertheless, an expression of the postmodern challenge to the science–myth relation can be found in this text too, especially as a construction of reality with personal meanings. Robert A. Segal suggests, taking up D. W. Winnicott’s idea about transitional phenomena, that it can also be a myth, together with an internalized object like a hobby, an interest, or a value, that enables us to construct a world with a far deeper meaning, to deal with a much wider world. In this sense, the myth is “make-believe.” ⁵

To explore the functions of “noble” myths in detail, we will focus first on the feelings of the interview subjects about being a nobleman or a noblewoman. Then we will concentrate on their father and mother figures, including the importance of parents for the interviewees. When talking about fathers and mothers, we will not omit education, which is fundamental to nobles’ identity construction. ⁶

Before we start to analyze these topics, let us remind ourselves of several key data of the history of Bohemian nobility.

Prior to the abolition of the Hapsburg monarchy, Bohemian nobles held leading positions in Hapsburg society and in the Austro-Hungarian government, in spite of the nationwide efforts of the Czech and German bourgeoisie. It is important to mention that most Bohemian nobles were major landowners, though not comparable to English gentry. Till 1918, just over 300 noble families owned over a third of the land area of the Hapsburg’s Bohemian crown lands.

With the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, everything connected with the Hapsburgs was repudiated. In this way, nobles were defined as national and social enemies that had to be erased from the history of the Czech nation. However, despite the efforts of the first Czechoslovak Republic, many high nobles managed to retain a considerable portion of their wealth (they still owned about a sixth of Czechoslovakia’s total surface area after land reform), and to a great extent they maintained their way of life, as well as their social networks and their influence, at least at a local level.

Three historical events provide the next step toward an understanding of nobility myths: first, political developments in the 1930s, which lead many Czechoslovak nobles to turn to Nazi Germany; second, the postwar expulsion of Sudeten Germans, including a majority of Bohemia’s nobles; and third, the Communist seizure of power in 1948, resulting in a final liquidation of noble property and, with it, of nobility.

The number of nobles in Czechoslovakia was therefore, by 1948, dramatically reduced. Historians enumerate about 200 families of high nobility living in Czech lands in the period leading up to the collapse of the Hapsburg monarchy, and a Czech “Gotha”, written in 1930’s, contains the names of sixty noble families ranked to high nobility. After the Second World War (WWII), only twenty such families remained in this almanac. ⁷ Most nobles went into exile, with only a few remaining in communist Czechoslovakia.

It was only after the momentous year of 1989 and the following restitution laws of the 1990’s that many of the exiled nobility returned to Czechoslovakia, where they could reclaim their property (even though much of it had been destroyed). Nevertheless, the fate of the Bohemian nobility in the twentieth century has only recently ceased to be neglected by historians. ⁸

My first interviews with nobility date back to 2001. The starting point was the Mensdorff-Pouilly comital family, ⁹ whose members recommended their relatives and acquaintances, and the recommended persons then provided further contacts (creating a snowball effect). These recommendations turned out to be crucial: agreement on the part of many of the nobles to grant an interview was bound to this kind of endorsement.

Between 2001 and 2005, I interviewed thirty-one nobles (thirteen women and eighteen men). ¹⁰ The majority of them were born in the 1920s and 1930s, the eldest in 1910 and the two youngest during the communist era, in the 1950s. I interviewed nobles who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia and subsequently returned as well as those who had spent their lives under the communist regime. Among the emigrated nobles were ones who had settled in countries where nobles had previously existed and also those who had lived in countries without any tradition of nobility.

Surprisingly, when the interviewees talked about their own feelings of being a nobleman or a noblewoman, the social and political situation of the countries in which they had lived did not influence their memories at all. One would expect the answer of an interviewee from Germany, where nobility officially exists, to be very different from that of an interviewee who had spent their life in Czechoslovakia under communism or one who had lived for forty years in Australia or in Canada. An interviewee from Australia, in 2003, said, “No, no, it does not exist in Australia” and my question of whether he feels like a nobleman provoked the answer: “Eh, rather … I do not know.” What is more important is that the interviewee immediately continued, “There is a nice family vault here, isn’t there? Perhaps you would like to see it?” And a visit to the family vault would conclude the interview.

As we have just seen, even forty years under communism, or forty years spent in very different countries, did not remove the “nobility” from my interviewees. To be a nobleman or a noblewoman also means being faithful to the myths about them. These myths are of two sorts, as the outcomes of the survey mentioned at the beginning of the article suggest. One of them praises nobility and describes its members as possessing only outstanding and distinguished qualities. The second sort of these myths, on the contrary, blames nobility and emphasizes their differences, and their sense of superiority or arrogance.

This article argues that nobles are faithful to both sides of the argument in that they implicitly confirm the first one (as will be shown later) and vehemently deny the second one. The latter stance was evident in the case of the two youngest interviewees, a brother and sister, who were descendants of an old Czech noble family whose members had remained under communism in Czechoslovakia. The entire interview, held in 2003, seemed to have for them one aim: to convince me that they were normal and just like their neighbors. However, although they pretended that they were not different, the way they talked seemed to praise and honor nobility. For example, they praised their parents’ approach to raising them, and the need to hand over to their children what their parents had given to them. They described their strict but fair and honorable father, their beloved grandmother, repeated how everybody should have values like them, such as being attentive, obliging, kind, and polite toward others, were proud of their ancestors and generally appeared to give ample evidence of their “otherness.”

The message of their narrative is, in that way, very similar to the thoughts of the aforementioned interviewee from Australia. Yet another method of constructing a self-justification can be seen in the following example. This time the interlocutor has returned to the Czech Republic after the restitution of their family chateau—immediately upon the commencement of her interview, made in 2003, she makes a distinction between noble and citizen, going on to say that she is only one part of the chain composed of all members of her family, and then explaining how she was suffering when, during her exile, she had to live in apartments and houses that are not elegant and that “a nobleman suffers from it, while a citizen is indifferent to it.”

We can see that regardless of whether they pretend that nobility exists or that it is only a notion from history, it nevertheless has meaning for them. Noble values are deeply imprinted in their memory. They are conscious or unconscious incarnations of noble values. But why is this so? Why do they speak about themselves in such a way? In other words—why is their identity constructed in such a way?

To be able to answer these questions, let us first consider how our interview subjects talk about their parents.

Parents act as great role models for the interviewees; none had any complaints and none expressed any discontent toward them. ¹¹

“My father had a loyalty to the emperor that was incredibly deep and fundamental,” said one interviewee. “He was pure … he had not betrayed anyone.” He did not blame anybody for anything, even when his property was confiscated. “My father always said—if I drank everything away, I would have only myself to blame.” These are the words of the eldest interviewee, born in 1910. The two youngest interviewees, born in the 1950s, saw their father as a highly principled, fair-minded man who was conscious of his duties toward his own parents. They also remembered their father helping others with various things: “ … if anybody ever needed anything … He was loved, I would say very loved … in the neighbourhood.”

Another interviewee described his father as an “extraordinarily kind person” and he appreciated the way his father behaved toward his children. “He always spoke to us as if we were adults, as if we were equal to him, in an intellectual way, and he gained great respect from this, so we made an effort to be like him, even if he never told us to do things like he did … He was never angry, he was never in a bad mood. Sometimes he was meditative, when troubles came, but he always remained open … I held him in great esteem and everybody loved him; he was well educated and had many varied interests, so I became infected and discussed everything with him.”

For another interviewee, his father was “incredibly honest, unbelievably moral and sincere.” Another’s father had “deep knowledge of church history, of church law, he could speak many languages and I appreciated his principles and his character, of course.”

Fathers of our interviewees are adored, even eulogized, described as persons having only positive character traits: they were always honest, disciplined, orderly, moral, extraordinarily kind, educated, and wise, with exemplary conduct toward others. Some of our interviewees did reveal the negative sides of their fathers, their rigidity, and occasional corporal punishments, but they felt that this was okay: “that is usual” and they even seemed glad about it because it was a mark of good education. The interviewees felt they were lucky with regard to their parents and are grateful to their fathers for everything.

The image of a father is, according to analytical psychology, determined by father-like persons and father-like images of collective consciousness and collective unconsciousness. Collective consciousness was, until recently, strongly patriarchal. It is no wonder, therefore, that most of the elderly interviewees spoke of their fathers as the head of the family, as all-powerful and all-knowing, as paradigmatic authority figures that called for submission (albeit unconsciously) and that expected our interviewees to obey. “I loved and respected my father. He served as an example for me—what to do, how to behave, how to make decisions, how to retain one’s honesty.” Our other interviewees confirmed the fundamental role played by their fathers in terms of their education—he checked up on them and influenced them.

Analysis of the narratives revealed that the image of a father often corresponds to the image of a grandfather that is transmitted through family memory. “My father would say: ‘Do everything in such a way that you could look into anyone’s eyes and assume responsibility for your behaviour. This is what my father said to me. And if you do it like that you will have a nice life’.” The work on family memory continues and our interviewees transmit the heritage of their fathers to their own children; some of them mention it in their interviews as well.

The glorification of a father can have its roots in religious influence and in the Catholic education of our interviewees. A “great father” behaves here like a “great father-like god”—patriarchal as was the case in patriarchal societies.

However, it is also possible that respect toward the deceased forced our interviewees to glorify their fathers, as one of them admitted.

The image of a father is created in family memory, not only on the basis of personal experience with a biological or social father or with other father-like figures. What is determined here is the influence that the archetype of a father has on the human psyche. According to the Dictionary of Analytical Psychology, the archetypal father embodies qualities such as authority, personal standards, rules, fairness, punishment and forgiveness, courage, astuteness and love of liberty, traditions, knowledge, and values. ¹² Surprisingly, all these qualities are present in the fathers described in the narratives. The fathers of the interviewees are very similar to archetypal fathers. How can such a coincidence be explained? It is clear that the heritage of ancestors was transmitted through family memories by father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, and so on.

The image of a father is transmitted through family memory almost as a never-ending chain that has no clear beginning. This article argues that this is why all the fathers in the interviews seem similar. Individual qualities are subordinated to the characteristics of the entire social group. We can conclude that all the interviewees are speaking of one father, about a collective image of a father that was preserved in their collective unconsciousness, in their collective memory of aristocracy.

Are the mothers of the interviewees also glorified in such a way?

When speaking about their fathers, the interviewees mainly used the word “father” (otec in Czech). For their mothers, they used the words “mum” or “mummy” (maminka in Czech). The use of the diminutive suggests the qualities of their mothers. First, it is worth noting that mothers are mentioned far less frequently than fathers. It is possible that the archetypal striving of the psyche for maternity, safety, and exclusivity is, for the interviewees, overshadowed by the archetypal features of the father.

The second point concerns the gender of the interviewees. Fathers are mentioned frequently by male interviewees, while female interviewees talk about both their parents. The influence of collective unconsciousness may be important here, specifically the institution of primogeniture, an important factor in aristocracy for many centuries in which heritage is transmitted from the father to the eldest son. The mother is not as important in terms of aristocratic heritage.

Third, female interviewees did not describe their fathers in such detail as their male counterparts. One can only guess as to the reasons for this. Perhaps there is a connection to the image of the female interviewees’ husbands; the choice of partner is influenced by the relationship with the parent of the opposite sex in childhood and, similarly, the choice of him or her demonstrates the psychological qualities of the parent to whom a child is unconsciously bound.

So how did the interviewees describe their mothers? One saw his mother as someone who worried, especially about her children. The mother was weaker: “poor mother.” The image of a “suffering mother” is seemingly transmitted through family memory; the grandmother of one of the interviewees suffered too, although she was a good person.

Another mother had cried when her daughter announced her intention to emigrate but she was “a kind person” and courageous as well. Yet another mother was “kind to everybody, great, a wonderful person, who gave us a good education and served as an example for us.”

Mothers were mentioned quite frequently by female interviewees. Female interviewees also emphasized their mothers’ kindness and goodness. Perhaps this is, again, the influence of family memory—the interviewees followed their mothers’ examples and became equally kind and good.

Male interview subjects also noted the strictness of their mothers, as well as their ability to organize a household. “My mother was very practical,” said one of the male interviewees, “She organised the household at the castle: kitchen, laundry, wages, what to cook, what to buy, et cetera … and she was stricter than my father.”

We can conclude that the image of mother is similarly generous to that of fathers. Like fathers, they served as examples to their children, though more so for female interviewees. Similar to the image of a father, mothers were described in archetypal terms—kind, modest, self-sacrificing, strict but not overly so. And, as with the image of fathers, we find here a model that has been transmitted through generations since at least the nineteenth century, when mothers were seen as people whose unique mission and unique need was “care for, to look after and to suffer.”

Let us now focus on interviewees’ upbringing, the sphere in which the influence of the mother and father was the most important. All interviewees agreed that their upbringing was particularly hard, strict, and severe. “Since my early youth I had to behave politely, I was always a young count,” recalls one of the interviewees. “As a student I was not allowed to go out anywhere, to a bar or the like, because I would be immediately noticed and people would identify me and what I did there. It was impossible.” Another interviewee picked up on this point: “ … it was not possible, in society, for someone to exist who would have been involved in any unscrupulous behaviour or forbidden pastimes …”

Other interviewees remembered strict discipline regarding their dining: “It was a university; how you have to sit at a table, where and how your hands are meant to be held, how you hold a fork and a knife, when you can first drink water, before the soup or after. What you can cut with your knife and what-not; you know, it was very strict … or how you sit in an armchair.”

However, discipline and strictness did not mean upbringing without affection and feelings, as some historians have described large noble and bourgeois families. At least since the nineteenth century, affections and sensibilities have developed between the father and the mother and toward the children, even if it was primarily in a formal way. For the interview subjects, “exceptional discipline” does not exclude the presence of love and affection in a family.

The coordination of such discipline required leadership. Interviewees said that this was the role of the mother, although the father acted as a leadership model, a model that was unconsciously replicated by the children.

Another reason for such strict education was the need to pass on values belonging to the social group, to nobility. One can again identify a similarity with the nineteenth century. It was the mother whose task it was to pass on the values of ancestors and to instill them in the children in the form of advice about dining, behavior, speaking, and so on. One interviewee remembered: “I was often told … you have to be polite. Always be polite towards everybody … Or how it was not permissible to shout at somebody. If, for example, a cook would do something and we were angry, it would have not been permissible to shout at her. No, you have to talk to her, but not shout!”

To behave in the same way in which they were educated was also the aim of the youngest interview subjects: “Certainly we tried to behave in such a way, because we were hopefully educated as polite people and certainly we all … in this family, tried to be attentive to other people, willing and polite. This should be a principle for everyone.” All these examples could be seen as outcomes of an educational strategy in an appropriate social group, namely the family: “… So that children … say hello, and were able to help. In order that they were able to listen to somebody and were completely usual, completely ordinary.”

Although one educational strategy could stress distinction while another would indicate commonality with others, it can be argued that the interviewees had identified with values that were entirely transmitted by their upbringing. Was it because they were told how to behave so many times? Or was it enough to watch and to behave in the same manner?

According to M. Halbwachs, collective family memory is very important here. “If we enter the family in any way, we become a part of the group where there are not our personal feelings, but rules and habits which do not depend on us and which had existed before us, which fix our space—we can feel it …” ¹³ A conception of the family is decisive, therefore, and its orientation is important: “When a group has had an influence on us a long time, we are so impregnated by it, that if we are alone, we behave and think as if we were under its pressure.” ¹⁴ In this postmodern society, one does not know what kind of rules one will meet, what relationships one will find, what kind of feelings will be imposed upon us. However, we listen to the traditional rules we adopted unconsciously in our family, and they give us direction. Family is then the most important element of our identity—both our social and cultural identity. Personal identity is constructed with the help of this element through family memory.

Family memory is a heritage, as French clinical sociologist V. de Gaulejac explained, and it leads to orientations, choices, and inclinations that appear mainly unconsciously, but also consciously. ¹⁵ Psychologists prefer unconsciousness, sociologists consciousness, which means a social or economic context. Only by connecting the unconscious and the conscious could de Gaulejac conclude that contemporary psychological conflicts, which are seemingly pure, are produced by the history of social relations created at a given moment in the past and developed subsequently. This memory, transmitted through generations, forms a chain that leads from the history of a person’s group to his or her own identity.

Family memory has still not been explored sufficiently. In France, for example, A. Muxuel said that there are still no studies about how members of various social groups express and use family memories. ¹⁶ Nevertheless, one can suppose that in this case we can talk about two types of memories. The first one is personal and intimate, rarely shared and impossible for sociologists to analyze. Only psychologists have access to it, A. Muxuel explains. The second one is constructed memory, codified and normative, where one speaks about signs of common family identity. This family is transmitted in personal examples or habits.

The second form of memory is revealed when, in the case of the interviewees, a strict Catholic education is transmitted. Many of my interview subjects had received their education in Catholic schools, while others were or still are the members of the Order of the Maltese Cross, and so on.

The article will now analyze how the interviewees reacted to fixed stereotypes about their exclusive education, specifically the supposed advantages of this kind of education. As already mentioned, all the interviewees stressed strict discipline. This article argues that, by emphasizing it, they were unconsciously protesting against myths of indolent aristocracy who only profited from their wealth. “As a country family, in our childhood we had to perhaps do much more than other children were doing,” said one of the youngest interviewees. He continued and spoke vehemently about the strength and the force of the myth against which she has struggled: “We were doing everything that was needed in our family, especially housework. Or our father, for example, as a teenager … because there was a great estate here and forests and ponds were here, he had to go through it all … he was given a pitchfork and he had to make a dunghill … In our case it was, of course, different because we had nothing, we had only a house and a garden. But it was not permissible when, I don’t know, potatoes were picked, that we would sit somewhere and watch it. We came and did it…. You know, all completely ordinary work.”

Other interview subjects denied the same myth but less strongly. It may also be a question of age. “We were not allowed to keep money with us as children,” explained, for example, one of the interviewees, who was born just before WWII. “The older ones could keep money but not without constraints. Father gave them a sum and they were obliged to account for their expenditures; I paid so and so for such and such a thing. Father commented on all expenditures, whether they were appropriate or not.” Other interviewees confirmed strict attitudes regarding finances.

It is unsurprising that the interviewees spoke only occasionally about the advantages or exclusivity of their education. The effort of fighting against the typical myths concerning aristocracy could be evident here, together with the possibility that they did not recognize any difference at all.

Many of the interviewees identified with the advantages of their education in that they accepted it as natural. For example, one interviewee evidently did not know what to speak about when asked about her education. Yes, there was a cook at their house. Of course, French was studied at school and there was also a governess and a piano. Yes, she would hunt and yes, it was at her grandfather’s house, but in general there was nothing to speak about, “because it was … how can I explain it? It was self-evident. It was quite usual.”

This article argues that fatherhood and motherhood not only create family memory but are also its products. Family memories are undoubtedly transformed in each generation, but aristocracy seems to remain more unchangeable as confirmed by the life stories of the interviewees.

More so than others, the elite are not just the victims of the image created of them but, to an even greater degree, they themselves create it. Their own identity is based on retaining and constantly recreating their image.

To conclude, let us return to the answers of the survey mentioned at the beginning of the article. Why such stress on the distinguished qualities of our interviewers and their parents? I argue that the narratives of my interviewees are constructed mainly as a defense. As a defense against accusations of which they are perhaps not consciously aware, against memory which connects them mainly with negative values. In their narratives, they implicitly react to the negative image that has been created of them.

Nevertheless, their particular strategy leading to the construction of their identity and of their self-image can also play a role.

The more or perhaps the less space there is for nobility in contemporary civil societies, the harder and more furious their unconsciousness’ strategies become. The fewer the people who share the same attributes, the more important these attributes become in their self-image and the more important the impact of that shared identity becomes. ¹⁷ The only things that can support their memories—memories of a definitively closed era, according to M. Halbwachs—are their narratives and the narratives about them.